A Homiletical Learning from An Inter-Textual Reading of the Book of Jonah

Abstract

The Korean church loves to read the Bible, Word of God, and its preacher is sincere to deliver messages daily and weekly on the Bible for the life of people. However, it is admitted to say that the church’s way of reading and understanding the Bible determines the church’s way of being in the world. Our loyalty to the Bible often makes us ignore a new challenging way of reading and takes us back to fundamental and Biblicist way of believing in God. Thus, we, preachers, are responsible to be a more faithful and biblical readers for the church, and reading the Bible as a literature helps preachers open wide their eyes to sense God and humanity from a new perspective. This study purposes to introduce an inter-textual reading of the Book of Jonah as one of case practices of literary reading of the Bible for preaching. Inter-textual reading of the Bible helps the church read the church’s book more biblically and faithfully because the inter-textuality informs its reader of the earlier texts which the writer used to create a new meaning. The Book of Jonah is one of exciting stories in the Bible to show us how one text is made up of other texts for creating a new meaning. For this study, I will first give an overview of what inter-textuality is and what the story of Jonah tells about. Then, it moves to some features of Jonah’s inter-textuality with two kinds of literatures: one from the Hebrew scripture - Noah’s flood in Genesis and the Book of Ruth; the other from outside of the biblical literature, an ancient Egyptian tale, The Shipwrecked Sailor. After overviewing the inter-textuality of Jonah, this study concludes with presenting three homiletical learnings from inter-textual reading of the Bible.