THE STORY OF JONAH IS SIMPLE, but with the help of James Bruckner’s excellent commentary, each component of the story line teaches us an important lesson.
God asks Jonah to do something. What God asks Jonah to do is precisely stated in Jonah 1:2: “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” This is a dangerous task. God is asking Jonah to be a prophet, to bring the word of the Lord, an unwelcome message, to a people who are not living up to God’s standards.
Jonah refuses. We are not used to this in the Old Testament. The other major and minor prophets all accept the challenge and do what God requests. (Nahum, in fact, seems to do precisely what God wants in presenting oracles of judgment against Nineveh.) Jonah, by contrast, is a kind of anti-prophet, a man who refuses God’s call in the first place and then, when he finally acquiesces, is disappointed in the way God handles things.
Jonah not only refuses, he flees. In this incident we find much about his character. By running to Joppa to seek a ship to Tarshish, Jonah betrays his belief, his conscience, and a certain naïveté. He believes in God and God’s request and has enough faith to hear God’s voice. His conscience tells him that he is doing wrong by refusing God—why else would he flee? And he is naïve to think that he can escape the consequences of his refusal by changing his physical locale.
God punishes Jonah. The punishment—the ocean storm, being thrown overboard, being swallowed by a fish, being spit up on a beach after three days—is the usual focal point of the story in our imaginations.
Jonah complies with God’s request. In the moralistic way the story is often told, the effectiveness and imaginativeness of the punishment is reinforced in our minds because Jonah’s reluctance melts away (and whose wouldn’t?). By all accounts, he gives the Ninevites God’s message straight: “Forty days and Nineveh will be overturned” (3:4).
Jonah gets angry with God for his resolution of the story. When the Ninevites repent, God doesn’t carry out Jonah’s threat of destruction in forty days. Jonah is peeved. His prophetic integrity is on the line.
But the moralistic way the story is often told, emphasizing Jonah’s disobedience and God’s surreal punishment, can mask some of the other important dimensions of the story. Jonah as anti-prophet is far closer to our modern experience of vocation, perhaps, than we sometimes realize. We don’t hear God’s call so clearly—we have to take classes on finding God’s will for our life. We think of our religion as a religion of thinking right rather than doing good.
Another equally valuable way to read the story of Jonah is to focus on the first and last parts rather than the middle three sections. God makes an extravagant request of Jonah. It is a dangerous task, a mission impossible. Yet the message of Jonah is that this kind of request is not the exception but the rule. What is exceptional about Jonah is that he refuses God’s call. The story of Jonah teaches us that we are all required to serve God, to act based on the graceful salvation God gives us. Moreover, Jonah teaches us that some of us, sometimes, meet the challenge and some of us, sometimes, don’t. What is universal is that God calls us all.
So what does this reading lead us to do? (1) We should expect to be summoned by God to do something for the kingdom, and we should seek it and embrace it when we find it. This is not a burden; rather, it is an affirmation of who we are. We are the called ones. Followers of Christ are not just groupies but members of the road team. Mature Christians hear the calls of God—and there will be many in our lifetimes—and our hearing leads seamlessly to action.
(2) We should not be overly concerned if our actions don’t lead to the outcomes we expect. Jonah wanted results that he felt vindicated his message of punishment. God had a wider grace to apply to the Ninevites. Once we have understood God’s call—with the church’s help, of course—and have faithfully acted in ways consistent with that call and the gifts God has given us, we must trust God to bring about a resolution. That is God’s business, not ours. Others may plant the seeds, we may water and tend, but God gives the growth.
Terry C. Muck