Jonah and the end of the story

  • 05ruejonahinthewhale_partial.jpgAfter Pascha, I man­aged to find some time to get around the Ortho-blogosphere a lit­tle and came across this post of Jan’s that I really liked. Then in the past week, my work sched­ule has sud­denly exploded and I haven’t had much time to do any­thing. Well, that’s a story for another blog-post. In the mean­time, I really wanted to revisit what Jan observed after read­ing the Book of Jonah.

    Cast­ing our minds back an entire week, we recall that at the Holy Sat­ur­day ser­vice, the entire Book of Jonah is read. That’s not really that much of a killer — it’s only four chap­ters long. And Jonah packs a lot of action, human drama and psy­chol­ogy into four chap­ters. Jonah’s called, Jonah runs scared, Jonah comes clean and is thrown over­board, Jonah is in the belly of the whale for three days, Jonah utters a song of prayer (which is alluded to as one of the odes of the canon that the Church sings at orthros and other times). Jonah is “brought up” by the whale, prophe­cies to Ninevah and then, when the peo­ple actu­ally repent enough that God for­gives them, Jonah goes into a bit of a snit and has to have God gen­tly chide him for his pride and unright­eous anger.

    05ruejonahinthewhale1.jpgThere’s always some­thing hap­pen­ing in the Book of Jonah. But Jan looked at it with a writer’s eye and observes that as far as plot devel­op­ment and lit­er­ary basics, it all fol­lows the pro­gres­sion of the “hero” and his “jour­ney.” Except that the big action of the story, and the big change that Jonah expe­ri­ences, hap­pen at the mid­point with his con­fes­sion at sea and his three days in the belly of the whale rather than at the end, as they would in a book or movie.

    So what’s the point? As we know from many hymns in the Church and also by Christ’s admis­sion, Jonah’s three days in the whale and his com­ing up alive out of it are a pic­ture of Christ’s death and res­ur­rec­tion. It’s worth giv­ing a thought to the fact that in the story of human­ity on earth, Christ’s First Advent — from his birth to death, res­ur­rec­tion and ascen­sion — aren’t the END of the story. Though His earthly min­istry, sac­ri­fi­cial death and ris­ing from the dead changed every­thing, they didn’t end every­thing. You could say they hap­pened some­where around chap­ter two. Jan says:

    For Christ’s story (and maybe for man’s story, too, but I’m not fin­ished think­ing about this), the death and res­ur­rec­tion are the mid­point, not the cli­max. The thing is, we don’t know the cli­max. Beyond the indi­ca­tions from Scrip­ture, we have only guesses and spec­u­la­tions about the har­row­ing of sheol, about break­ing down the bars of death, about what Christ meant when he told the myrrhbearer not to touch him because he had not ascended to his father, about what the Ascen­sion actu­ally entailed.

    This is the odd­ness and the ten­sion known by every believer liv­ing in the Church Age — it even affects those who say they don’t believe. As the Chris­t­ian nar­ra­tive has gone out into the world and the story — if not the impact of the story — has per­vaded the cul­ture, we have all known that we live like some­one who has read the begin­ning and the last sen­tence of a mys­tery novel with­out being able to read every­thing that comes in between. We know Christ will come back; He will have a Sec­ond Advent. But we’re dying to know when and under what cir­cum­stances? What will He find? How will He find us? Every gen­er­a­tion of Chris­tians, includ­ing the very first ones and maybe even the dis­ci­ples, appear to have thought that the Lord would return soon because things couldn’t get much worse.

    I won­der how amazed the Chris­tians of the 1st cen­tury — or the 4th, 11th, 15th or 19th — would’ve been if they had known that the Church would endure this long. Per­haps she’s been banged around a bit, per­haps she has a lot to answer for, but the Bride of Christ still IS. Look­ing at it through the long tele­scope of the cen­turies, isn’t that a mir­a­cle, really? We say that we don’t live in the age of mir­a­cles any­more, but maybe we just don’t know where to look for them. It’s a mir­a­cle to go to church every Sun­day and find that it’s still there.

    God will­ing, that’s where He finds us when­ever the end of the story does actu­ally come.


    Related posts:

    1. Bright Week do’s & don’ts
    2. Pascha on the porch
    3. The shame­ful story has a happy ending
    4. What’s the story, morn­ing glory?
    5. The morn­ing after — ahhh.

    May 3rd, 2008 | Grace | 1 Comment |

One Response and Counting...

  • Mimi 05.03.2008

    Amen!

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