Posted by Roland     

The Three Rabbis. Somebody pretty smart once said, “The basic task of exegesis [how to figure out the meaning of biblical passages] is to address, as a whole and in parts, the historical questions: What was the author saying to the readers; and why?  These questions ultimately demand an answer at the broadest level in the form of a hypothesis to be tested against the verse-by-verse details.” It has always seemed to me, that the testing hypothesis can usually be found in the understanding that the great authors of the Old Testament books were great storytellers – invariably living in an oral culture. God is the master storyteller. All of the Bible is set ablaze by stories – stories which are all one story. When his son climbed up to the top of the mount (and when he came down off of it), he was telling stories – stories which could be understood within the context of the singular, overarching story told by his father. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel (in the tradition of his, and our, Jewish forefathers) tells this wonderful tale:

“When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw misfortune threatening the Jews it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. There he would light a fire, say a special prayer, and the miracle would be accomplished and the misfortune averted. Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to intercede with heaven, he would go to the same place in the forest and say: “Master of the Universe, listen! I do not know how to light the fire, but I am still able to say the prayer.” And again the miracle would be accomplished. Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save his people once more, would go into the forest and say: “I do not know how to light the fire, I do not know the prayer, but I know the place and this must be sufficient.” It was sufficient and the miracle was accomplished.

“Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn to overcome misfortune. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, he spoke to God: “I am unable to light the fire and I do not know the prayer; I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is to tell the story, and this must be sufficient.” And it was sufficient.

“God made man because he loves stories.”

Those to whom Jesus was speaking from that mount were familiar with God’s story. What Jesus was trying to get them to understand was that the familiar story was now all being reworked around him. The problem for us is exactly the opposite, i.e. we are all too familiar with the story of Jesus and all too unfamiliar with the story that he assumed his audience was steeped in. If either story is ignored, the pieces just won’t fit.

The Big Fish. Now, let’s test this hypothesis against the verse by verse details of the story of Jonah and the Whale. Who was the most despicable enemy of the Jews? Clearly, Assyria. Jonah was so appalled by God’s request to have him give fair warning to Nineveh (capital of the Assyrian Empire), he took off in the opposite direction.  It was unthinkable to this Hebrew prophet that he would be asked to aid in the salvation of the wicked city which had dedicated itself to tormenting Israel. He tried to hide from God (not exactly a brilliant idea) but God caught up with him and Jonah got himself swallowed up by apparently a really, really big fish. Jonah then pleaded to God in what sounds a lot like a Psalm but amounts to an ancient version of “God, get me out of this pickle and I promise…….” God answered him and then promptly sent him back to finish the job of rescuing Nineveh—this time successfully. But Jonah was so ticked off that he had played a part in granting salvation to the gigantic city of Israel’s most hated enemy he wanted to die. He grew a bush to give him shade and God killed the bush. Here’s how God responded to Jonah:

“You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus might well have said, “You have heard it said God loves your enemies because they are all his precious ikons (images of God); now, you need to love your enemies as well.” Well, that’s pretty much what he actually did say. Then we bellyache, “That’s just too much to swallow [get the pun?]—there must be another way to read this passage.” But “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” is not a metaphor. It cannot be circumvented by root-word studies in ancient Aramaic or Greek. It is simply and plainly a working out of the story of Jonah in the new context of all of accepted scripture being reworked around and through Jesus of Nazareth as the fulfillment, climax and culmination of all of those scripture stories.

So back to the Jonah tale (another pun). We moderns read this story and say, “The ancients didn’t have the benefit of modern science and didn’t realize that it would be ridiculous to believe that a man could could be swallowed by a sea serpent, be spit out after three days and still live. Well, guess what? Those ignorant ancients knew as well as we do that such a scenario violated everything they knew about the physical world. Sure, they knew nothing about molecular biology but they knew enough not to fall for big fish tales. But they appreciated what we tend to miss, i.e. that the story was not about a really big fish but was about how God loves our enemies. He has the audacity to love our enemies! How dare he? We (Jonah) tend to get all out of sorts about the ridiculous undeserved grace and promiscuous love of God—at least when it comes to others. I know God loves me and so it only stands to reason that he would hate those who hate me. But that’s apparently not the way it works. And that’s the reason these stories were told and told over and over again for centuries before somebody decided to write them all down. What was the author trying to say? What is the meaning behind the story? What does God want us to learn from these stories? With the Book of Jonah, the answer is simple: God loves our enemies and it doesn’t seem to make much difference that this tends to piss us off—and, now, in anticipation of God’s New Age we are being called upon to move in the direction of becoming fully human where we will be able to love our enemies as well. This is a Kingdom story. If you want science stories, listen to stephen hawking. If you want fish stories, listen to the pastor—and read the bible and search for meaning. Remember, God made man because he loves stories.

The Big Story. When I got interrupted last time (by running out of space), we were talking about a little bit different way of reading the bible, i.e. seeing it all as a series of stories that all tell one big story—and then drawing the meaning out of each story. And that big story, as I see it, is:

The Beginning (the first page of the bible): In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,….So God created humankind in his image,… in the image of God he created them….male and female he created them….God blessed them, God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. (Gen 1)

Then This Happened: (the basic plot premise): But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God….she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, ….Lord God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals  and among all wild creatures;….therefore the Lord God sent him [man] forth from the garden of Eden,…. (Gen 3)

The Plot Thickens and God Makes a Promise: Now the Lord said to Abram, ….I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing….and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’ (Gen 12) [God winds up making six covenants (a term of art in the old days), some conditional, some unconditional, some to Israel, some to all mankind, which covenants provide (for careful readers) the explanatory threads which weave themselves throughout all 66 books and tie everything together.]

The Next 37.5 Books of the Bible: Israel finds its vocation (to be a blessing to all nations, i.e. to effect God’s great restoration plan); Israel loses its vocation; Israel re-discovers its vocation; Israel forgets its vocation (suffering and enjoying the appropriate and promised blessings and curses along the way)… and on and on (you get the idea).

The Unexpected Plot Twist: God decides to become man and finally serve out the purpose of Israel in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, i.e. the perfect Israelite, inaugurating the long-promised Kingdom and renewal and re-starting of all of heaven and earth and, thereby, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. Jesus is the Messiah of Israel and talks incessantly about the Kingdom of God as the end and aim of God’s relationship with His people (a point the Reformed and Catholic churches just seem to miss). To bring all of this about, He had to be tortured, suffer physical death so that our sins (not His) will no longer count against us (a point the Reformed and Catholic churches fixate upon) and then be resurrected in a glorified body and ascend to be with His Father, awaiting the unfolding of the rest of history.

The Surprise Ending (the last page of the bible): The Messiah comes back (as promised) and we are physically resurrected in glorified bodies (1 Cor. 15). John testifies (and it becomes canon): “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away….And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’ ….And the one who was seated on the throne said, ‘See, I am making all things new.’ Also he said, ‘Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true.’ Then he said to me, ‘It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end”. (Rev 21) The Kingdom, inaugurated by Jesus becomes fully completed upon His return.

The Moral of the Story: We behave as Kingdom-people-in-transition NOW because that now-and-yet-to-be Kingdom will be our eternal home.

The Meaning Is What Matters. I believe every story in the entire bible can fit like so many puzzle pieces into this super big picture and without bending or twisting any one piece so that it will go where we want it to go (to get it to comply with our pre-conceived or taught or learned view of what we expected scripture to say before we really read the bible in a holistic manner.) These stories, then in turn, can best be understood by asking questions like: What was the author saying? What meaning was he trying to convey? What are we supposed to take away from the story? What is the biblical truth driving this story? Why was it written? If we believe these stories are God-breathed (and we do), then what is it that God is trying to get through our thick skulls? Is He saying, “I’m so powerful that I can make a man live inside of a tuna for three days.” Or, is this His way of getting us to understand that God loves our enemies (because He created them just as much as He created us) and when He comes right out and says that in Jonah and when His Son comes right out and says the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount (adding that dreadful business about how now we must also love our enemies if we are to be Kingdom people), he’s being as serious as a heart attack (actually, an attack on the heart that transforms it radically).

All of these stories are intended to convey messages and meanings. And these messages and meanings are not hidden or secret. But they are obscured by the crusty lenses of our own preconceptions and culturally-conditioned worldviews we have built up over our entire lives. A friend of mine, who is a recent convert, asked me to take The Great Litmus Test of authentic Christianity, i.e. “Do you really believe .…[take your pick] that the world was created in six days or that God got really mad and sent a ginormous flood to kill everybody on earth other than Noah’s family and pets or that Jonah really lived in an over-sized trout for three days or that the sun in fact stopped in its course or….[you get the idea].” Now, here’s the implied syllogism: “Well, if you don’t believe that really happened, then you don’t believe what the bible says and therefore, you don’t see the bible as trustworthy and true!” See the trap? Either you believe what the bible says and are therefore willing to ignore physical realities we all know to be true ever since the Enlightenment OR you are willing to acknowledge that we know a lot more about science than the primitives who wrote the bible but then your reliance on the bible becomes an illogical, untenable and unjustified leap of faith (wishful thinking).

Reading the bible to get to the meaning of the particular story and putting it in the context of the overarching story very nicely smashes these Greek sophistries like so many Higgs bosons in a super collider. It is the MEANING of the story—not its syntax, spelling, science or conformity and containment within the limited capacities of our niggling and peewee minds (apologies to stephen hawking who knows more than God so there is no need for God) that matters. God was not saying in Genesis 1 and 2, “Look at me! I can do a whole lot in six days”—He was answering our eternal question, “How did we and everything else get here?’ Answer: It was all created by God (and it makes zero difference if that was in six days, six weeks, Carl Sagan’s billions and billions of whatever, in a big bang [originally a derogatory term for the Genesis story of creation, by the way], a cosmic soup or in a way, heaven (or should I say “ether”) forbid, science hasn’t yet or never will figure out. When you meet God face to face and your creator confirms, “I created everything, “are you going to feel the need to ask, “How the hell d’you do that?” (Me? I’m going to take off my shoes because I will be on holy ground. (Joshua 5:15))

Russell Crowe. As to the Noah story, the authors are not trying to teach us diluvian histogeology, zoological classification systems, shipbuilding architecture and engineering or Archimedes’ water displacement principles. (As a footnote, flood stories in ancient Mesopotamia were as common as zits on a teenager. God ALWAYS speaks to us in the culture, language and idioms we understand. That’s why Koreans don’t smuggle Spanish bibles into China.) NO! (as Paul, the inventor of Christian theology would say). These storytellers are trying to get us to understand that evil and wickedness had entered and infected God’s good creation, that something needs to be done about evil, that there is some level of evil present in all of us, that God is going to be true to his promise to Abraham to restore all of creation, that all of God’s covenant promises are trustworthy and can hold the water of hope (including his covenant with Noah), that God has a plan to accomplish all of this (see the rest of the bible), that we are the custodians and caretakers of everything on this earth (including the animals and including our fellow human beings) and that much of what happens in history and in our lives can be made sense of by the constant yet simple realization that there is Creator. Those who criticize the new movie “Noah” lament the fact that the 2 ½ hour Hollywood blockbuster does not rotely and invariably recreate the eight paragraphs of Genesis 7 and 8. As for me, I was amazed to see and hear all of the biblical truths and meanings of so many of the Genesis stories (creation, the garden, the fall, Cain and Abel, Cain’s banishment east of Eden, God’s protection of Cain, the background to the tower of Babel story, mankind’s desire to become like God, Tubal-cain’s forging of murderous instruments, Noah’s ancestry, the universal knowledge of the creator) all drawn out and put in the mouths of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. Two opposable thumbs up from this critic.

We spend $62 billion a year on movies—all because we love stories.

So does God.