Lingering on the Image in a Saying, Before Moving on to the Moral

 If one reads Jesus saying about lilies, the most basic thing one might say is that, if this saying has any connection to Jesus at all, it makes him out to be someone who thought about lilies in a certain way, as effortlessly beautiful and (perhaps) puzzlingly under-appreciated. Every version of the saying goes on to make that the premise in an argument, or in some other way  uses it to grease the skids for a bit of advice or a recommendation. 

It is my preference, in interpretation, to linger for a long time on the basic fact: Jesus thought about lilies in this particular mood of appreciation. Partly, that's because there are various ways of arguing out to advice preserved, and so it seems at least possible that early editors encountered a lily-observation and decided to make something useful out of it. That is one reason for not taking the advice all that seriously, at least at first. 

Three other general reasons occur to me (for lingering with the topic of a saying): (1) the advice is sometimes pretty obvious advice; (2) the advice is, on some plausible interpretations, bad advice; and (3) the reasonable argument connections between the image and the advice seem tenuous. Now none of those considerations rules out some image-advice combination being the best reading of the saying: Jesus could have wanted to emphasize the obvious, he might have sometimes given bad advice, and he might have sometimes used bad arguments. Or, it is surely possible that the origin of the saying we have is nowhere near Jesus, that our baseline is some ancient proverb that somehow wandered into the sayings sources. 

I want to urge that, in interpretation, one take one's time, and not run directly to advice and moralizing readings. I want to open a space for the possibility that the image - the lilies, for example - came first, were thought about in themselves first, not plucked off the shelf as a helpful way of explaining some moral or practical point. I also want to open a space for the possibility that Jesus was curious and puzzled about various topics, and that the sayings preserve, in part, the list of topics that engaged his curiosity.