A Reflection on Jonah and the Whale

 

A Reflection on Jonah and the Whale

April 3, 2023

 

Say the name Jonah to most people, and they’ll immediately think of Jonah in the belly of a whale. Yes, Jonah in the belly of a whale is part of his story, but it certainly isn’t all of his story. More fully, the story goes like this. God tells a man named Jonah to go to Nineveh and prophesy there. The name Nineveh may not mean much to most of us, but it would have meant a lot to the ancient Hebrew people who were this story’s first audience. Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, one of a succession of empires that rose and fell far to the east of Israel in what is now Iraq. In the eighth century BCE, Assyria threatened both of the Hebrew kingdoms then in existence. In 722 BCE it conquered and destroyed the northern one of those two kingdoms. To this story’s first audience, the name Nineveh would have evoked fear and anger. It was the capital of the enemy, of the evil people who did very bad things to them and their nation.

Jonah knew what Nineveh was. He knew it as the principal city of Israel’s implacable enemy Assyria. He thought something like, “Go to that horrible, dangerous place and preach the word of the God of Israel to them? I don’t think so!” So rather than go east from Israel to Nineveh, he boarded a ship headed west toward a place called Tarshish, which was probably in the southern part of what today is Spain. He was trying to get as far away from Nineveh as he possibly could get. A great storm came up. The ship was in danger of sinking. Everyone onboard faced death by drowning. Everyone thought that someone’s god must be causing the storm. Eventually they decide it is Jonah’s God who was causing the storm because Jonah was trying to run away from God’s call. So they threw Jonah overboard, more or less with his consent. The Lord, that is, Yahweh, Jonah’s God, provides a “great fish,” maybe a whale or maybe not, to swallow Jonah. Jonah is in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights. The Lord then has the great fish disgorge Jonah, who, we can assume, ended up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit.

At that point Jonah says all right already. I’ll go to Nineveh and prophesy to them. He goes there, but all he says is that in forty days Nineveh will be overthrown. Whereupon all the people from the king on down repent, fast, and put on sackcloth. They even put sackcloth on their animals. The Lord does not destroy Nineveh, which makes Jonah go off and pout. The Lord just says to Jonah that the Lord cares about Nineveh, which I guess is why the Lord didn’t destroy the city. The text doesn’t say whether Jonah ever stopped pouting. I seriously doubt that he did.

Frankly, I’ve never taken the story of Jonah very seriously. I’ve thought of it as biblical comic relief. I find Jonah very funny. I can imagine a good standup comedian having great fun with this story, as Bill Cosby once did. Recently however, I read something that has led me to reconsider my take on Jonah. As the thing I read suggested, I have now been thinking of the story of Jonah as an archetypical story of many people’s spiritual journey, my own included. In this story, God calls Jonah to a particular ministry, namely, going and preaching to Nineveh. Preaching to the enemy in the enemy’s capital city probably was about the last thing in the world it would ever have occurred to Jonah to do. When God told him to do it, it was no doubt the last thing in the world Jonah wanted to do. Jonah heard God’s call. There’s no doubt about that. He does not, however, immediately take up the ministry to which God has called him. Quite the opposite. He doesn’t just tell God no, he tries to run away from God and God’s call to him. God, however, doesn’t give up on him. As Jonah runs from God, God causes him to hit rock bottom. I mean, Jonah being swallowed by a whale (or whatever it was) is a pretty good metaphor for the many ways in which we humans hit rock bottom. Then God brings Jonah up from rock bottom. It’s a messy procedure what with the whale vomit and all, but Jonah comes back up. He goes to Nineveh, and when what he does there doesn’t produce the result he wanted, he gets all upset.

Let me illustrate what I mean by saying that the story of Jonah is archetypical of many spiritual journeys by comparing what happens to Jonah to my own spiritual journey. I used to be a lawyer. I started practicing law in 1981. By 1994 I was badly burning out on law. I developed moderate clinical depression for which I was taking drugs that at least kept me from killing myself. When I did a Jungian psychological exercise in an attempt to figure out why I was having so much trouble with law, a voice from deep within me told me, “You’re not a lawyer!” The voice that said those words arose from my subconscious mind without my having ever consciously thought that I wasn’t a lawyer. Of course I’m a lawyer, I thought. When the voice insisted that I wasn’t, I asked it what I was. It said, “You’re a preacher!” I thought that answer was absurd. Though I didn’t think of it this way at the time, I now understand that that voice was God calling me to a ministry it had never occurred to me pursue and that I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to pursue. Jonah never thought of preaching to Nineveh on his own. I had never thought of myself as a preacher or of ever becoming one on my own. Jonah fled from God’s call. I didn’t flee from it so much as I just ignored it. It made no sense to me, so I put it aside and pretty much forgot about it.

God didn’t give up on Jonah. God didn’t give up on me either. Three years later, in 1997, an opportunity to receive seminary training as a Christian minister arose in Seattle, the place where I had worked and near which I lived. When I learned of that opportunity, which hadn’t existed in Seattle before, I knew I had to go the university that offered that opportunity (Seattle University) and earn a Master of Divinity degree. This time it wasn’t that a voice spoke directly to me saying that I had to do that. Somehow I just knew it. I didn’t know how I knew. I just knew that I had to do it, and I knew it as clearly as I had ever known anything. I understand now in a way I didn’t then that that knowledge of mine was precisely God not giving up on me. It was God calling me again, or still, to become what God knew I was but I didn’t. Depression and a failing law practice were my belly of the whale. It was my rock bottom. The Seattle University School of Theology and Ministry was the beach God brought me up to. I don’t recall any whale vomit, but through that school God was bringing me up from my rock bottom. I earned that MDiv degree in December, 2000. In March 2002 Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ called me as their pastor. That little church wasn’t and isn’t anything like Nineveh. Still, in a way it became my Nineveh. It became the place where I could and did perform the ministry of preaching, pastoral care, and other pastoral duties to which God had first called me eight years earlier.

Jonah’s pouting when Nineveh wasn’t destroyed is harder to fit into my story. Here’s one way I can do it. Jonah’s ministry didn’t produce the result he wanted. He wanted Nineveh destroyed, and it wasn’t. It is true of many of us in professionals in ministry that our work doesn’t always, or usually, produce the result we want. Or at least it doesn’t at all appear to do that. The people with whom we minister to all appearances remain the people they were before we began to minister with them. I don’t know that many of us pout about our ministry’s apparent lack of effect, but many of us find ministry disappointing for that reason. We need to understand that just as God cared for Nineveh and didn’t destroy it, so God cares about the people with whom we minister and will bring them along on God’s time not our time.

So the story of Jonah has a lot more depth for me than it has had before. Though it really is pretty funny, it is a lot more than mere biblical comic relief. The details of my faith journey are very different from Jonah’s, but the broad outline is the same. It’s the same for a great many people God calls to ministry. We get a call. We deny that call. God keeps calling us. Often we hit rock bottom because we deny God’s call. God can then bring us up from rock bottom and send us on our way to do the ministry to which God had originally called us.

There’s one aspect of my story that I don’t think is part of Jonah’s. I mentioned it briefly above. God knew who I am far better than I did. God knew I wasn’t really a Russian historian, which is the first profession I trained for. God was more sure that I wasn’t a lawyer. My decision to go to law school when no university jobs for Russian historians were available in the mid-1970s was poorly thought out. It wasn’t the result of any intentional discernment on my part. It was just something I could do, so I did it. Being a lawyer was fine for quite a few years, but eventually who I really am conflicted with being a lawyer so much that I hit rock bottom. The first day I walked into Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ as it pastor I knew that I was already a better pastor than I ever was a lawyer. And I was. Not long before she died of cancer my wife of thirty years said to me “I’m so glad you finally are who you really are.” I don’t think Jonah was ever finally a prophet. I know that I am a pastor. I’m retired now, but my years of active ministry were the best years of my professional life. By far. And I still get to preach and lead worship occasionally. For calling me, letting me hit rock bottom, then calling me back up to become who I really am all I can say to God is, “From the bottom of my heart, thank you.”