It’s surprising what details people remember from their Sunday-school days about Old Testament stories. I was preaching (twice) last Sunday, and the lectionary had pointed me to Noah who appears in Genesis but is also commented on by the writer to the Hebrews, the apostle Peter, and by Jesus himself. Naturally, my sermon talked of judgment, myth, apocalypse, temperance, Noah in the New Testament, and the righteous remnant.
But in conversation afterwards, members of both congregations remarked not on the theological significance of the story but on modern versions of the ark: the supposed finding (again) of the wreck on Mount Ararat, the precise dimensions of the ark (300 x 50 x 30 cubits) being reproduced in the building of the Jardine Mill in Draycott (left, 5 miles west of here), and the plan to bring a replica ark to London docks for the Olympics next year (below).
It’s all too easy to latch on to apparently precise data like names, measurements and dates, dramatic stories, and miraculous outcomes in Old Testament tales. It’s not so easy to see stories like these not as history but as ancient myths providing rather more important understandings about God and man, judgment and deliverance, faith and hope.
