Jonah - more than the whale!

This morning, I re-read the Book of the Prophet Jonah. Nestled away in the Minor Prophets between Obadiah and Micah, and only two pages long in my Bible, we probably don’t give much thought the the story of Jonah beyond our childhood retellings of the prophet swallowed by a whale. I was prompted to read it because today marks the start of a three day fast for the Assyrian Church of the East, called the Rogation of the Ninevites (ܒܥܘܬܐ ܕܢܝܢܘܝ̈ܐ Bā'ūṯā d-Nīnwāyē). The three days are a time of fasting and penitence, and the commemoration dates to the sixth century. The Metropolitan of Adiabene (the Syriac ecclesiastical province, which included Nineveh) called the fast in order to implore God’s mercy after a devastating plague - recalling the prayers and repentance of the people of Nineveh in Jonah’s time.

Re-reading the story will take you no time at all, and I would recommend doing so in these days of the fast. It was a reminder to me of the Bible’s capacity continually to surprise us - even this story which I thought I knew well threw up things that caught my attention for the first time.

I had always thought, for instance, that the sailors in the first chapter were a rather heartless lot - but they were extremely reluctant to throw Jonah overboard, even after he told them to! They are men who want to act justly, and are moved to faith in the living God by this encounter.

Jonah’s prayer of thanksgiving in chapter 2 is beautiful and poetic - and a model for us in those times where we feel overwhelmed and trapped. It culminates in a moving prayer of trust - ‘Deliverance belongs to the Lord.’

There is quite a lot of interesting stuff about creation in this story, too. God ‘hurls’ the great wind that causes the storm; he speaks to the fish to release Jonah; and in chapter 4, God ‘appoints’ the bush to grow and the worm to destroy the bush. God uses creation to fulfil his divine will, and at the end to teach Jonah his lesson. How can we be attentive to the ways God works in creation? And what lessons does he use creation to teach us?

When it comes to Jonah’s prophetic proclamation, none of the other Biblical prophets had it so easy! I was struck by how quickly the people of Nineveh repent - and of course, Jonah gets extremely angry because God relented and did not destroy the city.

This latter point is a bit puzzling, I think. But I was reminded that the other mention of Jonah in the Old Testament is in 2 Kings 14.25 - and here, we are told that God restored the borders of ancient Israel in the time of King Jeroboam according to the word God spoke through Jonah. So first of all, we have a Jonah who prophecies God’s defence and fortification of Israel. But then God sends Jonah beyond Israel’s borders, to the ancient metropolis of Nineveh - and of course, Jonah doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to preach outside the world he knows. Through the minor intervention of a whale (the text just says, a ‘big fish‘), Jonah winds up in Nineveh and proclaims the message that God has given him. The fact that the Ninevites might believe him doesn’t seem to have entered his mind - and in the end, Jonah gets angry with God about the whole affair (Jonah is convinced he is angry enough to die…) Jonah is in fact angry that God decided to show mercy to the people of Nineveh. And there is a lesson for us in that! How often have we been angry with God for the outpouring of his grace in the lives of people we think are not like us?! The message of Jonah is that God’s loving mercy transcends our boundaries, our borders, our self-centredness. God is at work in the world, often in spite of us rather than because of us - but God’s grace still breaks through.

‘The Church of Christ is a haven and place of refuge,

and she receives men who journey in sins as on the sea, delivering them through the great power of the Cross.’

(From the final liturgy of the Rogation of the Ninevites)