Living Wittily

Dragged out of my comfort zone to gaze at the morning sky.

It was 7.30 in the morning when Dorothy rang my doorbell. She was dressed as always, immaculate hair, mohair cardigan, blue chiffon scarf and her favourite brightly coloured long skirt. She tugged my arm, urged me to come outside and look up.

And there flying over the West End of Aberdeen, against a frost blue sky, a long skein of geese, honking their way north. “Would it not be fine to be able to do that” she asked, her eyes bright with the thought of such wild freedom. I hope I’m as alive as her when I start pushing eighty!

The wild goose is a Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit, expressing the freedom and urgency of God, and the homing instinct of the human heart. “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in You”, said Saint Augustine. His words, a millennium and half later, still speak to the restlessness and God embarrassment of people not sure what we want, but full of wanting.

The American poet, Mary Oliver understood the frustration and desire that give our hearts colour, edge and the rich texture of emotional and spiritual longing.  

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

About that restlessness, Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, life in all its fullness.” Two thousand years later Jesus still dares us to take flight, and fly, and live, and find our home in God.

Jonah and the Whale 7. Book Review: Jonah the Conflicted Prophet

Six prophets in just under 500 pages of commentary, only forty of them on Jonah. But this is vintage Goldingay. It may be history told as a parable, or a parable linked with history and memory - either way for Goldingay it's the theological message that matters, and the freight that the narrative is created to carry.

The interactions between a violent city, a resistant prophet and a merciful God enable the storyteller to set up powerful tensions in the narrative and plot. The narrator then develops larger than life characters of city, prophet and God, and then pushes the story towards a conclusion which is intentionally inconclusive. Like a good post-modern novel the reader is left with unanswered questions about what happens to the protagonist Jonah.

Goldingay's take on Jonah is that of a conflicted prophet who expects mercy for himself, but punishment for Nineveh; Jonah who believes in a predictable God who brings judgement on evil and injustice, and shows mercy to the penitent; Jonah, whose expectations are conflicted when he encounters a city of pagans whose repentance forces a theological collision between who Jonah believes God to be (righteous punisher of sin), and who God chooses to be (gracious in mercy and pardon), and to a city overwhelmingly guilty of great evil. 

All of this is worked out in a commentary that combines first class exegesis with sympathetic, even compassionate reflection on the inner psychological and theological worlds of Jonah. It's clear that Goldingay likes conflicted prophets! Yet on the other hand, as a commentator he refuses to jump to safe conclusions about who God is and what God is about. "God's election is not for the sake of the chosen, but for the sake of God's purpose." And that purpose is formed out of who God is - "a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."

But what exactly is God's purpose in this frustratingly inconclusive story? It is justice...and mercy! It is to bring about repentance of the so far impenitent. It is to use Jonah to give the violent city a chance, but a chance Jonah doesn't want them to be offered. But which Nineveh takes and God honours.

Goldingay's commentary is readable and engaged with the text and its commentators. His tone is both playful and serious, as is the book of Jonah itself. His theological reflections are profound and uncomfortably searching for those who think they have God sussed. The commentary exploits the playfulness of the story, pointing out the ironies, the practical jokes and the serious questions posed throughout this intriguing text. His own comments are, as he believes the text to be, theologically subversive of the lazy certainties of those who have become complacent of grace, and grudging to the point of jealousy of God's abounding steadfast love. Jonah is, quite literally, a wake-up call to its readers, then and now, to see the world as God sees it - all those people, and many cattle.

Throughout Goldingay is in conversation with the best exegetical literature, and with other important conversation partners, including: Leslie Allen, Karl Barth, Jacques Ellul, Ann Lamott, Martin Luther, Elie Wiesel, and H W Wolff. The commentary is also strong on intertextual references, the exegesis constantly linked to the wider biblical witness either for comparison or contrast. The Subject Index and Scripture Index are thorough, user-friendly, and enable the reader to follow up such inter-connections within and beyond Jonah. 

The commentary on Jonah represents only 10% of this volume. I bought it because I know Goldingay's work, and have profited constantly from his fresh, at times provocative, but always thorough and reverent treatment of the biblical text. I'm happy to have this composite volume. I think it's worth the investment, dealing as it does with three of the "major minor prophets", along with Joel, Obadiah and the recalcitrant Jonah. 

Act of Oblivion: A Good Book for Dreich Days.

I recently finished Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion, and thoroughly enjoyed it - read it in three days. (well two of them were dreich and wet). In Scotland 'dreich' is the word we reserve for days that are dull, damp, cold and relentlessly demotivating!

 

Robert Harris excels in the historical novel, this one based in the English Civil War period and its immediate aftermath. Following the execution of Charles I, and 12 years later the Restoration under Charles II, it's the story of the manhunt for those who signed the death warrant of the King.

 

Harris tells a great story of embellished fact and convincing fiction. You can smell 17th C London, and its reek of political corruption and public suspicion in a divided country. The period includes the Plague Year and the Great Fire of London, and without overplaying the details, it's obvious Harris has done his research and imagined well some of these great historic events. The precarious life of the colonies, the minimum three months for first class mail across the Atlantic, the secret networks of Puritans, spies, the Court and Europe, these are each woven into a narrative which never loses momentum.

 

The story includes Thomas Goodwin the puritan, the early days of Harvard, Cotton Mather, and a helpful list of the main dramatis personae in the various locations of London, New Haven, Massachusetts, London and Europe. Puritanism is a tricky movement to define, and was much more diverse and fluid than the caricatures of bad history writing. That said, Harris steers a middle course in his imaginative reconstruction of Puritan political, theological and social motivation, and is particularly subtle when he explores the moral and spiritual inner life of Puritan piety. The Puritans are both villains and saints, their motivations complex, and their individual convictions and ambitions as varied as any other radical religious and political community.

 

On a League table of Robert Harris novels Act of Oblivion is in the top five for me. The Cicero Trilogy (Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator) is as good as any historical fiction I know on the transformation of Rome from Republic to Empire. Conclave is a remarkable account of another religiously intense community, this time the Vatican and the 72 hours of a papal election - not usually the stuff of thrillers, but this is just that. Munich I think is one of the most perceptive attempts to understand Neville Chamberlain, and the fear and dread in Europe as Nazi ambitions and war aims became increasingly clear. Act of Oblivion easily resides on the top shelf of Harris's books. Aye. A good read for dreich days.

 

Jonah and the Whale 6. Customer Service Complaints About God's Compassion.

You only understand Jonah if you’ve learned to hate, if life experience has educated you in heartfelt, instinctive, focused and justified hostility.

And so you only understand Jonah’s God if you are prepared to unlearn hatred, and by a painful inner re-orientation, accept that God is not in the hate business. Jonah hated Nineveh – ‘the great city’ famed for terrorist atrocities, centre of a brutal, organised, military machine – merciless, meticulous, arrogant, conqueror and oppressor of Israel.

The equivalent today is hard to imagine – but where there is religious hatred, ancient tribal enmities, and people whose suffering and oppression have educated them into hatred, there we come near to the same mindset – that wants to obliterate the enemy. The combination of terror and anger, of hatred and hopelessness, produces that lethal cocktail we call terrorism – and it flourishes in a world sold on consumerism, militarism and the polarisation of extremes, two poles arcing in violence

Jonah stands for those who want to see power get what it deserves; those who pray that cruelty and violence will get its payback. So you’d think that a word from the Lord to preach against the wickedness of the great city would have Jonah book a first class overnight camel to be the first to tell Nineveh “You’ve had it!” God’s call could be understood as permission to hate, time to ridicule and gloat, and celebrate the anguish of the enemy.

So why did Jonah run in the exact opposite direction? Why miss out on the vengeance he’d prayed for? Why not takes his hate and use it to make him an eloquent herald of doom? Instead, “But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. (1.)

Jonah’s bizarre behaviour only makes sense when you come to Jonah’s angry and exasperated prayer once Nineveh repents and the Lord relents! “Jonah prayed to the Lord, “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.”

 Jonah isn’t disobedient – he’s in denial. It isn’t that he doesn’t believe enough in God – he believes too much. He knows too well, his theology of God is so true it’s a liability. He runs in the opposite direction because he senses God is going to do the opposite of what Jonah wants. There’s a million to one chance that Nineveh will repent – and if that happens, there isn’t one chance in a million that God won’t be merciful. It’s an absolute certainty that God would be slow to anger and abounding in love.

And that isn’t fair. That is theologically unacceptable. Abounding in love, slow to anger, with Nineveh? That is absolutely scandalous! That a vast city built on the blood and tears of the conquered should turn from their wickedness and find mercy shows there is no justice in the universe. Jonah prays his anger. The very thing he believes most about God (compassion) is getting in the way of the very thing he wants most from God (punishment). His faith, The God he believes in, is frustrating his sense of justice. So Jonah won’t take that million to one chance. God, of course, has other plans.

And as the story unfolds it isn’t that Jonah will, learn a new theology of God – he will learn the hard way that a theology of grace and mercy forces a re-think about the deepest, hardest, most heart-breaking, experiences of his life.

He’ll learn about God’s generosity and legitimate human grievances; he’ll learn that mercy is greater than murder; that compassion not cruelty is God’s way; all that and more he’ll learn. As we read this story today it also touches on some of the most important things we will ever need to know - about ourselves, about God, about all those different others, human and animal, planetary and elemental, who share this planet with us – and about whom we should be concerned.

The story about Jonah doesn't set out to give us the right answers to our questions; it does something far more subversive. It givers us new questions that show us how little we understand the scandal of grace, how hard it is to have sympathy with the creative strategies of divine mercy, and how outrageously different is God's compassion from our expectations.

One further thought. When you have time, read the whole story - then these verses from a much longer hymn by F. 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.

There is grace enough for thousands
Of new worlds as great as this;
There is room for fresh creations
In that upper home of bliss.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of our mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.

It is God: His love looks mighty,
But is mightier than it seems;
’Tis our Father: and His fondness
Goes far out beyond our dreams.

But we make His love too narrow
By false limits of our own;
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal He will not own.

 

Saying 'Gratefulnesse' Slowly.

We walk here often, and every time this view is different. The avenue of trees filter the light depending on the season.

The low winter sun produces floodlit grass and highlights last summer's leaves, and that long straight path through one open gate to another suggesting opportunity, possibility, and each of them an invitation to keep walking.

 

As an old preacher used to say, "and that's a bit like life".

 

Each day a different view, the changing of the seasons, a path to be walked in all weathers, and so much to enjoy if we are open to seeing, listening, paying attention and regularly polishing that lens that enables us to look at our place in the world with some joy and more hope - gratitude.

 

Or so it seems to me...and so it seemed to George Herbert in his poem 'Gratefulnesse'. The older spelling and form allows for a slow enunciation, and time to recall the theological sub-structure, that grace, gift and gratitude occupy the same semantic field. 'Gratefulnesse', try it for yourself.

 

'Gratefulnesse':

Thou that hast given so much to me,

give one thing more, a grateful heart.

See how thy beggar work on Thee,

                                       By art

 

Not thankful when it pleaseth me;

As if Thy blessings had spare days:

But such a heart whose pulse may be

                                     Thy praise

 

 

"Great are the works of the Lord." Photography as an Oblique Form of Praying.

What nourishes our humanity? Where are the sources of spiritual sustenance, moral nurture, emotional health, physical joy, and humane maturity?

How do we grow into the kind of person for whom respect for others is a default disposition; for whom care for human flourishing is an active passion as well as a living aspiration; for whom compassion for life stretches from lichen to linnets, from seaweed to swans, from cats to catfish, and from forests to lochs?

I've just looked through the photos I've taken over the past month. Each was a deliberate act of framing, focus and click. But why were the subjects chosen? Because I saw something I wanted to see and take away with me. A photo allows me to carry away some of that seeing after the moment has passed; that's the time to explore the why, the significance of just this moment of seeing.  

My camera is a window out into the world I see; it is also a window into the mind and heart that sees. At the moment of framing and focusing, something is going on between what is seen outwardly, and what is felt and thought and envisioned inwardly. I'm aware of this as an oblique form of prayer; that is, it isn't praying, but it isn't not praying either!

I've spent a while this week reading about the big argument between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner over the validity of a natural theology. Can we see the fingerprints of God all over creation? Can we have knowledge of God other than what God has revealed in Jesus Christ as testified in Scripture? Does God also reveal something of his glory in the beauty of a sunlit loch, in the majesty of mountains, in the haunting honks of chevrons of geese flying in the dark over our house towards Loch Skene?

I'm on Brunner's side, and as a matter of fact on Calvin's side. The world around us is "the theatre of God's glory." Here's Calvin himself, writing from Geneva surrounded by the Alps!

"Ever since in the creation of the universe he brought forth those insignia whereby he shows his glory to us, whenever and wherever we cast our gaze. …And since the glory of his power and wisdom shine more brightly above, heaven is often called his palace. Yet…wherever you cast your eyes, there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some sparks of his glory.” (Institutes, 1.5.1)

As I try to understand what's going on inside me when I take photographs, I'm in danger of spoiling spontaneous fun by overthinking it! I know. But still, the joy of taking a good photograph is perhaps related to an inner recognition that this too is a glimpse into God's theatre, a moment to "discern at least some sparks of his glory."

What nourishes our humanity, as those made in the image of God, if not appreciation and gratitude for God's masterpiece of creation? Where are the sources of spiritual sustenance, moral nurture, emotional health, physical joy, and humane maturity, if not in our seeing, and willingness to share in, the productions performed in "the theatre of God's glory"?

That is at least one good reason for taking some of the photos I take. That, and perhaps a resonant sympathy with the words of an ancient poet of Israel, "Great are the works of the Lord, they are pondered by all who delight in them." (Psalm 111.2)

The moment when I lift my camera, frame, focus and click, I'm paying tribute, "Great are the works of the Lord."

Later, reviewing the photographs filed under their dates, I am pondering them, as one who "delights in those great works of the Lord."

Or so it seems to me...for now...anyway. These are three photos of such great works, each containing the joy of the moment, and later persuading the photographer to ponder in a spirit of gratitude. 

 

Jonah and the Whale 5. Some Helpful Guides for the Journey (1)

The short story of Jonah has provoked library stacks of research and exegetical study, and has behind it two thousand years of Jewish and Christian preaching, preceded by at least a further 500 years of Jewish commentary and midrash. This is not an attempted literature review. This is a two part post on six of the books that to date I have used, learned from, and could recommend to others who want a reliable guide or two on their journey to Tarshish...and back!

This post describes three; a second post will follow with a further three. I'll then do a select survey of several popular expositions just to round off the resources available, especially for preachers. 

Terence Fretheim's The Message of Jonah, the book that started me off on my travels chasing after Jonah on his travels, has an earlier post to itself. See here:

1976. Leslie C Allen, Commentary on Joel, Obadiah, Jonah and Micah (Eerdmans, NICOT)

On publication this was one of the more substantial treatments at 60 pages. The literary genre is neither historical narrative nor allegory, but a 'parable', created "to explore God's dealings with man." Imagine a group of travellers, sitting round the fire, and a storyteller entertaining them with a story intended to make the listener think. The literary tone is playful satire, with elements of parody and irony. Allen sees the Psalm in chapter 2 as pivotal, the key to the whole story: "The Psalm plays its part in demonstrating an overall theme, depicting the inconsistency of one graciously brought back from the brink of deserved destruction (chs.1-2), then churlishly resenting the divine right to rescue other sinners from perishing.(chs.3-4)" (185) 

The message of the book is that God is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger - Jonah is a story that powerfully argues for God's sovereign compassion, while illustrating the all too human desire for the punishment of enemies. Jonah is a call to see the world through the eyes of God. All of this is worked out in exegesis full of sharp observations. For example on the repentance of Nineveh, Allen connects ch 3 back to ch 1. "Chapter 1 has served the purpose of softening the reaction of the listening circle toward comparatively innocuous foreigners before confronting them with an odious community of hardcore heathens." (224)

And so on throughout a detailed exegesis rich in expository suggestions, laced with humour like that of the book itself; humour used to enable truth to fly beneath the radar of our prejudices. This remains a valued conversation partner, despite its age. This volume is due for replacement in a few month's time, in a composite work covering Joel, Obadiah and Jonah, by James Nogalski, an acknowledged expert on the Book of the Twelve Prophets. I won't be banishing Allen to the reserve shelves any time soon though.

1990. Jack Sasson, Jonah, Anchor Bible Commentary.

Until the publication in 2020 of the Illuminations Commentary by Amy Erickson, this volume was the most substantial critical and technical commentary on Jonah. The real strength of Sasson's work is in philology, grammar and literary analysis, which are treated in near exhaustive detail. There isn't much theological reflection, more a clarifying of the text of a narrative that seems theologically inconclusive - that is the book ends without a resolution of Jonah's problem with God, or God's problem with Jonah! But the literary artistry, the rich syntax, the rhetorical devices and semantic choices, the derivations, parallel uses and intra-textual comparisons of each significant word - Jonah is a mine with numerous rich seams, and Sasson has worked them assiduously.   

In relation to the bigger picture, Sasson refuses to pin Jonah down to a single literary form or style - parable, allegory, myth, short story - satire, irony, comedy - all of these are possible interpretations and indeed the book is a masterpiece of ambiguity, fluidity and narrative art. He settles for Jonah as 'comic dupe', a figure used to teach a serious theological and life-lesson, through the art of inducing knowing laughter and unforeseen consequence. 

I confess to using this book as occasional reference now. For my own purposes of preaching, theological reflection on a narrative text, and personal reflection as lectio divina, there is less urgency for technical scholarship. This is especially true when a number of other commentaries while not ignoring the historical, critical and literary issues in interpretation, do so alongside theological interpretation and attempts to explore the continuing power of Jonah to challenge, upset and even contradict our favoured interpretations.

But as one reviewer said of Sasson's work on the minutiae of philology, grammar and text, his work is unlikely to require significant updating for at least a generation. It is, however, 30 years old. And as mentioned above, Amy Erickson's commentary has now appeared and it is all but encyclopaedic. Later in the year I will review it. More than that, the Hermeneia volume on Jonah, by Susan Niditch, is due at the end of April 2023, and Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer's Jonah Through the CenturiesIt seems there is a Jonah renaissance underway.    

1993. James Limburg, Jonah, Old Testament Library, SCM / Westminster.

The driving thesis of Limburg's exposition is his view of the book as a "didactic story." If a story is told to teach a lesson, then any interpreting of the story should ask the question clearly, and require the hearer / reader to think about it and answer it. That's what God is about in the story of Jonah. It is a story, a comic tragedy, laced with humour and bristling with unsettling incidents, not least a story that calls in question the received theology of elect Israel, and the relation of the people of God to outsiders, pagans, others, even enemies, like Nineveh.

Limburg's exegesis is more spare than Allen's, and more accessible than Sasson. Like Allen he insists Jonah was designed to be heard. The best stories are spoken and heard, in the I-Thou of storytelling where reader and listener are present. The commentary proper is a running commentary on the story, supported by considerable scholarship sparingly used to clarify the rhetorical devices and theological digs and nudges throughout the story.

Limburg is a clever and entertaining guide through the text. There are sections of how Jonah has been interpreted in Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought. These are important glances at the reception history. As Philip Davies quipped, and he was no great fan of overblown commentaries; "Rarely do I think a commentary might have been longer; here is an exception."

More in next Jonah post.    

Jonah and the Whale 4. A Brilliant Sermon, Preached by God, to Closed Minds

Many of us first heard the story of Jonah in Sunday School. If you’re older you’ll know the chorus, “Listen to my tale, of Jonah and the whale, way down in the middle of the ocean.” The story of Jonah is so familiar. It’s about the compassion and undeserved grace of God. The very idea that God would forgive Nineveh, the sworn enemy of Jonah’s people, is a scandal. What’s scandalous is that God chooses to have mercy on the world’s worst sinners, and Jonah resents it, and God has to talk him round.

Jonah is usually called the disobedient prophet. But it’s always worth asking why people do what they do. God said go to Nineveh. Jonah went to Tarshish, the exact opposite direction. He’s asleep in the bottom of the boat in the midst of a deadly storm. But he’s found out. He admits to the sailors he’s defying God’s command, and to save themselves they throw Jonah overboard. He’s swallowed by a great fish, prays a Psalm in which he promises to do as he’s told, and is spat out on the shoreline.

Jonah goes to Nineveh, but preaches the worst sermon ever. Nothing about God, repentance or mercy. “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned.” That’s it. Five Hebrew words. Bad news. No hope. Countdown to the city’s destruction and Jonah has a seat in the front row. Then the whole city repents, from the king to the cows, and call urgently on God, God has compassion, and spared them and their city.

So Jonah goes in the huff. He paid his ticket for the best seat in the theatre of God’s judgement, and finds that the original programme is cancelled and there’s a new production called compassion and forgiveness.

But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “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. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.” (4.1-3)

If our view of the world is that everyone should get what they deserve, then we will have trouble understanding forgiveness. If we’ve been hurt time and again, and have come to wish harm on those who harm us, then forgiveness will seem like weakness. And if we think the world should be a place where life is fair, where wrong is always punished and goodness always rewarded, then we’ll be disappointed, and even resentful that life isn’t the way we think it should be.

All of this is the Jonah mind-set. And it still survives whenever God doesn’t do what we want God to do. Imagine giving God a row because he is “a gracious and compassionate God”! It’s OK for God to forgive us our sins, but the idea that forgiveness is God’s gracious decision, and he shows mercy on all who call on his name, sometimes just doesn’t seem fair. Especially when they have done much worse than we have. That too is the Jonah mind-set.

And God’s answer to the angry Jonah, sitting on a hillside in the heat of the noonday sun, is to make a plant grow up to give him shade. The next morning the plant dies and Jonah is exposed to the dehydrating heat and is angry that the plant has died, blames God, and even wishes the precious God-given gift of life should be taken away. That would teach God! Truth is, Jonah would rather die than have Nineveh spared.

At that point this story comes crashing into the world we now live in. Think of the politics of hate. Reflect on how we ourselves, our politicians, and the wider world, view asylum seekers, refugees, migrant and displaced peoples. As we think about what attitude we should have to those ‘others’, whoever they happen to be, what does it mean to have faith in the gracious and compassionate God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? How does my faith in Jesus, and in God’s justice and grace, God’s mercy and forgiveness, His care for all peoples, - how does that way of looking on God’s world, through God’s eyes, change my heart towards others?

The last two verses of Jonah are amongst the most moving words in the whole Bible. Go read them. This is God, God mind you, trying to convert Jonah’s heart from resentment to compassion, from hatred to mercy, from enmity to reconciliation. There’s a lot of hating going on in our world. The divisions are deep, damaging and hard edged. Instead of finding ways to work with and for each other, the style is to be over and against. It’s almost as if, like Jonah, people find their identity in decrying those they hate, oppose, and who disagree with them.

The book of Jonah is a brilliant sermon, preached by God, to closed hearts. For us as Christians, the faithful witness of the Church in our world at this time, will be as witnesses to Christ the Reconciler who heals enmities by the blood of the Cross; witnesses to Christ the Prince of Peace whose ambassadors we are; couriers of Christ the preacher of the Kingdom of God whose outstretched arms on the cross are held out in welcome and entreaty to all who will come.

We are called to echo the very words of Jonah, not from hearts angry against others, but from hearts that have felt the healing flows of God’s grace, known the touch of God’s compassion and been transformed by the gift of forgiveness: “We know that you are a compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” (4.2)

Those words, about compassion, slow to anger and abounding in love; not a bad strap line to guide the way we think about others. They call us to learn to live amongst others as the presence of Christ, and the voice of God’s grace, and in Jesus’ name.

Jonah and the Whale 3. "An argument that created a problem, and caused a falling out between God and Jonah."

A book review 47 years late! But first, an explanation for doing this. My last email exchange with Terry Fretheim was just a few months before his death in late 2020. I wanted to thank him for his life of scholarship in the service of the church, in which his exegetical theology was worked out with a pastor's heart. My own debt to him is considerable and long term and spans many of his books. Here is some of what I wrote:

"Your book on Jonah taught me so much about OT exegesis as well as giving a credible insight into what the book of Jonah teaches us about God's dynamic mercy, and through a story more comedy than tragedy. The spine is cracked, pages are falling out, the cover is faded and it's held together by the books on either side...

That slim volume opened doors for a young minister learning to preach in ways open to the rich texture of our canonical texts. You will, I hope, take it as the compliment I intend, if I place your work alongside that of Walter Brueggemann as scholarship that has formed and guided my own engagement with the Old Testament texts down the years. I still remember hefting as treasure that first volume of the New Interpreters Bible with Fretheim on Genesis and Brueggemann on Exodus."  

His one line answer: "Jim, Thanks so much for your generous response to my work. You made my day!  Terry."

I'm glad I lifted his spirits during what was his last illness. I have numerous reasons to be grateful for the work of Terry Fretheim, but they all go back to my reading of this early study of the prophet Jonah. I'll keep an overview of Fretheim's work over the past 40 or so years for another post.

What Fretheim found as the focal point in Jonah was a theological conflict, an argument that created a problem, and caused a falling out between God and Jonah. The prophet is so annoyed at God he runs away and spirals from disobedience to despair. Jonah is a divided man. He believes in God but disagrees with the nature of the God he believes in! Grace and compassion are fine, but not to be bandied about indiscriminately as if mercy was going out of fashion! Sure, mercy, appropriate mercy. Only not for Nineveh, not for enemies, not for people whose behaviour is so "evil" it is unforgivable. 

But there's more. God's grace and compassion are so integral to God's nature that they are poured out on whoever seeks his mercy and trusts to Gods compassionate grace - even Nineveh. If that's not bad enough there's the outrageous game changer in theology - that if evil Nineveh repents and turns from its wicked ways God may relent, change his mind, and pardon them. 

To be clear, Fretheim is not saying there's no judgement on sin, evil and 'dire behaviour'. Sin and evil lead to death rather than life. But God will do everything to avoid that. The Sovereign Creator is not to be imagined in our image, created by our preferred theology, controlled by the moral demands and intellectual limits of the creature!

The starting point for all mission is that the God who sends is gracious and compassionate, given to mercy, constant in faithful love. God's mercy is free to all, is gift not earned reward, and as the Word of God, mercy has power to persuade and pull into the orbit of divine grace, even those we think least deserve it. 

That in a nutshell is Fretheim's argument. After that initial statement of what he is about, there are three further introductory chapters on the characterisation of Jonah as a person, and the historical situation of those early years of the people of Israel rebuilding after the exile. Confidence was low, faith was hesitant and timid, there was a low grade but chronic cynicism about the Word of God, and religious practice was more option than obligation. And it was Assyria's fault then, and Babylon's fault now, and every other Empire's fault since!

Chapter 3 is a lexical treasure trove setting out the importance of proper names such as Tarshish, Joppa, Assyria, Nineveh, and Jonah - each of them freighted with narrative (and theological) significance. Then there are words that are important because of repetition: Great, Evil, Hurl, Appoint, Call, Fear, Go down, Anger, Perish, Pity. These words are used and re-used for their rhetorical power, they are clues to what the author is trying to say.

The fourth chapter is 'Irony, Structure and Unity'. Jonah drips with irony, one of the most effective forms of argument and persuasion in human discourse. The structure is straightforward according to Fretheim. There are two main parts:

"The one focuses on Jonah's own deliverance, the other focuses on Jonah's reaction to someone else's deliverance. Jonah is joyful when he is spared and angry when Nineveh is. There is revealed here the heart of the argument between God and Jonah. Who is to be the object of God's deliverance?" (58) 

Chapter 5 meets head on the question, 'Fact or Fiction.' Is Jonah factual history? Fretheim is cautious: "The question of 'happenedness' is only preliminary to a discernment of the message of the book." Fretheim concludes that Jonah is best understood as a satirical, didactic short story. Interestingly.

Leslie Allen opted for the word parable, conceding that parables as stories can have historical origins, or even a developed historical context, as do historical novels. The point for Fretheim is that the message of Jonah, the theological core of the story, does not depend on proving what actually happened. It depends on a changed mindset about God as a result of hearing the story - as does the prodigal son, and the good Samaritan.

Four chapters follow in which the text is explored and the story unfolded, with clear and at times quite daring theological commentary, bringing the book to a well argued conclusion. I finish the review with some of the last lines of Fretheim's interpretation, which I find sound and persuasive:

"What is involved in God's being moved to spare? The use of the verb 'moved to spare' points us to the fact that God's action has its effect upon God himself. This verb has reference to suffering action, action executed with tears in the eyes...And so 'to have pity' would mean action undertaken with tears flowing down the cheeks. It is suffering action. Here God takes upon himself the evil of Nineveh. He bears the weight of its violence, the pain of a thousand plundered cities, including Israel's. God chooses to suffer in place of Nineveh. His tears flow instead of theirs. Someday he may even choose to die." (p.130)   

Why I'm re-reading a 50 year old book when newer ones are available.

Read old books, wrote C S Lewis. Quite right too. Not to do so is 'chronological snobbery.' I'm re-reading this one. It's surprisingly readable, wide ranging, and both sharp and sympathetic in Zahrnt's account of leading figures such as Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, Jaspers, Gogarten, Bonhoeffer and Tillich.

 

It isn't often a writer combines fairness in judgement and exposition of ideas, with critique that clarifies and allows the reader to give complex ideas a hearing that is both fair and well informed. Published first in English in 1969, it's really about Protestant Theology in the first half of the 20th Century.

 

But for all that has been published in the past 50 years, this book has an excitement and enthusiasm for these great thinkers, perhaps due to the proximity contemporary and continuing influence of such seminal and provocative thinkers. Bultmann was still alive, Barth, Tillich and Gogarten all died in the previous few years, and Bonhoeffer was in vogue and being exploited to serve various emerging and radical theological agendas.

 

Zahrnt has read deeply and widely in these writers and their interlocutors. This is historical theology as it should be written; by a theologian both respectful and lucid in interpreting both the theology and the religious, historical and intellectual context of Protestant theology in the first half of the 20th Century. The actual period covered is from 1919/22 (Barth's Romans 1st and 2nd Editions) till Tillich's 'On the Boundary', an autobiographical sketch and self-summing up, published in 1968. Almost exactly 50 years.