If you tried my suggestion of digging in to the Bible by trying one of the 5 Ps, you may have hunted down Jesus’ parables. How good of Jesus not to rattle off a list of dos and don’ts, or a series of dogmas you must agree to. He told stories – which are precisely how we experience our lives. Tell me about yourself? You don’t list 5 key facts. You tell me a few stories. And like the best stories, there are some surprises, there’s no mansplaining, and always a hint of mystery in there.
Clarence Jordan, that Georgia farmer who took the Bible literally and started a commune of rich and poor, black and white living together, said that a parable is like a Trojan horse. You let it in and then – Bam! – everything’s turned upside down. Read a parable. Let the Bam! happen. Jesus didn’t over-explain what his stories meant, and most who heard them scratched their heads. Jesus trusted his hearers (and us) to do just that, to ponder, to read between the lines, and draw their own conclusions.
Try Matthew 20. What do you make of such a story? No way to run a business! Or is it – for Jesus? Ask Bonhoeffer’s questions: what is God saying to us here? What is God asking of us here? What here is strange and contrary to the conventional wisdom of the world?
This story, like all of Jesus’ stories, was made up. Not true stories! – or we might say, Jesus’ made-up stories were truer than the true stories you hear other places. A question Bible readers stub their toes on is: Is the Bible literally true or not?
Although the Bible was written centuries before we kept good records or had video or fact-checkers, most of the facts are surprisingly spot on. Naturally, some dates, names and places get jumbled. I do the same if you ask me to replay my 17th birthday party or what happened in 1993. No slick editor fixed the booboos, but let them stick, as if that’s part of the charm.
Are all these stories true? True to life, yes. But factually? I don’t believe that Jonah got swallowed by a fish and then was vomited up – alive! – three days later. No fish big enough have ever inhabited the Mediterranean Sea. Lacking gills, with his skin corroded by digestive acid, Jonah couldn’t have survived! It smells like a made-up story – and one with a beautiful point, like Pinocchio, Beauty and the Beast, or Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Made-up stories re-make our hearts.
If skeptics scoff and say Bible stories are ridiculous, I’m glad. They are ridiculous – which is the point, like the Ewoks defeating the Rebel Alliance, Frodo destroying the ring, or Arya killing the Night King. If I get to heaven one day and God says there really was a fish that swallowed Jonah, I’ll say Okay. Salvation doesn’t depend on whether you think Bible stories were factual or made up. Jesus made up true stories.
So what’s factual and what’s fable-like? The longer you read the Bible, the better you are at detecting the difference. Even young children can spot the signals. When my girls were little, I read to them one night about the death of Aslan in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. They fought back tears. The very next night, I told them that their great-grandmother Stevens had died. More tears. As little girls, they understood the difference. Aslan was a storybook character; Mrs. Stevens a real person whose funeral we’d attend.
So read. Let the Bible have its way with you. I love the Charles Schulz cartoon of the young man saying to the young woman, “Don’t bother me. I’m looking for a verse of Scripture to back up one of my preconceived notions.” Funny – and haunting. Be wary of your self inserting itself! Look for the strangeness Bonhoeffer told us to look for.