I have recommended the book “How To Stay Married” (by Harrison Scott Key) to lots of people. Approximately half(ish) of these people say, “I don’t like it!”

My theory about why some people don’t like it, is because it makes us feel the way we’re supposed to feel with we read Scripture …uncomfortable and unsettled.

The content feels irreverent. Perhaps it feels crass and crude; like maybe such gut-wrenching satire is incompatible with God’s holy plans and purposes of redemption?

Here’s an excerpt from the book that I find helpful…

The thing about Jesus is… in addition to being tender, He’s also undeniably abrasive. In Mark 11 He instructs His disciples to go steal a baby donkey in another town, and right after that He kills a tree that didn’t do a thing to Him. In Matthew 8 He ruins a perfectly good herd of pigs by filling them with demons and sending them plummeting over a cliff. In Matthew 25 He at first ignores a woman whose daughter is vexed by the devil because she’s carrying the wrong passport. He tells confusing stories, He causes legitimately awkward moments. His only weapons being the ability to perform mostly food-based miracles and to tell a great story in such a way to amaze His hearers while also insulting them. He’s slippery. He says, “Love your neighbor,” and then He’s all, “You may have to slay your neighbor (?).” When it’s time to get angry, Jesus gets angry. When it’s time to weep, He weeps. He’s fully human, and extraordinarily weird; the baby, the boy, the man, the God who refuses to be what you want Him to be, and instead is – and remains – the most cryptic and magnetic and heroic figure of world literature; unjustly executed by the state, slaughtered by His community, abandoned by those who claimed to love Him. You can understand the anger.

I had begun to feel some anger in me too, and very little happiness. The Bible seems to think the happiness question is moot. Saying you deserve happiness is like saying you deserve fresh minty breath …nice to have, enjoy in while it lasts. There are more things in heaven and earth to want than happiness. Purpose, community, duty, joy, goodness. I finally understood the point of the Bible. This book of operating instructions crowd-sourced over thousands of years, a sort of vast cosmic Wikipedia of wisdom about the human comedy. Each story a case study in the long war between darkness and light, proud and meek; present urges and passions can drag you and your loved ones to hell. Think of the future. Think not just a year or five into the future, cast your vision a generation ahead, twenty generations even; what you do now echoes across future history.

The Good News of the Old Testament – as far as I could tell – was in the frailty of its heroes. You’ve got to appreciate a world religion that does not attempt to make the good guys look too good. Name some grotesque character trait of Barak Obama or Dolly Parton. You can’t. You know they are probably jackasses in specific ways – we all are – but the official narrative won’t allow for it. Too much is at stake. Maybe Eleanor Roosevelt was secretly cruel to family pets. Albert Einstein probably had some weird mustard fetish. Tell me, where do we openly declare that even the greatest among us are flawed and broken, other than on the stages of comedy clubs and in the holy Bible, with its gallery of liars and rogues stripped of everything, at which point they throw themselves across the altar of their defeat and find, in their weakness, grace! There’s Jacob, as phony and desperate as George Costanza. There’s Solomon, the sex addict who awakens to the vacuity of his own desire. There’s David, an adulterer and murderer, who is also somehow “a man after God’s own heart.” David’s story of adultery (for those who don’t know) shocks with its audacity! Go read 2 Samuel 11, it’s all there! David, the “man after God’s own heart” we’re told, was also a creep! …He fetches this hot naked woman to his bed chamber (as kings do), and she goes (because he’s a king); and he lord’s his power over her so many times – she gets pregnant. He then conspires to murder her husband (Uriah), one of David’s top soldiers, via a Game of Thrones worthy stratagem. And when the wife of Uriah heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for her husband, and when the mourning was past David sent and fetched her to his house and she became his wife and bore him a son. What do we make of this NONSENSE! Nevermind we’re told that “the thing that David had done displeased the LORD.” Of course it had! But to what to make of how – in a very real way – the adulterers lived happily ever after!? Giving birth to a son who would go on to write the self-same Song of Solomon that drove me mad with lust as a boy? Solomon’s gift for lust suddenly makes all kinds of sense …he came by it honest. And it would be through his blood line that the very Savior of the humankind came into the world. The Bible gives no easy answers about adultery. It’s wrong, sure, but those who committed it could still be loved, and the fruit of their crimes could create much goodness in the world. How stunning that David, the hero of the Old Testament if ever there was one, was also one of its most cunning villains. David, Solomon, Jacob, Noah – these men were no better than Oedipus, and actually they were far worse! They failed and caused the failing in total consciousness of the failure.   

Harrison Scott Key