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I just spent a very enjoyable few hours leading a Bible study on the book of Jonah. Funny guy, Jonah. Out of place, in a way, among the other eleven "Minor Prophets." Nothing like Amos or Joel or (eek) Nahum. No long oracles calling Israel to repent and predicting doom for everyone else. Just this strange little story about a man who doesn't want to do what God sends him to do, whose entire oeuvre as a prophet amounts to five words (in Hebrew, seven in most English translations), and who reacts to the success of his mission by asking God to kill him. It's a story full of humour and life which all too often gets lost in arguments over whether or not the whale sequence, which is just a small bit of the story, actually happened. Was the whale (big fish is closer to the Hebrew) real? How did Jonah breathe in there? What did he eat? No, no, others say. There was no whale, the whole thing is a metaphor. So why bother if it's not real? The key, I think, is to fully accept what's on the page while you're reading it but to not carry all the details into life once you're done. It's like attending the theatre - if you sit there the whole time saying, "This isn't Hamlet, it's some actor, and we're not in Denmark," then you're not going to get anything from the experience. On the other hand, if you leave the theatre convinced that you just saw the prince of Denmark die...well...you have issues. The audience agrees, for the two or three (or four) hours of the play, that this guy is really Hamlet and that we really are in Denmark. In theatre this is called "willing suspension of disbelief." When reading scripture it's called "faith." Do we reject Hamlet because he's played by an actor? Of course not. Do we reject scripture because we can't believe that a big fish swallowed a man? I certainly hope not. But it's a common problem in our modern, science-focused world - we mistake facts for truth. It works the other way, too. A lot of fundamentalists mistake truth, or at least the vehicle through which truth is communicated, for facts. Meanwhile God keeps talking, hoping we'll someday figure out how to listen. |
