COLLEGE CHAPLAIN
Early on in Disney’s blockbuster, Frozen, Princess Anna sings the memorable tune, ‘Love is An Open Door’ with Prince Hans as they describe their feelings for one another. We all probably know the backstory: Anna’s elder sister, Elsa, had literally shut her door to Anna for years. The Castle of Arendelle was something of a fortress for Anna as she grew up. However, when Elsa’s coronation unfolds and Anna meets Prince Hans, she uses a metaphor to sing of what love has brought her. Meeting Hans brings her the feeling of an open door.
We know that Anna is using a metaphor. She is not speaking literally, at least not in the sense that we normally mean. None of us came away from that song thinking, ‘Unless I’ve opened a door then I haven’t found love’. Despite this, Anna is being truthful in what she says. She really, truly means how she feels. Love has opened her heart and her hopes. The door has swung open for her. If you’ve seen the film then you know that Hans is singing along with this open door metaphor too, but he is lying! He’s not telling the truth. Both Anna and Hans are using a metaphor, but one uses it to tell the truth, and the other uses it to lie.
If we’re honest, we know that using a metaphor or literal language doesn’t determine whether what we are saying is true, it just changes how we say it! Moreover, if we limit truth to only being something we can express literally, then we’ll often be left confused. That’s simply not how language works, and thinking too concretely can leave you with rocks in your head (I’m acutely aware of the irony of using a metaphor to appeal to literal thinkers!).
This question of course is often applied to the Bible. How can we take the Bible literally? The Bible can seem ridiculous in places if we read it literally. So maybe we should just read it metaphorically to cover over those tricky bits, but as we’ve just seen with the Frozen example, that approach doesn’t ensure we’ll get it right either. What we really need to be aware of is that even when we read the Bible metaphorically, we always need a literal reality to make sense of the metaphor.
Consider the well known passage from John 10, where Jesus describes himself as the door to the sheep pen—another door! We know what literal doors are like and what they do; Anna’s song has helped us with that. Doors are inanimate objects usually made of wood, metal, glass, plastic etc. Furthermore, it’s exactly because of our literal understanding of doors that we know that Jesus is speaking metaphorically when he calls himself a door, because Jesus is not made of wood or metal and he’s not hanging to a frame by two hinges.
But here’s the catch: Jesus is a real door. The literal meaning of how doors function helps us understand what Jesus is saying about himself. Jesus is the door who opens to let his followers into heaven and shuts out those who seek to do his people harm. He uses even more metaphors in that passage, describing heaven as a sheep pen, his followers as sheep safely protected in the pen, and the enemies as sheep thieves who are shut out! Indeed, Jesus was eventually hung on a frame and his side was opened so that his sacrifice of life could flow unhinged in forgiveness, opening the way to heaven for those who trust in Jesus. Maybe that’s pushing the door metaphor a bit far, but it’s not untrue!
Jesus continues: ‘If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture’ (v8) and have life in abundance. Here are more metaphors, but they are literally true. Those who trust in Jesus receive life-giving sustenance, like sheep eating and resting in lush pastures.
Most of the time we can tell when Jesus is speaking metaphorically and we can work out the literal truth of what he means, and it can happen in reverse too. When Jesus performs miracles, which we are meant to read as literal events that physically took place in history, there is often a metaphorical meaning behind them. Jesus makes the blind see; they see physically with their eyes, but they also see the truth of who Jesus is—the Son of God. When Jesus calls his first disciples, who were fishermen, he provides a miraculous catch of fish for them, literally hundreds of fish fill the nets, but then he tells them to leave their nets and become fishers of men!
Much of the confusion about taking the Bible literally comes not from the Bible being full of unbelievable rubbish, but from people reading the Bible in an unbelievably rubbish way. People will make memes about a word or two in a quirky passage of the Bible, but they are not willing to read more than a word or two of the Bible. They’re not willing to explore for themselves how all the words of the Bible hold together to arrive at just one word, which makes sense of all the confusion, and is literally the only word worth believing in—Jesus.
John begins his Gospel using a metaphor about Jesus, calling him the word of God. What’s interesting is that there is a literal reality behind the phrase, ‘the word of God’. We read in Genesis 1 that God brought the universe into existence at a word. God spoke his word and light, gravity, mass, matter and life all come into being at God’s word. So for John to speak of Jesus as being the word of God made flesh means that the very essence of the existence of everything is bottled in the body of Jesus.
This metaphor also helps us understand how the resurrection could be literally true. For if Jesus is the Word that brought the laws of nature into being in the first place, then it would not be out of place for him to intervene and do something unnatural like rise from the dead. If Jesus is the word of life for all things, then it would be no-thing at all for him to overcome the grave.
The metaphor of Jesus as the word of God is literally the only way to read the Bible. Because if you take that truth and run it through how you read stories about global floods, people living inside of fish, talking donkeys and whatever other kooky things you find in the Bible, none of them seem more impossible than Jesus’ resurrection. If you’re willing to open the door and interrogate the resurrection, you will find that it is literally how to make sense of what you read, know, feel and live in this universe. It is the open door to everything.
Gareth Tyndall | College Chaplain