Listen to my tale, of Jonah and the whale,
Way down in the middle of the ocean.
How did he get there? Whatever did he wear?
Way down in the middle of the ocean.
Preaching he should be at Nineveh, you see!
He disobeyed, a very foolish notion.
But God forgave his sin, salvation entered in,
Way down in the middle of the ocean.
This is Sunday School exposition, a way of telling the story that reduces a literary masterpiece to a cartoon comic. But there's no doubt singing it fixes the outline of the story, and the didactic soteriological lessons in the memory; evidenced by my word perfect recall from over 58 years ago! There's something about Jonah the prophet I've always liked, and something about the story of Jonah that has intrigued, provoked, and often enough interrogated my own understanding of God.
I live in and look at the world around, and wonder how I'm supposed to think about my own contemporary world where empire, power and cruelty still seem to go unrestrained, and their excesses unpunished despite the cost to human lives. Nineveh stands for any kind of overwhelming, oppressive power, whether nations, economic systems, or social structures which become abusive, unjust, self-perpetuating by holding on to the levers of power - from military superiority as threat or reality, to economic control of resources, to institutional systems that marginalise and depersonalise.
The sheer variety of interpretations on offer evidence the cleverness, ingenuity and ambiguities woven throughout the story of Jonah. A quick trawl of currently available studies, from devotional and popular expositions to more scholarly commentary, reveals quite a lot about the authors' presuppositions concerning the purpose of this very short story. Jonah - a Study of Compassion; Jonah - Running From God; Jonah - Preacher on the Run; Jonah, the Parochial Prophet; The Reluctant Evangelist; The Prodigal Prophet; Man Overboard; You Can Run but You Can't Hide; Jonah, God's Scandalous Mercy; Under the Unpredictable Plant.
Recently I've come back to Jonah for a closer look. I've preached on it, taught seminars on Jonah and Mission in a Pluralist Society, over the years read commentaries and monographs, and I'm glad to say I still haven't tamed this infuriatingly recalcitrant story, nor have I lessened its uncomfortable theological ambiguities. The scholarly literature is extensive, and every bit as varied in presupposition and conclusion as the titles of current popular treatments above indicate.
But Jonah becomes a politically charged story when I ask where Nineveh is today, and who or what are the powers in my time that do great evil, whose behaviour is "dire", and whose power seems unbreakable by those worst affected by them.
Then I ask- so who are the Jonah figures today, the doom merchants, those morally outraged at abusive power, who want justice understood as punishment to fall on oppressive regimes and systems; who are today's Jonah figures with vividly seared memories of "dire evil"? Who are the fierce critics of Nineveh who want to see it brought down, humiliated, and replaced by something better?
Then there is the God who sends Jonah, pursues Jonah, argues with Jonah, threatens Nineveh with destruction, and then shows mercy. It's not often a prophet is disappointed in God; but Jonah is seriously disaffected, in fact he is (literally) mad as hell!
Reading the story again, I follow Jonah to Tarshish and inside the whale, eventually to Nineveh and then to his little hut on the hill to watch the eschatological firework display that finally gives Nineveh exactly and precisely the justice and judgement and punishment it deserves. But instead of judgement, mercy; instead of fireworks, repentance; instead of satisfaction at justice done, sheer frustration at the audacity of God's freedom to pardon.
So what on earth is this short short-story meant to mean? Is it a rebuke to post-exilic exclusivism as recorded in Ezra Nehemiah? Is the story really about a reluctant preacher or a generous God, or both? Does Jonah fail, or was he set up? Does God change his mind, or did God know all along the moves that Jonah would make, and checked him towards submission like the ultimate cosmic chess master? Is Jonah really about mission in the way I used it 40 years ago? Or is that a hi-jacking of a much more complex story to provide a 'biblical' warrant for evangelism, and issue an early warning about having a too narrow understanding of what God is actually about in the world?
Alongside this annoyingly provocative and intentionally ambiguous story I sometimes read some verses of this remarkable hymn by Frederick W Faber:
There's a wideness in God's mercy,
like the wideness of the sea;
there's a kindness in his justice
which is more than liberty.
But we make God’s love too narrow
by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness
with a zeal God will not own.
For the love of God is broader
than the measure of man's mind;
and the heart of the eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
At the very least, the "tale of Jonah and the whale" leads to serious thought and re-thinking about the kind of God God is. The God of the expected and the unexpected, of judgement and mercy, consistent in divine freedom and final purpose, the God described in Jonah 4.2:
“Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."
By the way, the text says Jonah prayed these words. This is Jonah knowing and trusting God sufficiently to have an argument, to rebuke God, to complain that God is who God is! It's one of the astonishing features of Jewish thought and faith that there can be such transparency of thought and feeling, expressed in the intimacy of anger - and the patience of God in explaining, yet again Who God is.
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