And yet, and yet…

One of my favorite bands is an Austin-based group called Explosions in the Sky. I first saw them at Austin City Limits back in 2006, and their music has been a part of my study playlists ever since.

Explosions in the Sky has a song called “Six Days on the Bottom of the Ocean.” It is a haunting and dreamy melody. The other day upon listening to it, I wondered what the song was based upon. There had to be a real story behind it.

It’s a grim one.

In 2000, a Russian submarine (the Kursk) sunk in the Barents’ Sea, trapping 118 sailors. When the rescue teams made it down to the sub, they found that all of the sailors had passed. It’s a really sad story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster.

As I was listening to the song and thinking about the story of the Kursk, I began to think through the vision of the disaster. It is a bleak picture of failed pride and hopelessness.

It made me think about Jonah.

The story of Jonah is pretty familiar to most who have grown up in church. Running away from the calling of God, Jonah is cast into the sea in a storm and descends down into the deeps. God sends a fish that swallows him, and Jonah remains there for three days and three nights. Unimaginable.

And yet, in Jonah 2 we see the prayer of this man who fled from the call of God. This prophet began to express hope from the bottom of the sea. One thing that I didn’t really consider until I was an adult is that Jonah’s experience being thrown into the sea wasn’t like being tossed out of the boat and then landing like a basketball in the mouth of the whale. No, when Jonah hit the water he sank down to the bottom, finding himself entwined in seaweed and drowning. The fish’s appearance was no quick thing; Jonah knew he had been rescued from the grip of death itself.

So often when we face the terrifying realities of life, our “bottom of the sea,” we become deeply discouraged. Our hope is to be immediately delivered from the suffering, but we experience the very real threat of drowning.

And getting beyond just the believer’s perspective of the “bottom of the sea,” I cannot imagine the depth of fear and hopelessness that is felt by those without Christ.

Then strangely, we see Jesus say in Matthew 12:39-40, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in teh belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”

How strange! Jesus points to the example of Jonah to give visibility to what he would do. Jesus took the example of mankind at his most hopeless. Jonah’s hope illuminates the hope of mankind.

It is striking to know what we were saved from. Salvation in Jesus is not a mild realignment or a slight adjustment from being a bad person to being a good person. We are not sick people infused with the medicine of grace. Those who believe upon Jesus Christ recognize that we were dead in our sins, and that Jesus’s resurrection and salvation make us alive! All of us, all of humanity, have sunken in our sin to the “bottom of the sea,” to the place of certain death and no return. A place where even light won’t venture.

And Jesus reached down and bears us up.

In order for us to really express the joy of our salvation, we must remember the bottom of the sea. We must know the dark and cold and hopeless places of light to cherish the warmth of the light that Christ offers. Jesus loved us so much that he went to the darkest place for you and for me.

So when I listen to “Six Days at the Bottom of the Sea,” I don’t feel hopelessness. I don’t feel darkness or cold. I feel the thrill of that light which pierces the darkness, that rescuing hand reaching down to bear me home. And while Jonah’s salvation eventually vomited him up on the beach (bleh, that’s a different level of gross…digestive juices, sand, and fish guts…), our salvation opens the gates of heaven with his nail-scarred hands saying, “Welcome home.”

Because maybe even in the disasters of this life there is hope.

Signs and wonders y’all.

“I called out to the Lord, out of my distress,
    and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
    and you heard my voice.
³ For you cast me into the deep,
    into the heart of the seas,
    and the flood surrounded me;
all your breakers and your waves
    passed over me.
⁴ Then I said, ‘I am driven away
    from your sight;
yet I shall again look
    upon your holy temple.’
⁵ The waters closed in over me to take my life;
    the deep surrounded me;
weeds were wrapped about my head.
⁶ To the roots of the mountains I went down,
    to the land whose bars closed upon me forever.
Yet you brought up my life from the pit,
    O Lord my God.
⁷ When my life was fainting away,
    I remembered the Lord,
and my prayer came to you,
    into your holy temple.
⁸ Those who pay regard to vain idols
    forsake their hope of steadfast love.
⁹ But I with the voice of thanksgiving
    will sacrifice to you;
what I have vowed I will pay.
    Salvation belongs to the Lord!” Jonah 2:2-9