Jonah Hated His Job
Continuing on in our series about all the things you should’ve learned in Sunday school, we’re going to turn our attention to Jonah this week.
It’s hard to know how to talk about the story of Jonah. When people think about Jonah, they think about the whale, as if the point of the book is to somehow prefigure Moby Dick. But the whale is just a piece of the story, kind of a small piece at that.
If we zoom out a bit we see that the heart of Jonah’s story is God's universal compassion. And we could add on a few other things, if we need to, and talk about the transformative power of repentance or the role of humans in the carrying out of God’s plans.
If you don’t remember, the story of Jonah goes something like this. God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh and demand the people turn from their ways back to God. Jonah doesn’t particularly care for the Ninevites so this is a non-starter. Jonah tries to escape God’s call by getting on a boat to travel in another direction- but God stirs up a storm that throws Jonah overboard and lands him in the belly of a whale, wherefrom Jonah prays for rescue, which God does, only to then send Jonah to Nineveh after all. Jonah calls the Ninevites to repentance- and it works. They do repent. And so God embraces the Ninevites. Jonah is pissed about this and retreats to a desert where he spends his days being angry with God while sitting up against a small tree.
Click here to read it in full.
What can we say about this story?
Let’s start with the character of Jonah. Jonah cracks me up. Jonah is one of the few (maybe Jeremiah also fits this category) biblical “prophets” who is called by God, given a mission, accomplishes the mission, and feels horrible about it. Can you imagine being given a task by God, directly, and then succeeding, and then being so angry about your success that you retreat to isolation in the desert? There’s got to be a lesson in there somewhere, though I’m not exactly sure what it is.
Okay, okay, I’ll try. Here goes. God needs humans to carry out his plans. And, when God has a specific plan he wants accomplished, he gets it done even if people aren’t super happy about the role they have to play in that plan. Jonah shows us that such specific plans can be resisted- but ultimately if God wants to get his way, God will get his way- even if he has to be flexible about how the plan gets accomplished.
Let’s talk a little bit more about that flexibility shall we? God sends Jonah to be his hatchet man. Nineveh needs to repent or else. Jonah isn’t going to deliver a flowery message about God- he’s going to make them an offer they can’t refuse. But, God isn’t trapped in his emotions about Nineveh. If he was, he’d be quite inflexible. Think about the feelings of anger and resentment for a second. When you feel these- do they go away easily? If someone “repents,” can you just set those emotions aside? I doubt it. If you’re anything like me, you say to yourself, “Well, repentance is fine, but prove to me that you’re serious.” Not so with God. He breathes a sigh of relief. Violence isn’t God’s number 1 option- it's a relationship. That takes us to our final, and most significant point, which has to do with the depths of God’s compassion.
A central theme in the Book of Jonah is God's concern and compassion for all creation. At the time, Israelites perhaps thought they were God’s only people. They were chosen, and therefore others were not. Jonah’s story shows us this is not the case. Israel was chosen so that God could use them to keep choosing others. God's love extends beyond the Israelites to people from all nations, even those considered enemies. The people of Nineveh, a foreign city, are recipients of God's mercy. Thus- his compassion is universal- offered equally to all people.
What an unpopular message then and now. Jonah hated that message and probably chose skin cancer over embracing God’s universal love for all people. We hate that message too- we want God to smite the people who aren’t like us, who don’t think like us, who we feel want to exclude us. Isn’t that interesting? The way we operate today- we want to exclude people who exclude people like me (or people I care about). Exclusion is considered wrong, but if someone else does some excluding, then we’re perfectly uncomfortable excluding the excluders. You see the problem? We’re currently living in a vicious cycle of excluding and excluding excluders and so on and so on. If we’re not careful, we might all end up alone in a desert.
But this shows us exactly how radical God is. This is a God who is willing to offer acceptance and inclusion to all kinds of people- not just the type of people Jonah considered to be worthy of God’s love. And so the book of Jonah leaves us with big questions to answer. For instance, Who is not worthy of God’s love? Who should God exclude?
We’d be hard pressed to answer those questions. And, because of that, we may need to open our own hearts a little bit more than what is comfortable.
