This week's Theme: Spirit and Life
Day 1: Apples of Gold
The class mistress scolded me thoroughly. She had overheard me complaining about being “chooked” by a pin. She announced loudly that I should have said I had been stuck by a pin. “Chooked” (sometimes pronounced trouicked), she scolded, was not “proper English.” (Proper English notwithstanding, an older Irish gentleman was to tell me years later that in his childhood in Ireland, chook was a colloquial word for being stuck!)
In those days the local dialect was mostly frowned on. No one considered it a feat to be celebrated. No one considered the remarkable fact that this "new" intelligible pattern of speech had evolved from efforts to communicate in a common language by many (mostly forcibly) displaced people groups.
That perspective was to be introduced much later. But in the waning colonial world of my young life, the class distinctions of British society were still strongly evident across the remnants of the British Empire, and language was one of the primary markers.
If you've ever read George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1913) or seen the movie musical adaption My Fair Lady (1964), you would recognize the language theme in the experiment to transform Eliza Doolittle from "flower girl" to "lady". The experiment eventually succeeded, but not before a few hilarious moments when Eliza was betrayed by her speech.
She was hardly the first. Language or speech as a basis for judgment, conclusion, or action is by no means a new concept. Scripture gives a few examples even as far back as the Old Testament.
In the Book of Judges, we find an interesting account of a conflict between the Gileadites and the Ephraimites, provoked by an Ephraimite threat against Jephthah, the Gileadite leader. The Gileadites gained the upper hand in the conflict and used a peculiar strategy in the final phase of the battle:
The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan (Judges 12:5-6).
In the New Testament, the disciple Peter too, was betrayed by speech. In his case, it was not so much an instance of “Sibboleth”, or “chook”, but a matter of accent: And a little later those who stood by came up and said to Peter, “Surely you also are one of them, for your speech betrays you.” (Matthew 26:73 - NKJV).
Peter did not do very well in that instance—he vehemently denied the Lord Jesus to his own accompaniment of curses and swear words. But after genuine repentance he was forgiven and restored.
Later, empowered by the Holy Spirit he wrote: If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God… so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To Him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen (1 Peter 4:11).
Peter was speaking specifically about using the gifts we have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms (1 Peter 4:10). But the instruction to speak as one who speaks the very words of God would certainly be meaningful to him in any context—having once been undone by speech.
"Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone," Paul wrote to the Colossian church (Colossians 4:6). Hundreds of years earlier the wise teacher had written, A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold In settings of silver (Proverbs 25:11 - NKJV).
These days, the deafening noise of chaos, strife, and confusion ever rises—overflowing, overwhelming. But in the midst of this cacophony we are called to be transformed into the image of Christ—to speak the very words of God into the babble of cursing and swearing, into the harsh accents of discord and incivility.
And I can sometimes do so in my own local dialect—rejecting the shaming of the past. I suppose my conscience should be "chooked" for failing my school mistresses. But alas I fear there is still a considerable amount of flower girl in me.
