The Emerald That…. Wasn’t

I had a ring in 2nd grade that I loved beyond all reason.

It was cheap nickel alloy, clearly. So cheap, in fact, that it turned my finger green and would most definitely would have left a ring of raised skin if I ever took it off, which of course I never did. The stone was glass cut to imitate an emerald, faceted enough that when the cafeteria fluorescents hit it right it threw green across my knuckle.

My mother bought it for me at a craft fair and that is the whole reason it mattered.

She was rarely kind to me, and the afternoon she handed me that ring is one of maybe a small handful of occasions I can still recall when she was, and I think even at 7 years old I understood that I needed to keep evidence that she had it in her to be otherwise.

One day I was clearing my lunch tray and looked down at a bare finger.

I do not remember the seconds between noticing and being elbow-deep in a garbage can, which tells you what kind of emotional state I was in. Two of the lunch ladies came over and started pulling bags out with me. I remember the wet paper, the pungent odor of sour milk, my vision going swimmy so that I could not tell a glint of glass from a foil wrapper. We searched what felt like an hour and was probably twenty minutes. It never turned up.

When I told my mother, she said it was just a glass rock. It cost under five dollars. It was nothing to cry about.

She was right about every fact and wrong about the only question worth asking. The distance between her number and mine was not a disagreement about the ring. It was a disagreement about how worth gets set in the first place.

Consider how we price gold.

Gold is expensive because it is rare, because it will not corrode, because it is soft enough to hammer and dense enough to feel some substance in your hand. It has practical industrial applications, but nowhere near enough to account for what an ounce costs. Most of gold’s price is agreement. Silver behaves almost identically in a laboratory and sits far lower on the ladder for reasons that have little to do with chemistry. We have collectively decided, and the decision only stands on its own because everyone keeps re-deciding it every morning.

Which means market price is a consensus, and consensus can be, frankly, wrong.

My mother was quoting the market when she priced that ring at 5 dollars, and by market logic she was correct, and I have never once agreed with her.

We run the same kind of logic on people, constantly, and mostly without noticing. There is an almost invisible scale underneath ordinary life on which a surgeon outranks a janitor, a healthy body outranks a failing one, an earner outranks a dependent, someone with a following outranks someone without one.

James addresses this directly and does not treat it as a lapse in etiquette. He describes an assembly seating a man in fine clothing in a good seat and telling a poor man to stand off to the side, and calls it becoming judges with evil thoughts (James 2:4). The word is a courtroom word. To sort people by apparent worth is to convene a tribunal you were never given authority to convene, and then to hand down verdicts using a scale God does not recognize.

What arrests me is that the correction offered is not a better scale. It is the abolition of the pricing method itself.

When Samuel goes to Jesse’s house to anoint a king, he sees Eliab, who is tall and looks the part, and thinks what I consider the obvious. God interrupts him. “The LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7). The Hebrew behind outward appearance is literally the eyes: what the eyes take in, the surface data. Samuel was doing what any competent evaluator does, using the criteria available to him, and the criteria were the problem.

Knowing the scale is wrong does not tell you what the correct one measures.

There is an old rule of thumb that ” a thing is worth what someone will pay for it.” A house is worth the closing price. A painting is worth whatever the auction ends at. If that rule holds, then the worth of a person is fixed at the price God was willing to hand over, and Peter names that “you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Peter 1:18-19).

Look at what he does to the comparison. Silver and gold, the two substances by which humanity conducts all its other valuing, get filed under perishable. The metals anchoring every economy we have are, in Peter’s ledger, the depreciating asset. The currency in this particular transaction was blood, and it was spent on people who were, at the moment of purchase, hostile to the purchaser. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

This conclusion is one I still cannot fully…. absorb.

The price was not adjusted for merit. It was not scaled to usefulness or intelligence or beauty or output. The same amount was paid for the surgeon and the janitor, for the productive and the dependent, for the man with the following and the man with no one. If worth is set by purchase price, the janitor and the surgeon are worth exactly the same.

However, this seems delicate to me because I think this gets stretched into claims the text will not carry.

Equal worth is not equal function. Paul spends the bulk of 1 Corinthians 12 insisting the body has many members doing genuinely different work, and he never pretends the foot and the eye are interchangeable. Nor does the Bible suggest all conduct comes out even. There is a difference between a life spent building and a life spent wrecking, and the parable of the talents assumes we will be asked what we did with what we were handed.

What the cross establishes is not that everyone is identical but that the baseline is identical. Every person carries a worth no behavior can forfeit and no achievement can raise, because it was set in a transaction they had no hand in.

The Genesis grounding predates all of it. Humanity is made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), and the prohibition on murder rests directly there: “whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image” (Genesis 9:6). The image is what makes the life untouchable. Not the person’s character, not their contribution, not whether they had earned it. It was stamped in at creation and it does not wear off.

Holding this doctrine alone, however, has not stopped me from pricing people.

I still walk a hospital corridor and feel this kind of scale running. I still catch myself sizing up strangers by markers I would deny using if you asked me outright. The conviction lives in my head and the instinct lives somewhere different and perhaps further down, and the two do not appear to be speaking.

I suspect this is why the Bible so seldom tells us to believe in human worth and so often tells us to do things that presume it.

Visit the orphan and the widow in their affliction (James 1:27). Consider others more significant than yourselves (Philippians 2:3). The commands come as behavior because the reordering seems to happen through practice rather than through agreement. You act your way into seeing correctly, not the other way around.

It is also, I think, why Jesus kept company the pricing system had marked down. Tax collectors, the woman at the well, lepers, the children the disciples were waving off. He was not running an outreach program to the undervalued. He was demonstrating in front of witnesses, over and over, that the system was broken at the root.

To go back to my story: I never found the ring.

I remember walking back to class with the garbage still on my hands, having lost the one physical article proving my mother had been kind to me once, and being told by that same mother that the loss was not worth crying over.

What I have settled on, decades later, is that worth is conferred rather than discovered. That ring was worth five dollars on the market and something past accounting to me, and neither figure was created out of thin air.

So the whole question of human worth reduces to which valuer holds authority.

Every human scale is provisional, negotiable, and eventually revised in some way shape or form. The price paid at the cross is not open for renegotiation, and it was not calculated using any of the criteria I typically reach for.

That said, I do not always feel valuable. I spent a good stretch of my life being told, in one form or another, that I was priced above what I was actually worth, and some of that instruction came from people whose voices did a great deal of the work of forming me. What I have come to think is that my feelings are not admissible evidence. The valuation was performed by someone with better information and considerably more standing, He did not consult me, and He is not revisiting it.

Those two lunch ladies dug through garbage with me for 20 minutes over a 5 dollar ring, and I have never forgotten it, because they did the thing my mother would not. They treated the ring as valuable because it was valuable to me, and they took my valuation seriously enough to get their hands filthy over it.

I think that is nearer to how God does it than anything the market has ever produced.