Jonah and the Dress Code

First Jonah. I used to believe that Jonah was swallowed by a huge fish. Uh huh! Wild isn’t it! A huge fish, bigger than any we have on earth now, came up and chomp! Jonah was gone. But then he lived under water for three days. If any young chum challenged my belief, I was quick to say that with God all things are possible. That’s a laughable position in today’s educated circles, yet should it be? Rand Miller (and various episodes of Star Trek) said, “In an infinite universe all things are possible?” What’s the difference? One is scientific and the other mere religious wistfulness? Who gets to make that distinction?

In college I learned that the Jonah story is an excellent satire, “On par with ‘All in the Family’.” Yep, that’s what my Literature of the Bible teacher told us. And it’s true. It is great satire. Jonah goes to great lengths to avoid taking God’s message to Nineveh, not because he’s shy, but because He fears that God’s great mercy will spare the Ninevites, and He does, and that’s one point of the story. Another point is revealed when Jonah gets angry over a favorite bush that dies. So the conclusion is that God’s own people, the ones who are supposed to be busy sharing Him with others, are often more concerned with their minor possessions than they are with a perishing population.

Yeah, it’s a great satire; so good that it stands by itself. It doesn’t have to be believed as a factual story. And to story after story I have applied the same literary and psychological lenses, gaining great insights, and relaxing my grip on the reality of the stories. “Who cares if Samson ever lived? What matters is that I learn that God is behind all apparent strength for good, arrogance gets us into trouble, and God is willing to return to the humbled.” Good lessons. But as I quietly let Samson fade into the realm of fairy tale, I may be surrendering the very faith that led me to those noble conclusions. As Samson becomes fiction, so too might His God, so too might the more expository passages of the Bible. My interpretation of Samson is still colored by the traditional values I learned as a boy. Without a real God, my children may interpret Samson very differently. Perhaps they will conclude that the real point of the story is “Keep your secrets, don’t cut your hair, and be sure to get revenge even if it kills you.”

Now the dress code. As an academy principal with a drug problem on campus, I often heard teachers say, “We’re tired of enforcing the dress code. It’s a never-ending drag. Let’s just give up that battle and focus on the things that really matter.” I wanted relief as much as they did. And I might have ended the dress code, but for one piece of research. It claimed that students learn our values through our consistency in the little things. When we enforce dress codes, students can show their burgeoning independence and test the boundaries in ways that harm no one. If our codes only address criminal activity rather than civility, then our battles will be staged on the fields of criminal behavior. Better to battle for social graces. Furthermore, it said that when students see us take issue over attire, their internal response is “Wow! I can only imagine how crazy they’d get if I brought weed to school.”

Jonah as the dress code. Maybe there are some points of Christian faith that are on the fringe of human belief. They are easy to sacrifice in order to live amicably with non-believers. But there is a huge difference between being circumspect in what I discuss with them and actually shaving my belief system until it fits in the “human reason” box. Perhaps when we fit things in the human reason box we find that box shrinking until it’s not just Jonah that gets squeezed out. So do other stories and teachings and even principles. What is left is a verbal pabulum with no empowering miracle or mystery behind it. No motivation to conform one’s life to a grand God who really is. We incrementally compromise the “I AM” into the “he symbolizes…”

While there is much to enjoy in Jonah from a literary and psychological point of view, and while there are stories in the Bible that are told only to illustrate a point, maybe I need to move my literal belief back out into some of the hard to defend hinterlands of reason and debate. Once I get there, I don’t actually have to debate. I can just silently stand there in belief. It may be a lonely outpost but it guards the more central tenets of my faith.

Though this writing is not specifically about origins, this dynamic connection between the easily argued fringe beliefs and the core of one’s faith was summed up in a friend’s comment. He said, “If I can’t believe that God spoke the worlds into existence, then how am I to believe He can resurrect a life, break the bonds of an addiction, mend a relationship, or save my soul? It’s all a miracle of His grace.”