Changing Perspectives
Thumbnail image by sweetlouise, used under Pixabay content license.
Juli Belian
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
Second Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, June 21, 2025
Isaiah 65:1-9 Galatians 3:23-29 Luke 8:26-39
I will start with a confession: I am a broth of abominable things. I am a monster.
To understand this morning’s lessons, we must play with perspective.
And to do that, though, we need to talk about the pigs.
Pigs present a fascinating history of shifting perspectives. If you have wondered why Jews would have kept pigs, let me assure you they did not. Pigs, of course, are not “clean,” are not kosher under Mosaic law. Why is that? We don’t really know, but we know a few things that might be relevant.
Archaeological evidence indicates that from very early times, the rich in the area we now call Palestine preferred a diet with more mutton and beef, while the poor tended to eat pork. There were practical reasons. Ruminants evolved to eat grass, which requires ownership of or access to large fields for grazing. Though more costly to keep, ruminants are a great investment if you can afford them, as they produce not only meat but also marketable resources like wool and dairy products. It’s the same as it ever was: If you had money, it was relatively easy to make more money.[1]
If you had no money, it was still relatively easy to raise a pig. People who didn’t have enough land or money for cattle or sheep or goats could still manage a pig or two; pigs didn’t need grazing land, just the day’s leftovers. In contrast to large herds grazing in the fields every day, these “backyard pigs” were fairly easy to hide from tax officials. Pigs could be bred and slaughtered quickly within a family’s small homestead, even in a city. These features made pigs very popular among the poor.[2] And all you need to do to make something even less attractive to the rich is to make it more attractive to the poor. Pigs increasingly came to be seen as inferior animals with inferior moral qualities, as scavengers with insatiable appetites.
The early community of Israel maintained a mobile, pastoral way of life, which is not an ideal setting for raising pigs, so the prohibition under Mosaic law may have been just a logical outgrowth of their history, coupled with the developing cultural bias against pigs. Many foods considered unclean under Jewish law – catfish, rabbits, squirrels – are foods that, even today, we associate with the poor. However it happened, the Jewish proscription of these foods aligned with the biases of the day, and this leads us to an important shift in perspective on the gospel.
When the Romans overtook the area, pork re-entered the economic and domestic economy with a vengeance. Romans liked pork – a lot. Romans celebrated pigs in their most sacred and traditional religious observances. And despite what you may have been taught about exotic animals served at Roman banquets, the Romans’ favorite meat was pork. Both the poor and the rich ate pig as the meat of choice.[3]
This prioritization of pork shows up in their language, as well. No other animal has so many words to describe it in its different functions. Besides the general term sus we find porcus, porca, verres, aper, scrofa, maialis, and nefrens. The same goes for the vocabulary describing pork foods; for example, there are different words for half a dozen kinds of pork sausages and for more than fifty different ways of cooking pork.[4]
The new residents of the area found the Jewish refusal to eat pork puzzling and off-putting, and before long, the Romans “weaponized” pork against the Jews. Stories about Jews killed by Romans when they refused to eat pork proliferated. In turn, the Jewish prohibition of pork was weaponized against the Romans, heightening its religious importance. Among the emerging class of Jewish teachers known as rabbis, pigs became symbols of corruption, greed, oppression, and violence, all of which they associated with Rome. Rome becomes the pig.
For our next perspective shift, let’s talk about the money. These were not wild swine, but a herd maintained by someone, undoubtedly for profit. For Jesus to permit the demons to run the entire herd into the sea was a radical act of vandalism or even theft. Under Roman law, the herd owner would have a claim for damages measured by the highest possible amount that the pigs that could have been gotten at market in the previous year. Depending on other circumstances, the penalty could have been increased as much as fourfold.
It’s very difficult to compare ancient costs against current values, but my guess is that all foodstuffs are, relatively speaking, cheaper today than they were then. A conservative guess is that back then, a pig was worth at least as much you could get for it today. Using an online whole-hog value calculator, we can estimate a pig’s value as about $150 a head in today’s money. Luke does not tell us how big the herd was, but Mark puts it at about 2,000 pigs. If true, that means Jesus gave the demons permission to run $300,000 worth of Roman livestock off a cliff into the sea that day. If the crime earned an enhanced penalty, that would amount to at least a million dollars, give or take.
Was Jesus healing? Or harming?
This change of perspective sheds light on Jesus’ future career prospects. It’s one thing to heal a fellow, but destroying a million dollars’ worth of property is another thing entirely. One should expect there will be consequences to pay. One might expect the National Guard to show up.
The healed demoniac, quite reasonably, asks to follow Jesus. I say “quite reasonably” because I would not want to have to return to the town where the swine owner lived, either. Yes, I’m sure he also was enamored of his Savior, but honestly, for me it’s a draw as to which might have motivated him more.
So, although Jesus told Peter and James and John to stop earning a living for their families and follow him on a three-year walking tour, he told the healed demoniac to go home and tell everyone what God had done for him. And what does the man do? He goes home and tells everyone what Jesus did for him. “Not my fault!” we can hear him cry – “It was that Jesus guy!”
The passage from Galatians also addresses perspective shifts, in this case from a Jewish concern with the law to a Christian concern with faith. Paul is a funny guy – he goes from railing about gender-based hair length in I Corinthians and urging slaves to keep on slaving in Colossians to this beautiful passage regarding how little any of these distinctions matter. Paul is urging the Jewish and non-Jewish Christians to let go of these worries, including, I suspect, the pork or no-pork problem, by shifting their perspective on the role of the law in a community of faith.
What perspectives of our own need shifting? Each of you will have to answer that for yourself, but these days, I am finding certain perspectives start to make my brain explode. For example, consider the following statement:
They have taken over everything. They have ruined this country. They act without regard to the rest of us. Those who gave their lives to build this country are treated like scum. No one respects us anymore. No one respects America anymore. Politicians hold secret meetings with foreign governments and let criminals walk free. I can’t even feel safe at home because I don’t know whose side everyone is on. I’m afraid something terrible is going to happen soon. But we will fight restore our country, no matter what!
Who is the speaker of that passage? What did you think as you heard it? Listening to it makes me feel much the way the passage from Isaiah does at first, with its roaring promises of retribution. I agree. I can relate. God is ready to help, but “those people” won’t seek God. God has held out hands for us to grab, but “those people” won’t stop following their own devices. God will “repay into their laps their iniquities,” and I can’t wait for that to happen. “Those people” who sit inside tombs and spend the night in secret places are going to get what’s coming to them.
And what is coming to them? Jesus.
Wait. What? Have I got this backwards? Which one is “them”? I can say all these things, I do say all these things, but so do they. What does that mean? Aren’t we right? Aren’t they wrong? Aren’t these people disgusting? Or is it me who sees something disgusting where God does not?
To all these questions, I can offer only one answer, the same answer Jesus gave:
Change your perspective.
Go home.
Go home and tell everyone what God has done for you.
[1] Archaeology Magazine https://archaeology.org/issues/march-april-2025/letters-from/on-the-origin-of-the-pork-taboo/
[2] Id.
[3] factsanddetails.com
[4] Harold Whetstone Johnston, “The Private Life of the Romans” (1903, rev. ed. 1932).