What am I doing, when I ask someone to consider something?

"Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." Luke 12:27

At Luke 12:27, Jesus asks his hearers to consider the lilies. The call to ‘consider’ makes us expect various things to come next. In a courtroom or a political argument, that call often signals the start of an argument, as in “Consider the defendant’s actions on the day before the murder.” When we hear that from a prosecutor, we just know that the lawyer is going to try to convince us that the defendant was already planning the murder. I am guessing that this use of “consider”, as leading into an argument, is the first thing that comes to mind, when we hear the word. Let’s call this the argumentative use; it signals that someone intends to convince us of something.

 

A second use of ‘consider’: it points to a phenomenon worth attention but not necessarily well understood. One might say, “Consider how resilient prairie plants are to drought and fire” or “Consider how frequently the virus damages obese people”. The sense is: this is something interesting, something that should be investigated. Let’s call this the scientific use.

 

A third use of ‘consider’: it invites someone on a meditative or observational journey that is understood to be valuable, perhaps for its own sake, perhaps for its effects on attitudes and actions later. I think of the cases that could be made for amateur astronomy, for  birdwatching, for growing orchids, for reading Lord of the Rings. In each case, the suggestion is that this activity is valuable in itself. There may be an additional suggestion that doing this (considering the stars, the behavior of birds, the complexities of a novel) will benefit other parts of one’s life. ( The discussion around the psychological idea of priming is relevant here.) Call this the meditative use of ‘consider’.

 

So, when I am invited to consider the lilies, that might mean that I am beginning an argument in which lilies are important or that I find lilies perplexing and worth study or that I think it is valuable to think about and observe lilies.

 

A standard elaboration of this saying in the scriptures takes it to be the beginning of an argument: ‘God takes good care of the lilies, you are more valuable than lilies, so God will take care of you, so stop worrying so much (or being so risk-averse).’ But, knowing that morals have sometimes been added to sayings by later editors, one has to give some thought to the suggestions of the saying that are not argumentative.