5 secret words

A man with a big gray beard and the square-shouldered posture of a soldier was ringing a brass bell he held in his hand as he walked up the street from The Ellipse to the White House. Dressed plainly and striding slowly and deliberately in time with the clanging of his bell, he gave the impression of being on a serious mission. He told me his name was Michael, but afterwards it occurred to me that the name might well be one he’d adopted, part of his mission statement, since the Hebrew original of the name was Micha-El, meaning gift from god.

The bell was for waking people out of their spiritual torpor, the first step in saving souls. No, he wasn’t an evangelical, he considered that a misleading label, since if you weren’t evangelizing then you weren’t a Christian at all. True he’d been part of a church in the past but he’d had a revelation: the lord had told him that all he was doing was hiding inside the church and that instead he had to take on the work of salvation personally. He’d been stuck in a dark place but now he’d come out into the light.

I don’t hold it against anyone for trying to save the world, and since he was eager to talk, even (especially?) to an atheist, I was willing to listen. His story was about his relationship to god and it divided simply into his ask of god and god’s ask of him. After twenty years in the military, he’d had a bad tear in the rotator cuff of his shoulder and was awaiting surgery. This was after he’d had his revelation, he was getting ready to leave the service to take up his religious vocation, but this injury was messing up his plans. So, he had a serious talk with the lord: if you can heal me, then I can bear witness to your miraculous powers and that would be a great help to me in my mission. Soon the prayer was answered. When the doctors did their tests, they couldn’t believe it: the tear was completely healed. As miracles go this seemed rather underwhelming, but possibly to make up for that he delivered his account with a fierce look in his eyes, as if to say: this was his truth, and that’s what mattered.

A miracle story by itself isn’t enough for the work of salvation: it might get you in the door of someone’s soul but it can’t close the sale. For that you need a theology, or at least its rudiments; otherwise miracles could be mistaken for magic. Which brings me to the ask that god made of Michael. Had I heard the story of Jonah and the whale? Of course. Ah, said Michael, but did you know that there were 5 secret words that god imparted to Jonah? This was indeed news to me and so I asked him what those words were. He wouldn’t say, and for good reason. He’d gotten this knowledge directly from on high, and it could only be revealed in a proper time and place; otherwise the power of these words was such that they could set off a global catastrophe.

5 secret words. Later I read up on Jonah. He is one of the weirder characters in the bible. For starters, he’s the only prophet who tries to run away after god gives him a mission. It’s nuts: he’s supposed to go to the city of Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire, to deliver god’s message and instead he takes off in the opposite direction, hops a ship and promptly falls asleep down in the hull. Of course god knows where he is, and of course Jonah knows that god knows, so this is all a pointless performance. God whips up a monster storm to wake up his oddball prophet, the sailors are terrified, Jonah says for them not to worry, all they need to do is throw him overboard and the storm will die down. Is this guy suicidal? Or is he so dead-set against listening to god that you have to wonder why god chose him as a prophet in the first place? Anyway the sailors are desperate and eventually they do as asked but of course Jonah doesn’t drown; instead he spends 3 days in the belly of a big fish praying to god, only to be puked up onto land after that. Presumably chastened by the experience, Jonah finally hauls himself off to Nineveh where he delivers god’s message.

Which brings us to the 5 secret words, except that they aren’t secret. Jonah proceeds to deliver the shortest sermon in the bible (and maybe in history): Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown. That’s it – everything that god told him to say. And while in English it’s 8 words, in Hebrew it’s 5.

(Think of that: this is a message that couldn’t be more ominous, god is threatening to destroy a city which we are told has over a hundred thousand people living in it, and all Jonah can work himself up to say is 5 words! Did he yell them out? Did he walk around the city and repeat them? For all we know, he just mumbled them once at the main city gate and called it quits. And what a sight he must have been, recently plastered with whale puke; if he were alive today he’d probably be on antipsychotic drugs. But maybe that was part of god’s plan – to make use of this total misfit. Let’s say he did just mumble those 5 words once: what I imagine happening is that someone hears him and then passes it on to someone else and soon there’s a bunch of people who are upset and are fanning out across the city including to the king’s palace: Forty days, we only have forty days! The message got through precisely because this weird guy wasn’t yelling and so couldn’t be dismissed as a lunatic. A bit of divine genius in that.)

But there is a little gap of ambiguity in the story. It happens at the beginning, when god first instructs Jonah on his mission. According to scholarly commentary: “Neither what Jonah was commanded to say nor the reason for his flight is given.” This I don’t find convincing: it seems obvious that what Jonah was commanded to say is the 5 words he finally ends up saying. (As to the reason for his flight, Jonah explains that at the end of the book: he hated Nineveh and thought that god was too much of a softie to go through with destroying the city. So, by running away Jonah was hoping to force god to get tough, in other words to commit mass murder. Which makes him not only a screwed-up prophet but also a misanthropic creep.)

I realize it’s silly to take this story literally, it’s all myth and metaphor, but then again literalism is exactly how a person like Michael understands the bible. For him the logical reasoning I’m using doesn’t cut it. What I see as sloppy storytelling by the original writer, Michael sees as the mysterious ways of the lord. And in that mystery he finds inspiration for his mission of salvation. Indeed he finds what most of us spend forever searching for: the meaning of life – in 5 secret words.

Even though he wouldn’t/couldn’t disclose those words, he wanted me to know that he knew stuff no one else knew, and so I could have faith in him because he had a direct line to god. Maybe, just maybe, this would have been good enough a long time ago in some dusty town in Palestine, but in the here and now, a stone’s throw from the White House, the only impressive thing that Michael had going for him, to my mind at any rate, was his bell. Which made him a tiny bit like his hero Jonah: blessed with derangement.

But Michael’s mission to me wasn’t a total failure. It may not have brought about a religious conversion, but he and his bell, and Jonah and his whale, did remind me of a hauntingly beautiful line by the poet Yeats: That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea. The poem is called Byzantium, another ancient capital like Nineveh. Maybe there’s some relevance in that to modern-day DC, indeed eerily so given the election that’s about to happen: Forty days more, and Washington shall be overthrown.