A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [99]
Jesus’s death and resurrection, in this light, aren’t merely doctrines to affirm or meanings to celebrate in creed and song. They are a paradigmatic summons to participation and anticipation. True, the transformed future desired by God isn’t achieved by human effort, strategy, or wisdom apart from God.18 But neither is it achieved by God working apart from humanity via miraculous skyhooks. No, a better future comes as we join Jesus first in dying (metaphorically by dying to our pride, our agendas, our schedules, our terms, or literally through martyrdom as witnesses for God’s kingdom and justice), and then in rising, through the mysterious but real power of God.19 In this cruciform way, we participate in the ongoing work of God, and we anticipate its ultimate success.20
But we can refuse to participate as well. That’s what makes a participatory eschatology so different from pessimistic determinisms (like those of premillennialism21), on the one hand, and from triumphalistic determinisms (like those of postmillennialism22), on the other. In a participatory approach, God is always present to lead and accompany us in a more hopeful direction, but we are also free to spurn God’s leading and presence. The view is ultimately hopeful, because God’s persistent grace will surely prove more durable and vigorous than our persistent stupidity. But that ultimate hope leaves no room for complacency or smugness in the present moment, because human stupidity can and does produce true and great suffering and sadness.
An odd but fascinating biblical story cleverly and unforgettably illustrates this participatory eschatology, this anticipatory ethic, and our general resistance to embracing it: the story of Jonah. Jonah is often perceived as a cute children’s story about a gentle magic whale who serves as a living submarine for a runaway prophet. Actually, it could win an award as the most subversive document in the biblical library. Its one home-grown character, Jonah, is rebellious, pouty, and wrong nearly all the time, while all other characters in the story—from pagan sailors, to ocean waves, to Ninevites, to a bush and a worm, to the great swallowing and vomiting sea creature himself—respond to God beautifully.
The story begins with the word of the Lord coming to Jonah: “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me” (1:2).23 Jonah declines the assignment and jumps a ship that will carry him to the opposite end of the Mediterranean world (meaning contemporary Spain, not Iraq). God intervenes with a major storm to block Jonah’s escape. Jonah ends up getting thrown overboard by a remarkably kind group of sailors who, after doing everything they can to save both him and their own skins, in the end capitulate to Jonah’s death wish and toss him into the sea. Enter the whale, or great fish, who dutifully swallows Jonah and whose stomach provides a kind of prayer chamber—a symbol, to my interpretive eye, of the Jewish experience of conquest and exile. When cued by the Lord, the fish vomits Jonah on the shore, and when told by the Lord a second time to go to Nineveh, Jonah complies. Jonah arrives in Nineveh and starts preaching that the city will be destroyed in forty days, and right on cue everyone repents, from the least to the king himself. The king calls everyone to fast, pray, and “turn from their evil ways and from violence” for this reason: “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish” (3:8–9).
And that’s all it takes for God to drop the “destroy in forty days” forecast. At this point, Jonah is furious. He vents: “O LORD! Is not this what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning;