8. The Mystery of Metaphor
The Mystery of Metaphor
Metaphors are very strange,” wrote novelist Walker Percy, “because when you put two things together it’s a way of discovering meanings which haven’t been discovered before.”[1]
When Jesus said to His disciples, “You are the salt of the earth,” He brought together salt and disciples and planted a seed that’s been growing for centuries and producing fruit. But He went on to say, “You are the light of the world.” Now we have a three-way connection: Christ’s followers are like salt and like light, but they also create some kind of new relationship between salt and light. Indeed, metaphors are “very strange.”
What’s supposed to happen to you when you hear a metaphor? If the metaphor is merely embellishment (“He was as frustrated as a termite in a yo-yo”), you might think to yourself, “Now wasn’t that clever!” But that kind of response turns the metaphor into a distraction instead of a discovery. Instead of focusing on what’s being said, you start paying more attention to how it’s being said; and that kind of response can be lethal to good communication.
If the metaphor is “dead” (“He’s a bull in a china shop”), you might groan inwardly and perhaps even turn the speaker off. But if the metaphor is alive and vivid (“Why have you made me your target?” [Job 7:20]), you will probably find yourself connecting and saying to yourself, “I see something! I feel something! I understand something!”
“Connecting” is a term I’ve borrowed from psychotherapy. It describes what happens when a person “puts together” things that previously seemed unrelated, and thus gains new insight into life and the problems he or she is trying to solve. Says Ellen Y. Siegelman, “Much of psychotherapy consists in identifying previously unconscious metaphors and discovering how we unwittingly live by them.”[2] She quotes Edgar Levenson, “The significant insights in therapy . . . are not solutions but connections— connections drawn between previously unrelated events.”[3]
But what is actually “connected” within our listeners when they’re confronted by a biblical metaphor? I’m not trained in psychotherapy, but I’ll hazard a suggestion. I suspect that a successful “connection” would involve the building of at least three bridges.
The first bridge is between the contemporary listener and the ancient Book. On hearing the metaphor and “seeing” the picture it conveys, the listener says, “The Bible is speaking to me. It has something to say to me today!” The Word is heard, not simply as the text of a sermon, but as the voice of God coming to the worshiper in a living way. Biblical metaphors are timeless and can convey their messages to people in the age of computers just as they did to people in the age of clay tablets.
“Every great literature has always been allegorical,” wrote G.K. Chesterton, “allegorical of some view of the universe. The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.”[4] The many metaphors of life found in the Bible are “living links” that connect God’s Word to the hearts and minds of people today. In these moments the truth is transported to human hearts. The listener sees the relationship between the ancient text and the modern situation, and this opens the way for the Spirit to apply the Word. We want people to hear the voice of God, not just the voice of the preacher.
It’s something like watching a video of your neighbors’ recent vacation trip. It’s all rather bland until you see a place that you’ve visited; and you say to your wife or husband, “Remember when we were there?” All sorts of memories and emotions surface within you, some happy and perhaps some painful (“Isn’t that where you sprained your ankle?”); and suddenly the video takes on new interest.
In one sense, preaching is a travelogue that introduces us to the people, places, and events that make up salvation history. God has so recorded the story in the Bible that, if it’s properly presented, people will say, “I’ve been there!” or “That’s where I am right now!” One of the goals of preaching is to help people meet themselves in the Bible and discover the contemporary significance of that ancient Book.
A.W. Tozer used to remind us that “the Bible world is the real world.”[5] Too many people think that when they open the Bible, they have to set their watch back several thousand years; but just the opposite is true. It’s the Bible that brings us up-to-date so that we know what’s going on in today’s world. That’s one reason why Scripture contains so many biographies, because human nature doesn’t really change from one age to another. And that’s also why your Bible is filled with metaphors and images that transcend time and space and speak to people of every age.
Let me suggest secondly that metaphors can help people build a bridge between their past and their present. All of us have had difficult experiences that we’d like to bury and forget, but using the “Memory Gardens Cemetery” only makes the situation worse. It’s amazing how many people are being controlled by hurts and angers they thought they’d interred long ago. Metaphor has a way of bringing together the experiences of the past and the potential of the present and giving the listener new hope and encouragement.
Most of the people we know can describe their lives in a metaphor. A friend of mine used to ask me regularly, “Well, how goes the battle?” To him, life was a battleground, not a playground; and he took it all very seriously. Many people talk about being in “the rat race,” or about being “trapped” in their job or their marriage, or perhaps about “tough sailing” or “tough sledding.”
The metaphor we choose not only reveals our interpretation of life, but it also helps us choose the way we’ll respond to life. If life is a battle, then I’ll have to be a brave soldier and stick it out to the end. If life is a cage in which I’m trapped, then I’ll either resign myself to my fate or figure out some way to break out. If the sailing is tough, I’ll adjust the sails to try to make the winds work for me and not against me. The picture in our mind often determines the course of our life.
Metaphors help listeners build bridges between the ancient text and their own contemporary situation, and between their past and present. The third bridge is built between the person’s mind and heart. Recall the quotation from Sallie McFague: “Good metaphors shock, they bring unlikes together, they upset conventions, they involve tension, and they are implicitly revolutionary.”[6] In other words, a good metaphor is an explosive thing that shakes our inner person and forces us into a confrontation with the truth. Even before we mentally grasp what the metaphor is saying, we can feel the impact of it. T.S. Eliot claimed that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.”[7]
When confronted by a metaphor, you might find yourself remembering forgotten experiences and unearthing buried feelings, and then bringing them together to discover new insights. Your mind says, “I see!” Your heart says, “I feel!” Then in that transforming moment your imagination unites the two and you say, “I’m beginning to understand!” Then you’re challenged to take a step forward in spiritual and emotional maturity. “True insight is always connection,” says Ellen Y. Siegelman, “a simultaneous experience of feeling and thought, of ‘passion and prose.’ ”[8]
This kind of experience doesn’t happen when the preacher or teacher is only imparting information. A lecture may connect a teacher’s notebook with a student’s notebook, but a sermon must connect God’s mind and heart with the mind and heart of the listener. It’s when we penetrate the imagination with metaphors that we assist the listener in “putting things together.” Information is important, but we have to package that information in such a way that the listener has a confrontation with truth that produces an “experience explosion” within.
Welding Imagination with Experience
What philosopher and educator Alfred North Whitehead had to say about university education applies to our ministry of the Word.
The university imparts information, but it imparts it imaginatively. At least, this is the function which it should perform for society. A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence. This atmosphere of excitement, arising from imaginative consideration, transforms knowledge. A fact is no longer a bare fact: it is invested with all its possibilities. It is no longer a burden on the memory: it is energizing as the poet of our dreams, and as the architect of our purposes.[9]
Read that paragraph again, but substitute “church” for “university” and see how you respond. Whitehead goes on to say:
The tragedy of the world is that those who are imaginative have but slight experience, and those who are experienced have feeble imaginations. Fools act on imagination without knowledge; pedants act on knowledge without imagination. The task of a university is to weld together imagination and experience.[10]
The task of Christian ministry—preaching in particular—is to “weld together imagination and experience”; and metaphor is one of the tools we can use to accomplish this purpose. This doesn’t mean that the experience of “connecting” will occur every time we preach metaphorically. But this kind of preaching will give the Holy Spirit something to work with as He seeks to make the truth of Christ meaningful through our exposition of the Word.
Very few people can deal practically with abstractions such as truth, beauty, faith, and mercy. These abstractions must be “fleshed out” before we can really get ahold of them and put them to work in our lives. “The truth must conquer,” said Phillips Brooks, “but it must first embody itself in goodness.”[11] The Incarnation of our Lord is evidence of this and is a reminder to us that the Word must always “become flesh” if the Father’s glory is to be seen (John 1:14). A metaphor is a kind of “verbal incarnation” that enables us to make concrete in the minds of our listeners that which would otherwise be abstract and unreal.
The expositor doesn’t have to manufacture these pictures because they’re usually right there in the passage, sometimes hidden in the original text.[12] Since the Holy Spirit put these images into the Scriptures, we can assume that He wants us to use them as we preach the Word.
As I have already stated, biblical preaching is more than simply preaching the truth of the Bible or explaining and applying the Bible in an organized way. Biblical preaching means proclaiming the truth of the Bible the way the Bible presents it. The Spirit wants to use us to help our listeners translate paper and ink into the living truth of God, and then transfer that truth, in concept and image, to the heart and mind of the listener. If we approach the Bible only as a text to be analyzed, we may completely miss both its message and the most effective way to present that message.
Keeping Image and Concept in Perspective
Before we leave this topic, I want to issue a caveat that the biblical preacher must heed: the metaphor is not the subject of the sermon. If handled properly, the metaphor expands the subject, illumines it and helps to make it vivid and personal to our listeners; but the metaphor is not the message. To turn a metaphor into an allegory is a dangerous step for the biblical preacher to take.
For example, most commentators would apply the title “the sun of righteousness” to our Lord Jesus Christ (Mal. 4:2), and would contrast the healing rays of the sun with the consuming flames of the furnace (Mal. 4:1), which seems to be the emphasis in the text. In his book Tropologia: A Key to Open Scripture Metaphors, Benjamin Keach gives thirty-four parallels between Jesus Christ and the sun, most of which have no relationship to the passage in which the metaphor is found.[13] It is this approach to metaphor that must be avoided.
Metaphor must never replace precise definition of doctrine. I realize that all definitions have their weaknesses and none of them is perfect; but there is a “faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (Jude 3), and our pictures must not be substituted for theological precepts. In American church history, it was Horace Bushnell who wanted to replace “dogmatism” with “imaginative insight.” He wrote:
The Gospel is no dogma . . . the gospel is a revelation made up of fact and form and figure, and offered as a presentation to faith. . . . What is given to faith is put forth in some fact-form or symbol to be interpreted by imaginative insight, or the discerning power of faith.[14]
The crucial question, of course, is, “Whose ‘imaginative insight’ do we follow as we interpret these ‘faith symbols’ in the Bible?” It appears that Bushnell is encouraging us to abandon a biblical hermeneutic that keeps “images” and “concepts” in their proper place. The result is a very subjective approach to Scripture that leads ultimately to a dilution and then a desertion of the faith. “He who has imagination but no knowledge has wings but no feet,” wrote the French essayist Joseph Joubert, a warning that Bushnell didn’t heed.
The American naturalist John Burroughs said a very wise thing when he wrote in his journal on October 24, 1907, “To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is quite another.”