Jonah!
I have spent a lot of time with Jonah. I invite you to join me as I take yet another look at this remarkable, absurd, and deeply human prophet.
We walk on the beach today alongside our brother Jonah. We catch up to him on a fresh new morning in his life, a second chance, a new day. He has just been through a rough period, to put it extremely mildly. He jumped on a boat bound for the end of the world — or western Spain, whichever came first — because he thought he could outrun the reach of God’s arm. But the sea stirred itself up at God’s command; and then Jonah’s ship seemed to come alive in roiling distress, threatening to break itself apart; and finally an enormous fish obeyed God and swallowed Jonah up, gulping him into the tomb — and also the womb — of her guts. (Unlike Jonah, the great fish dutifully does what God says.)
After three days and nights in the fish’s pitch-black stomach, Jonah had a moment of clarity, a crystal-clear realization, an experience of authentic repentance. He cried out to God in confidence that God would hear him, and rescue him. And it was so. In my reading of the story, rays of the dawning sun glinted off the towers of Nineveh as the fish reared up and — as the Hebrew story vividly tells us — she vomited Jonah out onto dry land.
He falls from her jaws at our feet. We watch, awkwardly, as Jonah stumbles into a standing position, breathes, coughs out a mess of brine and muck, and hears, probably with a groan, God’s persistent command: once again God tells Jonah that he is to go to Nineveh and … “I know, I know!” my Jonah says to God with understandable exasperation. “How could I not know?!”
Jonah walks into the city, and his message is simple: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” he calls out. But then things only get worse for Jonah. Nineveh was supposed to burn, in a satisfying conflagration of God’s wrath. Nineveh was a powerful and cruel city, a city that did not know the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Nineveh is our enemy: they are villains — cartoon villains, even. Nineveh is the capital of the violent Assyrian Empire. Imagine the persons or people you think are far, far away from God. The people you would rather not see at God’s table. That’s Nineveh. And once Jonah warns them of God’s destruction, he plans to sit back and watch as God proves him right.
But then two astonishing things happen, more astonishing even then the Pixar movie of the Jonah story so far. First, unlike Jonah, the Ninevites don’t need a misadventure at sea and three days inside a fish to repent: they automatically see the error of their ways. Second, God has mercy on them and forgives them. This makes a fool of Jonah. His God doesn’t even do righteous justice properly. What if their repentance is disingenuous? What if others will see God’s mercy and decide to sin all the more boldly, knowing that good people and evil people alike can thrive and flourish in this world? What if nothing means anything and nothing matters, because God doesn’t overcome evil with magical, militant strength?
This is all deeply unsatisfying. And so, though Jonah sounded noble and courageous inside the fish, having finally understood God’s power, and his own call to be God’s prophet, Jonah regresses. As Nineveh repents, from the king all the way down to the livestock, Jonah’s resentment grows. His story ends with a question. It’s an unsatisfying, enigmatic, non-ending ending. We don’t know if Jonah finally gets the point, and goes on to become a great prophet. Maybe it’s up to us, then: we who hear this fantastic, bizarre story — maybe it’s up to us to write the ending.
If so, then Jesus can help us. He compares himself to Jonah, in Matthew’s Gospel, and we can see the parallels: today Jonah washes up on the beach and starts to preach his message; and today Jesus emerges from the wilderness (and before that, his baptism) and starts preaching his message. Jonah sits in the great fish for three days; Jesus is in the tomb for three days. Jonah, for all his faults, is a successful prophet: the city repents, and life is restored there. Jesus, well, Jesus triumphs over death itself, giving all creation new life.
So maybe Jesus writes the best ending to Jonah’s story. Maybe his triumph over death is a satisfying conclusion to a story about God’s prophet, God’s mission, God’s re-creation of the whole world.
But when we put the Jonah story into the hands of Jesus, he gives us a twist or two.
Jesus does a new thing that breaks Jonah’s mold: after preaching the message (which, by the way, sounds much more hopeful and inviting when Jesus preaches it), he immediately starts assembling a team. He walks along the shore of the lake, calling Simon, Andrew, and the others.
As we get to know the disciples, we may sense that they bear closer resemblance to Jonah than Jesus does. They’re fisherfolk, they’re boat people, they’re found at the edges of lakes and seas. They’re slow to cotton onto the meaning of the message, and they put up lots of frustrated resistance to the movement Jesus is launching. So if Jesus is the second Jonah, then he is opening up the whole framework of the story, gathering an ever larger community of Jonahs to preach his message. We sometimes call ourselves the Body of Christ, and we are right to do so. Here we see that by becoming part of the Body of Christ, we start participating in the prophecy and ministry of Jonah.
And that means we, like the disciples, can be forgiven for putting up some healthy resistance. God has seen this before, and God knows how to stick with us even as we absurdly (if understandably) try to resist the call to preach the Good News to our neighbors; even as we try to reject the call to minister to those we call our enemies.
If we are a community of Jonahs, then God will not make everything easy, but God will appoint a great fish, as it were, to swallow us up in safety. As dark as it is inside the fish, God surrounds us. And God in Jesus is right here in the middle of the darkness with us. (Maybe this whole past year of pandemic has been a long three days inside the fish. And maybe this is, I don’t know, day two? If so, then yes, it is definitely dark! But also, yes, God is around us, underneath us, holding us.)
We are called not just to the beginning of Jonah’s story, but also its ending. We write that ending, in our lives. We come to terms with the fact that God loves people we find almost impossible to love, and we hear God’s call to us to open our hearts to them, too.
Even now, today, the towers of Nineveh gleam in the rising sun. People act with selfishness, greed, and an easy, if cynical, assurance that nothing in this world will really change.
But people also respond to prophetic acts of courage, and pastoral words of comfort. And so, Jesus emerges from the wilderness, like Jonah tumbling from the mouth of the great fish, and he preaches Good News, Gospel, a message of challenge, but also reassurance. This world is changing, and for the better. He asks us to wrap our minds around this (wrap our minds around — that’s another way to translate the word for ‘repent’). Wrap your mind around this reality, says Jesus: all will be well, though that’s true also for our enemies, those out there in a polarized world, but also the enemies within, the enemies of resentment and fear. All will be well, because God is never giving up on any of us.
The sun is up. The fish has vomited us onto dry land. What do you think? Shall we enter the city and give them the Good News?
***
Preached on the Third Sunday after the Epiphany (Year B), January 24, 2021, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62:6-14
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
Art: Detail from my half-sleeve tattoo of Jonah. Photo by Jenny J.