Scripture: Jonah 2:1-10; Psalm 130
This is the second of several sermons based on the book of Jonah. I realize some of you weren’t here last week, some of you may not have total recall of where we were with the story last week, and I can stand a little refresher myself, just to get myself oriented properly. So let me begin with just a quick recap.
I’m not going to try to recap all the thoughts the story inspired in me, just the story itself. I should say—I didn’t say it last week—that we don’t really know anything about Jonah. There is a prophet Jonah mentioned elsewhere in the Bible—no guarantee it’s the same Jonah, but even if it is, we still don’t know much about him. In the book of Jonah, all we’re told is that he was the son of Amitai. So this Jonah could be anyone really—the book doesn’t seem to care—could be anyone. Could be you or me. I think that point is made pretty clear from the beginning.
So anyway, out of the blue God comes to this everyman, anyman Jonah and says: Come here. Or rather, go there. To Nineveh, the capital of Assyria (located in present day Iraq). I have some sort of unpleasant things to say to the Ninevites, and (it’s your lucky day) I’d like you to say them for me. So Jonah went “there” (opposite direction). Your basic no-brainer as far as Jonah was concerned. He didn’t like the Ninevites. The Ninevites weren’t likely to like him. Go preach hellfire and damnation to the Ninevites, not dropping leaflets from helicopters but actually standing on the downtown mall on a Friday after five and preaching hellfire and damnation? No way, as far as Jonah was concerned.
He got on a ship headed for Spain, hid himself, and went to sleep. Not good enough. God caused a storm to come up. Turns out it was a ploy to get Jonah out of hiding. The sailors tried everything and finally decided there was someone on board who was causing disaster to befall them, and they came to the correct conclusion that it was Jonah. Jonah, to his credit, admitted he was the cause of their trouble and told them that if they threw him overboard they would be ok. The sailors, to their credit, tried everything else, but when all else failed, they threw Jonah overboard. The storm stopped. The ship and the sailors were saved. And lo and behold a large fish, which Jesus later called a whale and which has been thought of as a whale ever since, a large fish came along and swallowed Jonah, and Jonah we are told lived three days and three nights in the belly of the fish. That’s where we left off the story last week.
This week the reading, chapter two, consists almost entirely of a prayer Jonah is supposed to have said from within the belly of the whale. At the end of the prayer, at the end of the chapter Jonah is unceremoniously deposited, the scripture says the fish spewed him out, on dry land, essentially back where he started from. At which point God says to him, to paraphrase: “OK let’s try this again.” Which is where we’ll pick up the story next week.
Today we’re dealing just with that part of the story from the point where Jonah is picked up by the fish at sea to the point where he is dropped off on dry land, and what Jonah is reported to have said while making the trip. Last week I was pretty clear what the part of the story we were dealing with was about. It was about someone trying to get away from God, and it at least raised the question whether we do that too, in our own many cunning and creative ways. That was how the story was speaking to me. This week I’m not so sure how the story is speaking to me. And it’s not that it’s not speaking to me. It’s that I have several different kinds of messages I’m getting from the story, some of them congenial to my way of thinking, some of them not so much. So for today rather than try to construct some coherent single theme from the story, let me try to describe the several meanings the story presents to me.
Let’s start with what seems to me like an obvious message. It’s not all that easy to escape from God. Jonah tried, tried his darnedest, and didn’t succeed. One reason he didn’t succeed is the fairly simple thought that there is nowhere that God is not. I began worship both last week and this week with the words of Psalm 139 that seem to fit the book of Jonah quite well. “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven you are there. If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, your hand shall hold me fast.”
To me this is a little bit more than saying God is big, God is everywhere, omnipresent is the theological word. To me it’s more intimate, more personal than that. It’s more like the book title I’ve seen somewhere, “Everywhere I Go There I Am”. I haven’t read the book, but I suspect what the author is getting at is not all that different from saying “everywhere I go there God is”, not because God is out there but because God is so all mixed up, all involved in who we are, in who I am as an individual that there just is no getting away. Jonah’s mistake was not that he didn’t realize that God would be in Spain too, or in the middle of the ocean. It was that he didn’t realize that God was actually inseparable from Jonah. You could say it all amounts to the same thing, and maybe so. But maybe you can sense the difference I’m trying to describe here.
There is another way to get at something of the same thing, maybe, that uses different images. I was talking last week about how I believed in some sense that we are all engaged in a life-song search for God, even though we don’t all necessarily think of it that way or use those words. What the Jonah story might also suggest is that it is not so much we, or not only we, who are the seekers, but God, that God spends our lives seeking us and does not give up and sooner or later finds us
This is not the same thing as saying that eventually everyone becomes a believer, which is manifestly not the case. I don’t have any trouble letting non-believers be non-believers. There are many people who don’t consciously have God in their life, who don’t think they are looking for God, and who don’t think God is looking for them. I have a little more trouble imagining that anyone, believer, non-believer, sometime believer, that anyone forever escapes the presence I call God, even if they do not, again not because we are successful in our search, but because God is successful in her search. And as a believer, just as I do believe, as I said last week, that we are all in some way in search of God, so as a believer, I do believe as the saying says that “bidden or unbidden, God is present and will in some way find every one of us.
Now here is quite a different kind of thought that the story suggests to me, especially the chapter 2 part of the story. Let me put it this way: It is important for us to recognize that there is a larger picture to our lives, even though we may not be aware, cannot be aware, of what that larger picture is. I’m sure that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, just like that, so let me connect it back to the story.
When “the sign of Jonah” is referred to in the gospels, it is pretty clear that the reference is to the time that Jesus will spend in the tomb: just as Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so Jesus will spend several days in the tomb and on the third day rise. For Jesus, Jonah in the belly of the whale is clearly a figure of death. I’m thinking it probably was pretty deathlike for Jonah too. He describes himself as having been in the belly of Sheol, roughly equivalent to Hell, completely cut off from God and from life, in utter darkness, no hope. Even the sailors must have seen it that way. They tried not to throw Jonah overboard because they knew it meant certain death for him, which maybe seemed a bit severe, but finally they did and when he got swallowed up by the fish they just figured that well, ok, he didn’t drown. He got eaten by a fish. Either way, it was the end of Jonah.
From a certain understandable perspective, Jonah getting eaten by a fish was the completion of deserved, though maybe excessive, punishment. God wanted Jonah to do something. Jonah refused, ran away, went AWOL. God got angry, confronted Jonah, and arranged for him to be thrown overboard and eaten by a sea monster. You couldn’t blame Jonah for seeing things this way. We, of course, can see the bigger picture. The sea monster who comes along is actually not an instrument of judgment but an instrument of mercy. The sea monster has been sent not to eat Jonah but to carry him back to dry land, to save him from drowning. That Jonah ends up in the belly of the whale is not the end of Jonah but his deliverance.
Again, from Jonah’s perspective, he is surrounded by darkness. There is no light at the end of the tunnel. There is no light and no tunnel, just the darkness and it is everywhere. If you had asked Jonah, he would have said he was cut off from God. In fact he did say it. “I am driven away from your sight…” Finally he was successful at getting away from God, though realizing too late that that’s not what he most deeply wanted after all. But sometimes darkness is all we can see of God. If Jonah could have seen the big picture the way we can as we read the story, he would have known that he had not been abandoned or cast away from the sight of God. He would have known that what he was going through was not a punishment or a penance, not a time of trial or testing, but that he was being delivered, saved, if you will. The darkness he was surrounded by was not Sheol at all, though it must have felt that way. It was God. The darkness Jonah felt was not a darkness of grief or of despair. It was a darkness that held him safe, protected him and sped him back to shore. Sometimes darkness is all we can know of God, but that does not mean that God is not there. It means that God is in the darkness, or that is using the darkness, or that God is transforming the darkness, or that God is the darkness, or all of the above. Not so easy to escape God, not even when you think that God has gotten away from you.
Of course easy for me to say. Easy for me to say when I’m sitting somewhere calmly considering the story of Jonah and seeing what’s really going on, seeing the big picture. Of course we don’t have that advantage, the advantage of seeing the story of our lives from the outside. We don’t have that advantage even in relatively good times, to say nothing of times such as Jonah was going through. And the message of Jonah is not that we should somehow know what the big picture is and not fret because everything is going to turn out fine. But Jonah does remind us that there is a bigger picture, and we should be assured at all times, and especially in the midst of difficult times, that there is a lot more to this story than what appears at any given time, a lot more than we can see, a lot more yet to come. Which is one way of putting what Jesus was trying to tell his disciples as they considered his death. There’s a bigger picture here folks. Remember the sign of Jonah?
And it’s not just how we view our own situation. The bigger picture also has to do with how we imagine God. The God that Jonah was trying to get away from was a God who was demanding, unreasonable, judgmental, angry, and punishing. And the story makes clear that it’s understandable how humans could occasionally think that. God’s love is not some wishy-washy, touchy-feely, feel good kind of affair. But with the advantage of the big picture we are given a glimpse of who God really is, and it is a picture of a God of mercy and a God of deliverance. By the end of chapter two, Jonah is getting a glimpse of this God too. He is in a different place, not just back on shore, but in touch with a different God from the one he thought he was dealing with before, and because of that restored to life. The book of Jonah asks us to consider that maybe to be swallowed up, to be totally consumed by such a God would be a blessing for us too. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 16, 2006