There are times when honesty demands that we "spiritualize" a teaching of Jesus. He did not mean steel swords when in those last hours he told his disciples, "let him who has no sword sell his mantle and buy one" (Luke 22:36). He meant, as Paul meant in Ephesians 6, "the sword of the Spirit." His dazed disciples did not translate the striking figure that he used into the Master’s intended meaning. Witness what they did: they brought him two steel swords, maybe blood flecked. Anticipating a kind of "good doggie" approval, they told him, "Lord, here are two swords." They had gone him one better. And this was at the most agonized time of his earthly ministry when, if ever, he needed sympathetic understanding.

We ought also to "spiritualize" the needle. Some prose-minded Bible interpreters ha…