Jonah, a Whale of a Story

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                Before us is

Before us is the story of Jonah, a reluctant, unwilling, prophet of God.  He does not go out with the boldness of Peter, but is rather much more like Saul the persecutor of the early Christian community.  He does not pray to God for strength to carry out God’s mission, he does just the opposite and actually flees from God.  But God gets him to do God’s work anyway.  It is a story that many of us have heard from Sunday School or Vacation Bible School several times over.  “Jonah and the Whale” was what we were taught, but now it is “Jonah and the Big Fish.”  God wants to go one way and Jonah the other.  God finally wins out in the end with an ending that makes Jonah unhappy.  What can we learn from Jonah?

 “The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time.” We know what happened the first time. God said, “Get up and go to Ninevah … and Jonah got up and ran away towards Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.”

He doesn’t leave what he’s doing and immediately follow God’s call. He jumps on the first boat going in the opposite direction and hides in the hold of the ship, hoping that somehow God won’t take notice. If compared to Jesus’ core disciples, it’s as if they, upon encountering Jesus, jumped into their fishing boats and rowed like madmen for the opposite shore, as far away from this dangerous itinerant preacher as they could get.

Jonah did just that, trying to get as far away from the LORD, and the LORD’s bizarre instructions, as he could get. Go to Nineveh? The capital of the Assyrian Empire, that destroyer of Israel, that brutal occupying force. It was unthinkable.

After Jonah runs away, God sends a storm. The sailors of the boat are more pious than Jonah, but they eventually they reluctantly throw Jonah overboard. The sea calms down immediately, and Jonah is swallowed by a big fish.

Jonah, totally surrounded by sea water and fish blubber, pleads to God: “You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me.” The sea in the ancient Near East, of course, is the symbol of chaos, of danger, of wildness. But even in the heart of the seas, God hears Jonah’s prayer. God speaks to the great fish, and the fish spews him out onto dry land.

That’s where we enter the story. “The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, “Get up and go to Ninevah, that great city.” And, this time, still covered in sea water and fish regurgitation, Jonah obeys. He walks into the city, one day’s journey, and preaches the shortest sermon ever recorded:

It’s a sermon of just five words in Hebrew -- “Forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown!”

The response is electric. Immediately, the people of Nineveh believe God, and here’s where the humor of this story builds. The people declare a fast. The king, not to be outdone, orders human and animal alike to fast and put on sackcloth. Then all those sackcloth-covered cows and sheep and people bellow out their repentance to God, and God’s mind is changed about the punishment, and does not bring it about.

We would think Jonah would be ecstatic. After all, he’s the only really successful prophet in the whole Bible. He has brought about a mass conversion of which even Billy Graham would be jealous. Every inhabitant of the city, human and animal alike, has come forward for the altar call. Jonah should be ecstatic.

But Jonah is not ecstatic in any sense of the word. Jonah is madder than mad. “Ah, LORD, is this not what I said would happen when I was still in my own territory? That’s why I fled to Tarshish in the first place. Because I know that you are a God who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”

Jonah, of course, is quoting the LORD’s own self-description (from Exodus 34:6) a description taken up by prophets and psalmists throughout Israel’s history to remind God of God’s own nature. But in Jonah’s mouth, it is an accusation: You, God, are gracious and merciful. I KNEW this would happen! I declared your judgment on this sinful city, and you changed your mind!

Here’s the thing, you see, this is what all of us have found out about following the call of God in and through the waters: God is God and does not act as we think the Almighty should act. In good faith, we follow where we hear God’s call, we go to the city, or the suburb, or to small town and rural America, and we are prepared to bring God’s word to that place, and what we find is that God is already there before us. We find that no people, and no place, not even Nineveh, can properly be called God-forsaken.

Often, of course, that lesson is hard to learn. A story I read comes to mind.  “A friend of mine whose first call was in a small-town parish. The council president in that parish was a very, very difficult woman who tried to sabotage him at every turn. He tried, he really did. He prayed for her. He visited her and attempted to reconcile with her. He prayed and prayed, and finally one day he started singing (to the tune of “Bind Us Together, Lord”): “Bind her and gag her, Lord, bind her and gag her with cords that cannot be broken …” It is a prayer Jonah himself might have prayed. 

Think now, if you will, of a person that you find difficult to love. (Now, I am not talking about an abusive situation.) Think about someone that you find irritating or annoying, someone you find difficult to be around.  They may hold values that you don’t hold.  Or perhaps those conflicting values are the cause of disagreements.  We all have that one person who is a challenge to us, that one person who throws us off to where we don’t know how to respond. But how do we treat someone like this with dignity and respect? There are no easy answers.  Sometimes it involves the slow process of getting to know that person and that person’s understanding of the world.  Certainly, praying about it and consulting others would also be of help.  Lastly, it facilitates the process if we remember that we are no better or worse than the person with whom we have a conflict.  Apologizing and forgiveness may also be in order to smooth out a relationship.

God indeed loves us.  That is also a message that we have been given several times.  However, we still have that tendency to draw some kind of line between us and them.  With God, there are no sides.  The same God who gave Jonah a second chance gives the people of Nineveh a second chance, and we can’t begrudge that kind of mercy. God gives all of us a second chance, a third chance, a fourth chance and ad infinitum. This God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, a God we know most fully in Jesus Christ. Jesus is our supreme model for our behavior towards others.

And that, my friends, is certainly a Gospel story worth preaching and teaching among all people everywhere.