Consider the Oyster

It is a quirk of the human mind that some of the things we think are easy to know are hard to know and some of the things we think are hard to know are easy to know.

Consider the oyster.  There is nothing quite like an oyster.  If you like oysters (as I like oysters) there something wonderful about the taste, the ocean smell and slimely descent of an oyster down your gullet.  An oyster calls out to you raw, it calls out to you breaded and fried, it says “eat me in a poboys sandwich with cole slaw.” An oyster is an excellent thing, a happy ornament to God’s creation. We would all be poorer if there were no bivalve molluscs in the world.

I can approve of oysters (and I do) but I don’t know what they mean.  Intellectually the oyster is closed to me: I can inwardly digest her but I can neither mark nor learn her.  Our relationship is purely carnal.  Every relationship with an oyster is a one night stand.  We pass as ships in the night.

In contrast to the meaninglessness (or at least hiddenness) of so many of the ordinary things we encounter in our day-to-day lives, God has revealed a great deal about himself to us.  Oysters are an enigma for which there is no specific revelation.  And so is almost everything else we experience. Why are there poison mushrooms?  What is the meaning of this or that disaster?  We can speculate but we don’t know for sure.  But God, on the other hand, has revealed his inner character to us in Jesus Christ.