Pigs in the Oven
The story goes that some parents began to fear the strange Child and tried to prevent their children from
associating
with Him…. A father is supposed to have seen Jesus approaching and to have pushed his children into a cold
brick oven to
hide them. When Jesus came in and asked for His companions, the father said that they had gone out to play.
The Child
looked significantly at the oven and asked —
“What have you got in that oven?”
“Only pigs,” said the man.
“Pigs be they!” said the Child.
And when the oven was opened, pigs they were.
— Frederick Cameron Sillar and Ruth Mary Meyler, The Symbolic Pig:
An
Anthology of Pigs in Literature and Art (Oliver and Boyd Ltd., 1961)
