Jonah and Me

Jonah and Me

I have always thought of Jonah as biblical comic relief. I mean, it’s hilarious. God speaks to Jonah and says: “Go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it.”[1] Now, you understand what Nineveh was. It was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire. That’s the empire that in 722 BCE destroyed the northern Hebrew kingdom of Israel and scattered its people. That scattering is the origin of the famous lost tribes of Israel. The ten tribes of the northern kingdom disappeared when conquered by the Assyrians never to reappear. Nineveh was the capital city of that empire, the enemy, the destroyer of Hebrew states. That’s where God told Jonah to go. It’s like it would be if during my time in Soviet Moscow more than forty years ago God had said to me go to Red Square and cry out against Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet Union that embodies it. Nothing good could have come of that for me, and it would have had no effect on the Soviet Union whatsoever. Nothing good could come to Jonah from going and crying out against Nineveh, and I doubt that he thought doing it would have any effect whatsoever on Nineveh.

Jonah heard what God said to him and thought: “Yeah. Right. I don’t think so. I’m outta here.” And he heads for a place called Tarshish, which was probably in Spain, in the exact opposite direction from Israel than to Nineveh. West, not east. So God sends a terrible storm upon Jonah’s ship, and what does Jonah do? He goes below and falls asleep. I mean, really? Everyone else on board is laboring mightily to try to save the ship and their lives, and Jonah goes below and falls asleep. The captain wakes him up, and eventually the crew decides that it must be Jonah’s god who is causing the storm. So with Noah’s consent they throw him overboard. Whereupon he is swallowed up by a “large fish.” We’ve heard that fish called a whale, but the ancient world that produced this story probably didn’t know that whales weren’t fish. Whatever. Jonah gets swallowed and lives in the belly of the large fish for three days. Whenever I read this story I’m reminded of the song “It Ain’t Necessarily So” from George and Ira Gershwins opera Porgy and Bess. “It ain’t necessarily so. It ain’t necessarily so. The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.” And: “Old Jonah he lived in a whale. Old Jonah he lived in a whale. Yes he made his home in that fish’s abdomen. Old Jonah he lived in a whale. It ain’t necessarily so….”[2] So Jonah lives inside this whale or fish or whatever for three days. Yeah. Right. That’s ridiculous. It might make a great story, but no one could live inside a fish. The idea that Jonah did is really quite funny. After three days the whale or fish or whatever vomits Jonah up onto a beach. The lesson? Try to run away from God and you end up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit. Which is actually pretty funny itself, isn’t it?

So there’s poor old Jonah on a beach in a pool of whale vomit, and God speaks to him again. God says: “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” I doubt that Jonah was any happier to hear this message the second time than he had been the first, but trying to run away from God hadn’t worked out too well for him, so this time he goes. The story doesn’t report God telling him what to say in Nineveh, but it does report what he said. He said “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” That’s it. He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t say who’s going to overthrow Nineveh. He doesn’t how whoever does it is going to do it. He just says it will happen in forty days. Whereupon every one in Nineveh, from the king on down, repents and puts on sackcloth. The king declares a fast. And the fasting from food and drink and the wearing of sackcloth extends even to the animals living in the city. Really? The animals? The storyteller can only have intended that as a joke. Imagine some poor donkey being forced into sackcloth and denied food and drink. What did she ever do to deserve such a fate? Nothing. Imagine making a film of this part of the story. I can just hear the audience roaring as some poor fool tries to put sackcloth on a reluctant donkey because the king has told him he has to. Hilarious! In any event, God decides not to destroy Nineveh as planned and spares the city.

Just as hilarious as someone trying to put sackcloth on a donkey is Jonah’s response to what the people of Nineveh did in response to his nine word sermon.[3] The text says: “But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry.” Displeasing? Really? The people had repented of their evil, violent ways and saved themselves and their city from destruction. What’s displeasing about that? What’s to be angry at about that? Nothing, of course, except that Jonah apparently didn’t want the people of Nineveh to repent and be saved. He wanted them to be destroyed, and he got mad when they weren’t. Makes Jonah sound quite the fool doesn’t it? A good comic actor could really ham it up playing Jonah’s displeasure and anger.

Jonah is so angry that he prays to God this way: “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why if fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it better for me to die than to live.” Talk about an overreaction!

So Jonah goes outside the city and makes a “booth” for himself. He sits down in it, “waiting to see what would become of the city.” Really? The story has already told us that nothing is going to happen to the city. I guess Jonah still hoped God would get with Jonah’s program and come wipe out Nineveh despite the people’s repentance. In any event, God sends a bush to give Jonah more shade. He’s already sitting in the shade of his “booth,” but never mind. Jonah quite likes the bush, but the next day God sends a worm that kills it; and Jonah gets mad all over again. God sends a hot east wind that makes poor old Jonah even more miserable. Why he doesn’t just pack up and go home at this point I don’t know. The story doesn’t say. Once again, Jonah overreacts. He says: “It is better for me to die than to live.” God dismisses Jonah’s complaining saying, in effect, I’m God, you’re not, deal with it. And the story ends. I have always found the story of Jonah to be hilarious. I do see some theological learning in it. You can’t run away from God. God is God, and we’re not. God accepts everyone, even people who don’t worship God. There is learning here, but mostly I’ve thought of Jonah as funny, as biblical comic relief.

The other day, because I was going to use part of the story of Jonah in a sermon I was scheduled to give, I mentioned Jonah to the Rev. Kimbrough Besheer, a retired Episcopal priest who has been my Jungian analyst for the last twenty-one years. Kimbrough is a graduate of the C. J. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. So, in good Jungian fashion, he tends to think of stories in mythological terms, at least if there is any way to think of a particular story mythologically. He said he sees the story of Jonah as a typical mythic hero story complete with night sea voyage, a common mythic theme. He sees it as a story of a psychological journey. So I thought I’d play with that notion some and see what comes of it. Is there a lesson for me in thinking of Jonah neither as comedy nor as theology but as myth? Perhaps. Let’s see.

Jonah receives a call from God. It is a call to act the hero, a call to do God’s will in the world though doing it would be quite dangerous. To get to be the hero Jonah has to undergo a journey that is a trial. He has to survive a threat to his life. He has to go through a storm and come out on the other side. Jonah’s decision to flee to Tarshish is the beginning of his hero journey. We can see it as a psychological or even spiritual journey. No one is automatically a hero. No one becomes a hero without undergoing a perilous journey. A classic example in Greek culture is the story of Odysseus, who undertakes a journey home from Ilium that exposes him and his crew to numerous life threatening perils before its culmination. I suppose it’s possible to see the story of Jesus as a mythic hero journey too. He undergoes suffering and death before rising and fulfilling his true destiny.

Jonah goes through his journey of danger too. He is on a ship at night. In mythology the sea is often a symbol of primordial chaos. It is unknown. It is dangerous. It can be calm, peaceful, and welcoming. But it can also be extremely dangerous. Sailors have lost their lives on it since there first were any sailors who ventured out upon it. On the open sea the sailor is at the mercy of the elements, and he cannot control those elements. Jonah’s ship is at the mercy of the storm that the Lord sends upon it. At first Jonah isn’t even aware of the danger he is in. He’s asleep below, but he gets awakened to the danger. When he does he makes a heroic offer. He believes that he is responsible for the storm, so he tells the crew to throw him overboard. At first they refuse. They do everything they can think of to ride out the storm. They try to row back to shore, but they can’t do it. The storm threatens all of their lives, Jonah’s as much as the others.

The storm comes at night. The text of Jonah doesn’t explicitly say that it comes at night, but that it comes at night is a reasonable inference from the fact that Jonah is asleep. Like the sea, the night can be calm and peaceful; but like the sea it can be threatening too. We can’t see in the dark. And of course physical darkness is often a metaphor for spiritual darkness, for not knowing. Danger lurks in the dark. Combine a sea voyage with darkness and the possibilities for calamity multiply. The hero is thrown into a world he cannot control, a world he doesn’t understand, a world in which he cannot see, and a world that threatens to overwhelm him, even to destroy him.

The storm would have killed Jonah had the Lord not provided the large fish. The fish saves Jonah from death. It gives him shelter. It provides for him a safe place in the midst of the danger of the sea. There he can recover. There he can come to his senses. In the belly of the fish Jonah says a prayer that sounds like a psalm. It speaks of the Lord already having rescued Jonah though he is not yet back on dry land. Jonah’s prayer is worth looking at, for it casts good light on the nature of his journey. Jonah speaks of the hardships of his journey:

You cast me into the deep,

   into the heart of the seas,

    and the flood surrounded me;

all your waves and your billows

    passed over me….

The waters closed in over me;

   the deep surrounded me;

weeds were wrapped around

                my head

   at the roots of the mountains.

I went down to the land

   whose bars closed upon me

                forever….

Jonah knew he was lost, and what was worst was that he was lost from his God. His prayer includes these lines:

Then I said, ‘I am driven away

  from your sight;

how shall I look again

   upon your holy temple?

Then Jonah says that he prayed to Lord, the Lord heard his prayer, and rescued him. He then vows:

But I with the voice of

                thanksgiving

     will sacrifice to you;

what I have vowed I will pay.

   Deliverance belongs to the

                Lord!

It is then that the fish vomits Jonah up on the beach and he undertakes the rest of his hero journey to bring God’s word to Nineveh, that great city. Jonah’s prayer recaps his journey into the belly of the fish. It tells of the hardships he went through and speaks of how the hardest thing was feeling isolated from God. It then tells of how God rescued him, even though God hasn’t quite yet rescued him fully. And it speaks of Jonah’s commitment to be true to the God from whom deliverance comes. To be perfectly honest I don’t quite see how what Jonah does, feels, and says after Nineveh repents and is saved fits into the myth of the hero. He seem he still to have wanted Nineveh destroyed. I suppose the hero destroying the enemy is a common part of hero myths, and the target of Jonah’s heroic act wasn’t destroyed. I guess we could understand him to be frustrated that his hero story in the end wasn’t all that heroic. In any event, I will end my consideration of Jonah’s story as hero myth here. It is enough.

If the story of Jonah truly has a mythic element to it, then it must speak to the experiences of women and men who also feel a call and who also go through rough times to respond to it. It turns out that that is actually quite a common experience, and I’m going to relate Jonah’s story to my own story as a way of illustrating how mythic tales like that of Jonah speak to ordinary people like me.

In 1994 I was trying to run my own law office. I’d been a lawyer since 1981, but I had run out of employment options in downtown Seattle. I had worked for three quite different law firms including the small Seattle office of the fourth largest law firm in the country but had not been offered partnership in any of them. So when I got laid off by the last of them I decided to open my own office in the suburban town of Edmonds, Washington. At first that went all right, but by early 1994 I was running into problems. I found that I was having trouble forcing myself to do the law work that had come in to me. Not that there was a lot of that work, but there was enough. So I undertook a Jungian psychological exercise that I had read about. In that exercise you quiet your mind, have a way of writing down what happens, and ask yourself questions about things that are troubling you; or at least that’s how I remember it. I asked myself: Why am I having so much trouble doing the law work that I have to do? Immediately, and I mean with the passage of no time whatsoever, a voice came from somewhere deep in my psyche and said: “You’re not a lawyer.” I was surprised to say the least. Of course I was a lawyer, and that’s what I said to the voice. The voice insisted: “You’re not a lawyer.” I argued with it. I said I’m sitting in an office that says on the door Thomas C. Sorenson, Attorney at Law. My Washington State Bar Association number is 11977. I said I have files here that have legal matters in them that people had brought to me. The voice kept insisting: “You’re not a lawyer.” So I asked: Okay, what am I? Again, immediately, with no time having passed for me to have thought about it, the voice said: “You’re a preacher.” I was stunned. I thought of myself as a Christian. I was a member of a church. In fact, at that time I was Moderator, the lay head of the congregation, of Richmond Beach Congregational United Church of Christ in suburban Seattle. But “preacher” wasn’t even a word I used. I referred to the church professional at my church as minister or as pastor but not as preacher. I saw no point in continuing the exercise and shut it down.

That’s when my night sea voyage began. Not long thereafter my wife and daughter (she was sixteen at the time) did what amounted to an intervention with me. They sat me down in our living room, and my daughter, bless her heart, said to me: “Dad, you’re depressed.” She was in high school, but she saw what was going on with me far better than I did. She meant I had clinical depression, and she was right. I called my primary care physician, got a referral to a psychiatrist, and made an appointment. He diagnosed moderately severe clinical depression and put me on antidepressant medication. It helped, but only some. I began to sense very strongly that there was something else I was supposed to be doing with my life besides practicing law. What I thought I wanted to do was go back to school to get a Ph.D. in systematic theology. I had gotten into reading good Christian systematic theology by then (Paul Tillich and Douglas John Hall mostly), and I would have loved to have been a professional systematic theologian; but I knew that wasn’t possible. To do it I would have had to move at least to the San Francisco Bay area, and there was no way my wife was going to do that. Besides, as I said to myself over and over again, you’re too old (I turned forty-eight in 1994) and you can’t afford it. So I carried on trying to practice law, doing it badly, and getting more and more depressed. By about 1996 I was making essentially no money. My wife had a good career as a sign language interpreter, but while that work is immensely important it never made anyone rich. We sold our house and bought a much less expensive condo. We sold the boat we had bought when I was making good lawyer money. That one really hurt, but we had no choice. I was truly at a dead end. I had sunk to the bottom of the sea, and I knew of no way to get myself back on dry land.

Back in about 1994 the interim minister at that Richmond Beach UCC church that I belonged to, the Rev. Dr. Dennis Hughes, had introduced me and others at the church to Jungian psychology. Dennis and I became quite close, and one day he gave me the business card of the Rev. Kimbrough Besheer, Jungian analyst, whom I mentioned earlier in this essay. I put it in my wallet and didn’t think of it again for a couple of years. Then, in early 1997, for reasons I’ll never really understand, I pulled that card out of my wallet. I have no idea why I even still had it, but pulling that card out of my wallet and making my first appointment with Kimbrough was the beginning of my time in the belly of a whale, a time of relative safety but not yet the final answer. Early in my time with Kimbrough I had a dream that I didn’t understand, but he did. I was walking across a beach—notice the connection to Jonah, though I wasn’t in a pool of whale vomit. I was wearing wingtip shoes. I came to the edge of the water and could go no further. The water, quite calm as I remember it, opened out before me endlessly. There was no land in sight. Kimbrough knew. Those wingtip shoes were a symbol of my being a lawyer. I actually had wingtip dress shoes at the time and wore them when I went to court. I had gone as far as they could take me. I had come to the end of my time as a lawyer. A different future opened out before me, a future of calm like the calm of the ocean in my dream. And I kept saying to myself: Yes, I know that I’m supposed to be doing something else; but I don’t know what it is, and besides, I’m too old and I can’t afford it.

Then the miracle happened. At least it was a miracle for me. I learned that the Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry (we just called it STM) was creating within its structure what they called, and call, the Institute of Ecumenical Theological Studies (IETS). Seattle University is a Jesuit university, thoroughly Catholic in its orientation; and because SU’s Catholicism is Jesuit it is for the most part a very good thing. The University’s School of Theology and Ministry, though it didn’t and doesn’t form Catholic priests, had offered a fully accredited Master of Divinity degree for some time. I learned that the leaders of several mainline Protestant denominations in the Seattle area, including my own United Church of Christ, had worked with STM to develop a way for Protestant students to get a seminary education at Seattle University that culminated with an M.Div., the degree required for ordination in most Protestant denominations. I attended the opening ceremony for IETS on July 1, 1997, though I’m not at all sure I know why. The first class of Protestants had started at STM that summer, but I wasn’t one of them. I remember saying to my wife not long thereafter that I just had to enroll in STM. I didn’t yet know why. Though that voice from deep in my psyche had told me three years earlier that I’m a preacher it still hadn’t occurred to me that my call was to parish ministry. My wife asked me how I was going to pay for it. I said I didn’t know. I said I’d go into debt if I had to (and I did). I closed my law office at the end of July, 1997, and in September I began my studies for a Master of Divinity degree at Seattle University.

Then the second miracle happened. I knew that I would have to have some kind of part-time job while I was going to school. I had no idea what that job would be. One day in August, 1997, I read through the help wanted ads of the Seattle Times newspaper. I had heard for years that the help wanted ads are really no way to find a job, but I looked anyway. There it was. The Legal Action Center of Catholic Community Services of Western Washington was looking for a half time attorney. I called and went in for an interview. The Legal Action Center was, and is, a legal services program that provides free legal representation to low income tenants in eviction cases. It styles itself as a homelessness prevention agency. I think they were as surprised by me as I was by them. They weren’t expecting to get a trial lawyer with years of experience who had been a senior litigation associate with the fourth largest law firm in the country, but that’s what I was. They knew I would be going to seminary. Mark, the director, asked me if I’d have a problem working with people with an “alternative lifestyle,” or something like that. It turns out that my immediate supervisor would be a lesbian woman. I assured them that I wouldn’t want to work for an agency where people like her were not welcome and fully accepted. So they offered me the job. I took it. At long last I was doing law that felt worth doing. Moreover, because I worked twenty hours a week and Catholic Community Services is an agency of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle, I got a twenty-five percent tuition reduction at Seattle University. Whenever I doubt divine providence I remember that Legal Action Center job.

STM and the Legal Action Center were my whale. They held me. They gave me a safe space in which to come to my senses. They gave me time to figure out where God was really calling me, which turned out to be to parish ministry in the United Church of Christ. I was a student at STM from September, 1997, to December, 2000. I worked for the Legal Action Center from September, 1997, to February, 2003, when the part-time call I had gotten as a UCC church pastor became fulltime. I thank God for both STM and the Legal Action Center. They rescued me from the storm of my life. With them my depression cleared up, and I stopped taking medication for it. I haven’t taken it for years now. They were my whale. Thank God for whales.

Graduating from STM with my M.Div. degree was, I guess, a little bit like getting vomited out of the whale, though I still worked for Legal Action Center. I knew God was calling me, and I knew I was ready to say yes if yes were in any way possible. Now, over seventeen years later, I am a recently retired, ordained UCC minister with nearly sixteen years of pastoral experience. That’s not a lot compared to my colleagues who went into ministry earlier in life than I did, but it’s what I was able to do. Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ in Monroe, Washington, became my Nineveh. It was where God called me to do God’s work. Of course I never preached against it like Jonah preached against Nineveh, but still. God called Jonah to Nineveh. God called me to Monroe. Thanks be to God for our personal Ninevehs.

So that funny story of Jonah turns out indeed to be a myth of the psychological or spiritual journey in response to God’s call, not that I consider myself any kind of hero. For most of us that journey has had its storms. It has had the darkness of night. We have been lost, and we have been found. We have said no, or we have said I can’t, or we have said I don’t want to, and God sent us God’s storms. God also sends us God’s whales. Then God sends us out of our whale to do God’s work. I like to think that I have never resented what God has done in my life the way Jonah resented God not destroying Nineveh.[4] Jonah’s story is indeed mythic. It is archetypical. It speaks of the journeys so many of us have been on. And yes, it really is funny.

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[1] The Scripture quotations contained herein are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

[2] One Sunday years ago the lay worship leader who was assisting with my worship service got me singing that song with him in front of the congregation. Some of our people may have been shocked to hear their pastor singing “It ain’t necessarily so,” although of course lyricist Ira Gershwin was absolutely right about that. I used that line as an epigraph to my book Liberating the Bible, in which I say that a great many things in the Bible ain’t necessarily so.

[3] I’m pretty sure some church people would appreciate it if we preachers would limit our sermons to nine words, or even nine hundred, but I digress.

[4] Jonah would have loved the biblical book Nahum. It exults in the violent destruction of Nineveh by the Babylonians. There Nineveh gets what Jonah wanted it to get, not that I think all that violence was really God’s doing.