Speaking Metaphorically

Reflections on the Lectionary for August 17th

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When we want to share an idea or an experience with other people, we describe it. The air was cold, we might say, or the air was frigid, using adjectives to describe the way the air felt. Or we could use verbs: the air made me shiver, or the air froze my breath as it left my mouth. Adjectives and verbs are reliable ways to describe something, and they help us communicate and share with each other. But when we want to make an idea or experience really vivid—when we want to add texture and depth to the thing we are trying to communicate—we often turn to metaphor. The air was a freezer frosted over at the corners, we might say, or the morning air felt like all the fire had gone out of the world. An adjective can tell us, but a metaphor can hold us.

Metaphors are the engines of meaning-making and description, and they help us make our own interior experiences and thoughts available to other people. Part of the brilliance of metaphors—part of the reason they work so well—is that often they describe a thing in terms of something it is not. Air is not a freezer after all, and the world is filled neither with fire nor with the absence of fire, but by referring to a freezer and to fire, we can begin to grasp something important about the thing we are trying to understand—we can begin to grasp something important about the air on a certain day. Metaphors are not, in fact, engines—but you understood the first clause of this paragraph perfectly well, because while you know that metaphors are not literally engines, you know that by comparing metaphors to engines I am hoping that you’ll imagine a driving force, a sustaining kind of momentum, something that offers propulsion to something else.

Reading the two prophetic texts that are part of the lectionary for August 17^th—reading Isaiah 5:1-7 and Jeremiah 23:23-29—I find myself thinking about the function of metaphor. Both passages make use of metaphor to talk about the nature and role of God, though each passage uses metaphor in different ways and with different kinds of forthrightness. Metaphor is an important part of any writer’s toolbox (there’s another metaphor), but I think metaphor is especially valuable when you’re writing about God. Since our knowledge of God is by definition limited—since most of us have not come face to face with God and we are unable to describe God using straightforward adjectives and verbs based on our own close observations—we often turn to metaphor. The Bible offers a truly dizzying array of metaphors for God, but never a description. We are never told that God is, say, five-foot-seven, or lanky, or purple. But we are told that God is a warrior, a father, a rock, a fortress, a king, a mother, a wind, a potter, a shepherd, a shield, and a stronghold, among many other metaphors. Our language for God is always metaphorical, as theologians like Sallie McFague have pointed out, because we don’t have access to the thing itself—we don’t have the kind of direct sensory experience of God that would let us use more direct language. And, somewhat ironically, the indirectness of metaphor sometimes allows more space for imagination than a more straightforward description might provide.

In Isaiah 5:1-7, the metaphor describes not God, exactly, but rather God’s people and God’s relationship to those people. The perspective in this passage is jumpy and a bit unstable, like the author couldn’t quite decide whose voice to privilege. The passage begins in the voice of a woman whose beloved planted a vineyard, but then in 5:3 it seems to jump to the voice of the beloved himself, the vineyard-planter, who asks the reader to act as judge over what unfolds next. And the whole thing is mediated through the voice of the prophet, Isaiah, who is sort of passing these words along on behalf of the other speakers. But through all those shifts in perspective, the metaphor stands out. The first couple of verses tell us all about a vineyard and the way it was created and planted with care. Someone located this vineyard on a hill, and cleared the ground, and planted it with grapevines. He put a watchtower in the middle so he could watch over the vineyard and protect it, and he made a place in the vineyard to process the grapes into wine. So far this is a very positive picture of viniculture, and as a reader I’m picturing an almost idyllic scene of grapevines growing green on a hillside in the shadow of a stone tower.

But the metaphor takes a turn in the latter clause of verse 2: he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded rotten grapes. And because of that bad harvest, the vineyard-planter narrates the vineyard’s destruction in verses 5 and 6: I will remove its hedge, he says, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be tramped down. I will make it a wasteland, he writes, it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. The vineyard that had been so lovingly planted and tended and appointed only a couple of verses ago is broken down and exposed to the world in a fury, forsaken in anger and left to be overrun by destructive forces.

At the heart of this transformation from loving care to destruction, hidden from those of us reading in English, are two instances of wordplay—two puns, almost—that help make meaning from the passage. In verse 7, the English reads he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness but heard a cry! In Hebrew, the words being translated justice and bloodshed sound very similar to each other; they are mishpat and mispach. And likewise the words for righteousness (tsedeqah) and cry (tse’aqah) are similar. By pairing these homophones, Isaiah is calling our attention back to the tension inherent in the metaphor itself. The rich description of a peaceful and productive vineyard is undermined by its harvest of rotten grapes, in the same way that the promises of justice and righteousness are undermined by bloodshed and cries of pain and anguish.

All of this should signal to us that when we read the prophets, we are reading some fairly sophisticated literature. Any student of creative writing (and I am one!) will tell you that it’s harder than it looks to deploy a metaphor. Metaphors run the risk of being distracting to the reader, or sprawling beyond the meanings the writer intends. They can sometimes point in the wrong direction, when part of the metaphor works and the other part doesn’t. And the kind of wordplay that we see in Isaiah 5:7, the kind that gathers together similar-sounding words so that the reader is tricked into making meaning out of their similarities and imagining new images is difficult to pull off. I did it twice in that last sentence, and chances are that you either found it intrusive and awkward, or you didn’t notice it at all.

If we turn our attention to Jeremiah 23:23-29, the other prophetic text in the lectionary for Sunday, we see metaphor working in different ways. Where Isaiah was very forthright in his use of the vineyard metaphor and he was very transparently inviting readers to notice the way the metaphor worked, Jeremiah is a lot more subtle—at least for most of the passage. At the end, in verse 29, Jeremiah does unfurl some very forthright metaphors. Is not my word like fire, asks God through the prophet, and like a hammer that breaks a rock in pieces? But for most of the passage, the metaphors are far further under the surface.

The whole passage relies on a kind of metaphor—at least I think we can think of it as a metaphor—about prophecy itself. In verse 25, God says I have heard what the prophets have said who prophesy lies in my name, saying “I have dreamed! I have dreamed!” Here Jeremiah refers to a kind of prophecy that is understood—wrongly, he thinks—as a kind of unexpected revelation, a vision that comes to someone in a dream. But later on, in verse 28, God says let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let the one who has my word speak my word faithfully. And then he adds, what has straw in common with wheat?

Interestingly, the unexpected answer to that rhetorical question is that straw has a lot in common with wheat, but not enough to make them interchangeable. Straw and wheat might look pretty similar from a distance, to the untrained eye. They look alike standing in a field, and even once they’re cut but not yet processed they might take on similar forms. The difference between straw and wheat comes in their purpose and usefulness. Straw might be useful and it might have a purpose, but it’s not the same use and purpose that wheat has. Even if both might be valuable in their own way, you wouldn’t want to mistake straw and wheat for each other.

Part of what’s at work in this passage from Jeremiah is the limits of dreams as a metaphor for prophecy. In the same way that straw is a poor substitute for wheat, having dreams is a poor substitute for letting the one who has my word speak my word faithfully, as Jeremiah says. Jeremiah—God—wants to distinguish between prophecy and metaphors for prophecy. God wants to emphasize the difference between seeing things in your sleep and speaking God’s word to the people. There might be a lot of usefulness in dreams—some good insights and haunting images have come to me that way!—but dreams are an altogether different thing, Jeremiah wants us to remember, from the discipline of speaking prophetically. This distinction is still relevant today, I think, when many people who purport to speak for God are simply spouting off whatever pops into their minds—what Jeremiah calls the deceit of their own heart—without stopping to ask whether they might be spreading nothing but their own prejudice and ignorance. But I digress.

Reading these two prophetic passages, I’m left with an appreciation for the sophistication with which these authors did their work. Both Isaiah and Jeremiah—and many of the other books of the prophets too—are rich with metaphor and vivid imagery. Their sentences are filled with wordplay and subtle nuance and layers of meaning. Although they were written thousands of years ago in a different language, they are still sophisticated writing today.

Both Isaiah and Jeremiah wanted to convey something of God’s dissatisfaction with the world. Isaiah railed against the rotten grapes of a vineyard that had been lovingly planted and tended, and Jeremiah had nothing good to say about prophets who purported to speak for God but really spoke only for their own prejudices and untruth. Isaiah wrote about vineyards and Jeremiah wrote about dreams, and both of them wrote about something ineffable—the nature of God—using the only language they thought could be adequate, the language of metaphor. Instead of saying God is angry, Isaiah told the story of a disappointed and wrathful vineyard-planter, and instead of saying that some prophets do not speak for God, Jeremiah says that the word of God—the real word of God—is like fire, like a hammer, and not at all like a dream.

One final observation: I think it’s a gift that so much of the Bible is written this way. It would have been easier, in some ways, for the Bible to have been written in straightforward language, with simple adjectives and verbs and forthright statements about God. The Bible could have been a list, really, if you think about it. The whole thing could have simply been a list of attributes of God and things we should and should not do, and the Bible probably could have been twenty pages long and far less convoluted. That’s the Bible we could have had, but that’s not the Bible we got. We have this text that is full of allusion and suggestion, that’s packed with allegory and insinuation, metaphors and parables and sagas and riddles. The Bible is packed with morally ambiguous characters who make both good and bad choices, and I would argue that that extends all the way to God, who can be seen in the Bible saying and doing some questionable things along the way. It’s more complicated than a list, to write the Bible that way, and it leaves a lot more room for interpretation. But perhaps that’s part of the appeal. If we had a twenty-page list of divine rules and characteristics, there would be nothing to fall in love with, nothing to be angry with, nothing to wrestle with and be wounded and blessed by. It’s hard to be held in thrall by an adjective.

But a metaphor—a metaphor can hold us.