Leopard Spot


The great thing about aphorisms, proverbs and sayings is they so often turn out to be right.  Of course they also tend to have something of an iridescent effect: looked at one way they can mean one thing; looked at another they seem to mean the near opposite.  Take for example the saying, “Can a leopard change his spots?”  You’ll hear this when a habitually bad actor repeats his bad behavior in the face of a second chance.  But then we all know of examples of people who have, indeed, reformed their bad behavior into a more upright life.  So, would we say of them, “See, these leopards did change their spots!”
The nagging sentiment at the bottom of this particular saying challenges those of us who really want to lead good lives.  We, if we’re honest, know that we are not as morally upright as we aspire to be—we all slip up, we all cling to another saying, “nobody’s perfect.”  Although a leopard certainly cannot change his spots into stripes (or swirls, or chevrons) we’re sure that our shortcomings are not as permanent as spots on fur.
Right?  I’m not so sure.  In every avenue of life—success, skills, moral character—I haven’t yet met a person who feels that they are in fact perfectly successful, skilled, or moral.  The cheerful see it as life’s learning curve they’re climbing; the morose see it as life’s Herculean requirement they must undertake simply to prevent failure.  But these gradations and perspectives merely forestall the recurring question:  Are you a man or a mouse?! What are you really made of?  Show us your true colors!
So many sayings say we have some innate qualities that will, quite apart from our choices, rear up and show us for what we are.  And over millennia mankind has used various schemes to characterize itself: the four humors, astrological signs, and more modern things like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  So, in the idiom of our time we say things like an ESTJ might act like an INFP, but could never sustain it.  The leopard cannot change its MBTI.
But there’s more.  Beyond types and fur marks we can be scarred without our consent.  Children raised in fatherless homes?  Homes with addiction or abuse?  No home at all?  A good home but having suffered major trauma—war or natural disaster?  What does all this mean to the Gospel?  “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”  Is repentance possible?  Can we change?  Indeed, didn’t Jesus ask the very question: “Can a bad tree bear good fruit?”
Therein lies the challenge of the Gospel, a challenge to the pride which I can’t seem to shake.  My fur is riddled with it!  But I’m commanded to repent, to behave contrary to my colors, my type, the promptings of my scars.  “Come to me, and I will give you rest.”  What is this rest?  Is it a new coat?  A new personality?  An absence of scar tissue?  Even the resurrected Lord had nail prints.
Here’s my conjecture.  The command to repent is a command to the impossible, equal to the impossible command to lose my life in order to find it.  The war against my sin (my colors, type, and scars) is a guaranteed defeat that will, if carried through, kill me.  And I must go willingly.  Faith speaks in echo: “I am the Resurrection and the Life.”  Whether metaphor or concrete fact, it resonates with the enigmatic quality of a truly wise, transcendent saying, not to be explained or solved, but to be embraced.  Can a leopard change its spots?  No.  And “the things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”

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