Myth and Truth

     The word myth is often used as a synonym for something false.  Sometimes it is used as the opposite of truth.  I’ve seen articles that claim to reveal the “myths” that surround one thing or another and to then tell the truth.  That is both irritating to me and also confusing.  I have always thought of myth as a way of telling truth.  Certainly the Greek myths did that and the bible is full of mythological statements that are not intended to be taken literally.

One of the great difficulties of religion is the tendency to read the myths literally and to expect them to be true in the detail that they offer.  I think of the early stories in Genesis about the creation, how Adam and Eve dwelled in the Garden of Eden, disobeyed God by eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and were then banned from the Garden.  We are led to believe that we are all stained by the “original” sin of that first couple.  There is a truth to that, of course that the mythological story relates well.  The difficulty comes when people take that story so very seriously that they insist on placing it in a particular time and space.  Archbishop Usher, the seventeenth century scholar wrote that the earth was created in the year 4006 BC, using the scriptural details of the story of the Garden of Eden.   That belief persists to this day in the denial of scientific findings that put the creation of the earth millions of years ago and the insistence that teaching the Darwinian concepts of evolution ought to be stricken from the curricula of our schools.  This is beyond ignorance and it endangers human intellectual understanding in the worst way.  That there is even controversy over this is beyond my understanding.

Jesus constantly taught in parables.  Are we to argue that there was an actual Prodigal Son and an actual Good Samaritan, or are these simply excellent illustrations of the points that he was trying to make about how we all live and are related to each other and our God?   In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells the story of the small mustard seed that grows to be the largest of shrubs:

                                       With what can we compare the kingdom 
of God, or what parable will we use for it?
It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown 
upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds
                                   on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and
 becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts 
forth large branches, so that the birds of the air 
can make nests in its shade.
                                                                                      --Mark 4: 30-32

That makes the Kingdom of Heaven wonderfully clear as a very small thing that grows in the world to be the largest of things that can enable and help from within everything that there is on this earth.  We don’t need to know “which” mustard seed or mustard shrub Jesus was talking about, the illustration stands by itself.  That might seem to be obvious, but it is far from obvious to those who want to make everything in the bible literal.

As a preacher, I love illustrations.  Hardly a sermon goes by that I don’t fill it with stories that demonstrate the points that I am trying to make.  I don’t expect people to take all of those stories absolutely literally.  They are there to illustrate the points that I am trying to make.  That’s all.  To give the stories the additional burden of being literally true in every point is to endow them with too much and to not allow them to be what they are, simply illustrations that reach back to the point that I am trying to make.  That is what mythology is trying to do.  To let the myths stand for a central truth that helps us all to get the point that God is trying to make.  The fall of human kind, the “original” sin, is certainly obvious for all of us to see if we just look around.  Isn’t the knowledge of good and evil central to our problems with each other?  That is the point of the tale of Adam and Eve.  It ought not bear the burden of all of creation also.