Jonah 3:10-4:11
16 August 2009
“The Sign of Jonah”
For the rest of this month, I’ll be deviating from the Old Testament lectionary readings in order to do a brief series on three of the twelve so-called Minor Prophets. I’ll invite us to look at Jonah, Zephaniah, and Malachi, each of which has a very different message.
Today, it’s Jonah. Those who know nothing else about him remember that he’s the guy who got swallowed by a whale.
Of the few memories I have from my brief attendance at Sunday school when I was a kid, one is of the story of Jonah. Our teacher, a nice old lady named Mrs. Williams, was fond of using those figures that adhere to a felt backboard. Seeing the figures of the prophet and the whale floating on that two-dimensional sea of felt inspired all kinds of questions within me. How could Jonah possibly survive inside that creature? How could he breathe? Why didn’t the animal’s digestive juices go to work on him?
Of course, at that age, it would be quite a stretch to understand the story of Jonah as some kind of parable or expression of political satire. And it can be quite a stretch, at any age, to realize that a lot more is going on with Jonah than getting the world’s biggest whiff of whale breath!
Something I never learned in Sunday school was what an angry fellow Jonah is! That’s something to notice about him: the book bearing his name goes to great effort to point out what a grouchy guy he is. He gets mad twice in today’s relatively short reading. But I’ll say more about that later.
Look at how the story begins. Even though he isn’t specifically described as angry, his reaction to the Lord speaks volumes. When God appoints Jonah to go to Nineveh, a key city of the hated Assyrian Empire, and give them a message of repentance, he’s not exactly enthusiastic about the assignment. In fact, he flatly refuses, and pays the fare for a boat headed to Tarshish.
A word about Tarshish: no one really knows where it was or if such a place even existed. Theories include somewhere in Cyprus, at the far end of the Mediterranean in Spain, or even somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Many saw it as the most distant place imaginable, even to the point of being a far-away paradise, a kind of Shangri-La.
The point is: Jonah is pictured as running from the Lord, even to the ends of the earth. He’s doing his utmost to avoid going along with God’s plan; he even buys what surely would have been a very expensive ticket!
His plan is going fine until a storm blows in. The sailors look at each other and wonder whose god has been offended. Jonah is found out, and he asks to be thrown overboard. I wonder if this isn’t one more attempt at fleeing God. You’ve heard of suicide by police? Well, I wonder if he isn’t attempting suicide by sailors!
In any event, this is where the Lord sends the fish that turns Jonah into an unwilling hitchhiker. This is actually God’s grace in action. And after being upchucked onto the shore, the prophet again receives the message to go to Nineveh. Jonah must be thinking, “I’ve seen this movie before.” We’re back to the same three actors we had at the beginning: Jonah, the Lord, and “Nineveh, the great city.”[1]
I don’t suppose any of you have ever sensed that you were called to do something—something that you moved heaven and earth to avoid—and then after all that exertion, found it still waiting for you?
Well, Jonah finally goes to the city and proclaims, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (3:4). And guess what? The evil Ninevites—of whom the prophet Nahum said, “who has ever escaped your endless cruelty?” (3:19), yes, those Ninevites!—from the king, all the way down to the livestock, take heed his warning, and they repent. Yes, the king even orders the animals to wear sackcloth and turn from their wicked ways!
This is not what Jonah wanted. He was hoping they’d shake his hand, say “nice sermon,” and then go right back to the stuff that put them on God’s hit list in the first place! Unlike Abraham, who didn’t want Sodom to be destroyed, Jonah’s already got a spot in mind with a good view of the city. He’ll set up his lawn chair, kick back, and let’s let the fire fall, baby!
Of course, God has the best interests of the city in mind, and Nineveh is spared. This is where we’re treated to some of that anger I mentioned earlier. The book’s final chapter really shows us what a piece of work Jonah is. In verse 1, the Hebrew word for “displeased” appears twice, and the word for “angry” (hrj) literally means “burned up.”[2] Jonah is blazing with fury.
The dialogue between the Lord and Jonah in chapter 4 is the high point of the book. There’s a sense of balance in the chapter—the speeches of Jonah at the beginning and of the Lord at the end both contain 39 Hebrew words. Jonah’s two outbursts of rage are balanced by God’s repeated question: “What right do you have to be angry?” (vv. 4, 9). What’s your deal, son?
Can we appreciate the depth of Jonah’s anger? Does his rage make any sense to us? Can we understand why the prophet would be so upset at having to watch his God forego punishing the enemy of his people? And I do intend to stress that pronoun: “his God.”
Jonah, more or less, has the correct theology. As he says, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (v. 2). But do you have to be merciful to them? Somewhere in Jonah, there’s a disconnect between words and actions.
There’s a very loose consensus that the book of Jonah was written after the Jews returned from exile in Babylon, in either the 5th or 4th century B. C. The man Jonah, who counseled King Jeroboam II, lived about 300 years earlier. The idea is that the book was written as a kind of satire, a kind of political joke, intended to warn the Jews about being too inward-looking.
By this time, prophets have been saying that they are to be a light to the nations. The hatred that comes from nationalism and hyper-patriotism no longer has a place among the people of God. The awareness is beginning to dawn that they have a responsibility to all the world, including their enemies.
Poor Jonah is presented as the prophet who just doesn’t get it! He talks about God’s grace, but he refuses to let it change him. Even when grace swallows him up and spits him out, even when grace springs up to protect him from the burning hot sun, he still doesn’t get it.
What about us—do we get it? I started by suggesting how most people focus on the big fish. Well, what about it? It seems to me that whether or not we believe that Jonah literally slid down the gullet of a sea creature, we need to ask about its meaning. How does the fish function within the story? What is its purpose? What does it represent?
Jesus seems to have these concerns in mind in Matthew 12 when he speaks of the sign of Jonah. Jesus sees himself in Jonah’s three-day tour of the deep. The ancient Hebrews spoke of Leviathan, the great sea monster that dwells in the watery abyss. Jonah prays, “out of the belly of Sheol I cried” (2:2). Three days was often seen as the amount of time it took to reach the underworld. This is a picture of death. Jonah, figuratively, has gone from death to life. And just as Jonah emerges from the grave, so does Jesus.
The sign of Jonah has great meaning. According to Jesus, “something greater than Jonah is here” (Mt 12:41). There can be no greater sign, no greater miracle, than life from death.
Jacques Ellul, a key figure from the Reformed Church of France, once said that “the question put to each of us is much more serious than whether we think God has the power to do [the] miracle [of the fish]. It is whether we find in the Book of Jonah a word of God which concerns us.”[3] That’s why Jesus, when asked by some scribes and Pharisees for yet another sign, answers them the way he does. They need to quit playing games. They need to heed the call to repentance, as attested by a prophet who has passed from death to life.
Maybe it’s clear by now that Jonah is a bundle of contradictions. He senses his God-given duty, but he fights like the devil against it. He sets off on the longest journey he can, and finds himself back at square one. The thing that he believed would destroy him becomes the vehicle of his deliverance. The message of the grace and forgiveness of the Lord becomes in him an occasion for anger and bigotry.
Jonah almost literally has to be dragged kicking and screaming to do his job. He’s successful in his God-given task, and you better believe, he’s mad as a wet hen about it! And yet Jesus sees in Jonah a forerunner of himself! That’s the power of grace in action.
And maybe we can see in Jonah the contradictions in all of us. Indeed, even as the book is drawing to a close, Jonah still has his priorities messed up. He’s upset because the plant that gave him shade from the hot sun has dried up, but he couldn’t care less what happens to the people in the city. Can we see ourselves in that bone-headed prophet, caring more for our own comfort than for the welfare of those in desperate need?
As Jacques Ellul reminds us, “The Christian is not just the [one] who is saved by Christ; he [or she] is the [one] whom God uses for the salvation of others by Christ.”[4] We don’t have to look hard for people who need what we can offer.
When God calls, and God will call, don’t try to book passage to Tarshish! Don’t try running to the ends of the earth. You may not like the ride home!