Archive of published posts on January, 2010
Back homeBack in September, we started going through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount at Mars Hill, exploring the counter-intuitive way of Jesus. Alongside the messages, I’ve been writing weekly readers focusing on the different passages for that week. You can check all of them out here.
At the moment, I’m in the middle of writing six weeks of curriculum on the book of Jonah for Mars Hill.
We’re going to be studying through Jonah during Lent. It’s such a compelling story. When the final drafts are available via the MarsHill website, I’ll post links to them. But in the meantime, here’s an excerpt from Jonah pt. 1:
“So immediately and without hesitation, Jonah arose as he had been commanded. But he didn’t go to Nineveh. Instead, he took off for the Mediterranean coast to catch the first ship headed to Tarshish. Nineveh is located in present day Iraq. Tarshish is in Southern Spain, literally, at the other end of the world. The journey by ship would have taken almost a year and would have been extremely expensive and very dangerous. Not only was Tarshish about as far as Jonah could get from Nineveh, “Tarshish was exotic. Tarshish was adventure. Tarshish in biblical references was a far off and sometimes idealized port (Under the Unpredictable Plant, Eugene Peterson).” In the ancient world, people thought of Tarshish like we think of Tahiti or Hawaii. It was an escape, and it seems there was no price that Jonah wasn’t willing to pay to escape.
Most of us know the way to Tarshish. Like Jonah, we’ve paid the fare at one point or another. The escape to Tarshish for some people takes the form of shopping. The temporary fascination with something new takes your mind off of the Ninevehs of your life. For others Tarshish is the workplace, and simply going to work or bringing work home is a kind of escape- one that keeps them from having to ever “be home.” Still others retreat inside. They escape by isolating themselves from everyone around them, keeping everyone at arm’s length. Then there is keeping busy, because of course if we keep busy enough we never have to stop and face the gnawing sense of dissatisfaction that we feel inside. Pornography promises a kind of intimacy without any strings. Tarshish is all around us, and we go there often.
But the truth, as Eugene Peterson says, is simply this: “Tarshish is a lie.” The release, the distraction, the satisfaction of escape is only a temporary and fleeting fix. You can only run for so long before you realize that life on this side of the fence is quickly becoming just like life was back on that side of the fence. The common denominator of course is you, your own heart. As the saying goes, “wherever you go, there you are.” The world doesn’t need people who are good at jumping fences. It needs people who know how to turn brown grass green, people who go to Nineveh. God is inviting us to embrace the darkness, both our own shadows and the shadows in the world around us. You will always find God in the darkness, in the wickedness, in the broken cracks and crevices of the world. Those places come up before God’s face, and he is concerned. God wants to meet you in Nineveh, and in that seemingly impossible place, he wants to change everything.”
How do you escape? What is your Tarshish?