The painting above is ”La Guernica,” one of Picasso’s most famous paintings. The real one is more than 11 feet tall and 25 feet wide. At first glance you may ask, “What is going on here? How can we possibly make sense of this? What if, Picasso himself explained La Guernica? He is dead so that’s not possible. However, let’s see if your perspective of this painting changes as I fill you in on some of the story behind the image.
In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, 28 Nazi planes bombed the Spanish town of La Guernica killing hundreds of people (at the request of Franco). In the same year the Spanish government had commissioned Picasso to do a large mural for the World’s Fair in Paris, the two events where around 15 days of each other. Picasso began painting this mural. The choice to paint in black and white conveys the feel of a newspaper photograph and the chaos and intensity of suffering and lifelessness of the war affords. Picasso was very pessimistic.
Did that help make sense of this image? Sometimes reading the bible can be confusing like the painting. There are a statements, actions, visions, and people that we have to arrange and put into order so that we understand how they all fit together. Thankfully, Scripture also includes comments by the authors that help explain these things. These comments can aid in understanding the bible and guide our study of it. This is particularly helpful in Narratives. So today, we are going to work through some examples of Narrator comments to see how they help and how we can leverage this tool to gain insight into God’s word.
The best way to get at understanding Narrator comments is by seeing them. Again, we begin to see them by reading and rereading the text.
Example One: Matthew 2.13-15
13When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. "Get up," he said, "take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him." 14So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: "Out of Egypt I called my son."
Two questions to guide you. (1) Where is the narrator’s comment in these verses?
(2) How can the narrator’s comment in this verse influence our study of this passage?
Where is the narrator’s comment in these verses?
Give up? It is in the last sentence. “This last sentence doesn’t tell us anything new about the events themselves. Rather, it gives us Matthew’s explanation of the events. Matthew tells us that Jesus’ being taken to Egypt is more than a matter of saving him from Herod’s sword; it also fulfills the promise in the Old Testament (Hosea 11.1) that Jesus would come ‘out of Egypt,’ just as Israel had done during the Exodus.” [1]
How can the narrator’s comment in this verse influence our study of this passage?
By pointing us to Messianic prophecies and leading us to Hosea and other related studies. How would you go about identifying and finding the quote given by the narrator?
Example Two: Genesis 25.29-34
29 Once when Jacob was cooking some stew, Esau came in from the open country, famished. 30 He said to Jacob, "Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I'm famished!" (That is why he was also called Edom.)
31 Jacob replied, "First sell me your birthright."
32 "Look, I am about to die," Esau said. "What good is the birthright to me?"
33 But Jacob said, "Swear to me first." So he swore an oath to him, selling his birthright to Jacob.
34 Then Jacob gave Esau some bread and some lentil stew. He ate and drank, and then got up and left. So Esau despised his birthright.
Two questions to guide you. (1) Where is the narrator’s comment in these verses?
(2) Is there another narrator comment?
(1) Where is the narrator’s comment in these verses?
“‘So Esau despised his birthright,’ That casts Esau in a rather different light, doesn’t it? All that talk of being ‘about to die’ was pure exaggeration -- he was just hungry, that’s all. And his birthright meant so little to him that he was prepared to swap it for a bowl of lentils. When, a couple of chapters later, we find Esau bawling because he’s been cut out of his father’s will, we aren’t quite as sympathetic as we might have been.” [2]
(2) Is there another narrator comment? “Edom” means Red ... How can you find that out?
Example Three: John 2
Two questions to guide you. (1) What narrator comment is present in the passage? (2) Do you see here how Jesus is doing Biblical Theology?
(1) What narrator comment is present in the passage?
vss. 21: “But the temple he had spoken of was his body.”
(2) Do you see here how Jesus is doing Biblical Theology?
“Given all this, Jesus’ words seem like nonsense to the people listening to him. How can he destroy the temple and raise it in three days? Indeed, we might have been at a loss to understand it ourselves, were it not for the narrator’s comment. When Jesus refers to the ‘temple’ here, he isn’t talking about the physical building they are standing in. He is talking about his own body.
The narrator’s comment highlights a huge claim that Jesus is making. From now on, he is God’s temple. He is God’s presence on earth, God dwelling with his people. And consequently he is the place, or rather the person, to whom you must go if you want to meet God.” [3]
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