“And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.”
(Matthew 6:28–29)
Anyone who learns to draw and paint begins to observe objects around them in more and more fine details – shape and form, light and shade, depth and projection, tonal values and blending of colors, and so on. But this is only an elementary stage. Creative artists begin with physical reality but move on to ever new aesthetic dimensions that may contradict our usual logic and sense of beauty. Artists like Pablo Picasso or MF Hussain were not always understood by those whose perceptions of art and beauty remained caged in some parochial perspectives and sectarian standards.
King Solomon was praised as the unique model of royal glory and splendor, opulence and magnificence in Jewish rabbinical tradition. Jesus, a Jew and a popular teacher or Rabbi, said that one of those tiny wild flowers in the field was more splendidly dressed than Solomon in all his glorious regal vestments. Self-assuming Jewish teachers must have thought of Jesus the untaught Galilean as simply foolish, or out of his mind or outright heretical.
The wild lily is too small and unimpressive a flower that human beings hardly notice them. While walking over the meadows in Spring, they unknowingly crush those feeble flowers underfoot.
The eyes of Jesus penetrated the veneer of things unlike those of ordinary artists, and recognized the amazing complexity of that humble flower. This is something similar to scanning a very ordinary thing using an electron microscope. What you see then is radically different from the usual. A small live flower with an intricate structure and pulsating colours is compared to the finely spun but dead royal outfit of King Solomon. Life in the simple flower is that matters and it is contrasted with the lifelessly artificial and the pretentiously pompous. Here is an aesthetic vision that inverted the worldly standards considered as normal.
It is the same sharp and tender eyes of Jesus that fell on the ugly and untouchable leper, the bent old woman, the helpless paralytic, the desperate Canaanite woman, the despised blind man, the condemned woman caught in adultery, the possessed madman…Ugliness,untouchability , contempt, and marginalization give way to beauty,embrace, healing and inclusion. This is the upending of the so called logical and the normal.
Jesus makes use of the plural. Not one, but many lilies of the field! There was only one glorious Solomon, but tens of thousands of wild flowers that excelled him in beauty and glory! The Plural eclipses the claims of the self-assuming Singular.
( Kmg, 9 March 2026)