After 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.

There’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.