A heartfelt conclusion
At issue is whether Matthew’s comparison drawn between Jonah and the Son
of Man is a basically incoherent statement requiring extraordinary
deference and excuse, or a straightforward, sensible remark however
culturally distant it may be from modern readers. I argue for the
latter.
Matthew’s reference to “three days and three nights in the heart of the
earth” as an ordeal for the Son of Man is therefore not a stressed
synecdoche, nor a cryptic chronology, nor a mismatched metaphor. It is a
summation of events involving Jesus in Jerusalem from Thursday evening
to Sunday morning. Although draped in biblical prose it recalls a
historical memory about the suffering of Jesus. As Jonah spent three
days and three nights of suffering inside the great fish, so Jesus spent
a final three days and three nights of suffering in Jerusalem, that
place known in biblical and extrabiblical tradition as the “middle,”
“center,” “navel,” or “heart” of the earth.