Every once in a while I read a book that blows (pun intended) me out of the water.  This was definitely one of those books.  You know that game-type question, “If you could have dinner with anyone alive who would it be?”  My answer is now David Benjamin Blower.  He has moved to the top of my bucket list in terms of who I want to meet in my lifetime.  Google says he is a musical artist which is true, he wrote (surprise, surprise) a musical based on the Book of Jonah, which is fascinating and really great but I believe that he is a theologian of the highest insight.  By the way, N. T. Wright narrates the musical “The Book of Jonah”.  

Blower writes that Jonah is the most politically and religiously radical book in the Bible and that the story of Jonah is a story for our times and a guiding light on how to live right now.  The book Sympathy for Jonah is short, half of it is footnotes (very well researched and documented) which is fitting given the original story is less than what a high school teacher would call 4 pages.  Out of that four pages, Blower is able to present all the major tenets of Christianity from an Old Testament book about a minor Prophet.  

If you want to be challenged about what it means to be a Christian, if you want to understand how radical Jesus really was, if you want to understand why Jesus told the people that the only sign they were going to get was the sign of Jonah, then read this book.  The book will blow you away (pun intended).