Rob Bell on Jonah from here:
…Then Pul king of Assyria invaded the land…
Tiglath-Pilesar, king of Assyria, came…and deported the people…
Shalmaneser king of Assyria marched against Samaria and laid siege to it…
-from 2 Kings 15 and 18
Invaded.Deported.Laid siege.
Invading is what happens when you raise
an army and then march into another country and take it over using force
and power and violence.
Deporting is what happens when you
capture the inhabitants of said country you’ve invaded and forcibly
remove them from their homes and jobs and towns and land and then take
them far away.
Laying siege is what happens when you
surround a city with your army and in doing this sever the city from its
food and water sources so that so many people are starving and
suffering and dying that eventually they give up and surrender.
The Assyrians, in other words, were mean.
Nasty, brutish, violent, oppressive-the Assyrians made life miserable
for the Israelites. Year after year after year.
It’s during this era in history that a
story emerged about a man named Jonah. Jonah was an Israelite. And
according to this particular story, Jonah’s God tells Jonah to take a
message to the great city Nineveh.
And Nineveh was in…Assyria.
Assyria? Our worst enemy? Those hated
infidels who have made life for our people a living hell time and time
again? You want me to go into the center of the beast-and do something
good for them? Seriously?
Jonah wants nothing of it and so he heads to the nearest port, jumps on a ship, and sails in the opposite direction.
Of course he does.You’d get in a boat, too.
(Side note: Often this story is told in such a way that Jonah’s disobedience is the point of the first part, along the lines of See what happens when we don’t do what God tells us to do?
But how do you imagine the first audiences would have reacted to this
story when Jonah won’t go to Nineveh? They hated the Assyrians. Would
they have focused on his disobedience or would they have cheered him on
because they could totally relate?)
So he gets on the boat, a storm comes,
there’s a discussion among the crew about the cause of the storm, they
determine he’s the problem, they throw him overboard, he’s swallowed by a
fish, he prays in the belly of the fish, the fish spits him out, he
then goes to Nineveh, the Ninevites are fantastically receptive to his
message, and then the story ends with him so depressed he wants to kill
himself because of a gourd.
(You can’t make this stuff up.)
There’s so much here, where do I start? We’ll get to the swallowed by a fish part shortly, but first, I’ll start with the sheer strangenessof this story.
You would assume that a story told by
Israelites about Assyrians would stick to fairly straightforward
categories of good and bad, right and wrong, righteous and evil.
But the Israelite in this story, the one
who supposedly follows God, runs in the opposite direction from God. The
word that’s used is flee. Jonah flees. He then ends up on a boat full of “pagan/heathen” sailors who pray.
And while they’re praying for the storm to stop Jonah doesn’t pray at all. Jonah sleeps.
The pagan, heathen sailors ask all sorts
of questions trying to figure out why this storm has come on them, only
to discover that Jonah is the problem, something Jonah knew all along.
And then, when he finally does get to
Nineveh, after he’s resisted God again and again, these horrible, mean,
nasty Assyrians turn out to be open to God’s message, really open-so
open that the king orders
…Let man and beast be covered in sackcloth.
Sackcloth was what you wore when you were
crying out to God, when you were acutely aware of your sins, when you
were asking for God’s mercy. The king orders everybody to repent and
wear sackcloth-including the animals!
(Animals repenting? Wha….? A fairly
surreal detail, to say the least. One of the many hints that the author
has a larger point in mind…a point we’ll get to shortly.)
(Another point about that point: when you
read the Bible, embrace the weird parts. Animals wearing sackcloth is
weird. Take note of the strange parts because they’re usually there for a
reason…)
We’re familiar in the modern world with
frameworks that see things in dualistic terms: there are the good
people, and then there are the bad people, there is the right thing to
do, there is the wrong thing to do, there are the people who need
saving, and then there are people who do the saving.
But in this story the categories are all
scrambled. The supposedly righteous Israelite is defiant and lazy and
generally prickish (is that a word?) while the supposedly evil and
wicked heathens are receptive and open to God’s message for them.
And then, in the end, after Jonah has had
a change of heart and he’s seen this massive, miraculous change of
heart in the Ninevites right before his eyes, he’s so upset by it that
he wants to die.
He says to God I
knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and
abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.
And then he adds:
Now LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.
What a bizarre story.
A story in which none of the characters do what you’d expect them to do. Which raises the questions
So why did this story survive?What did people find this story important and worth telling and preserving?What does it tell us about how they understand who they are and who God?
Several answers.
First,
this story is about a man, but it’s about a nation. Jonah doesn’t want
to go to Nineveh because the Assyrians had treated Israelites horribly.
The story asks the question
Can Jonah forgive the Assyrians?which is really the questionCan Israel forgive the Assyrians?
Jonah is angry at the end,angry that God has been so kind to them.
Of course Jonah is angry.
When you haven’t forgiven someone who has
wronged you and then something good happens to them-when they are
blessed or shown mercy or experience favor-it’s infuriating.
Which leads us to a larger theme of the
Bible: According to the story that’s been unfolding up until Jonah gets
on a boat, Israel had a calling from early in its history (Genesis 12 to
be more precise) to be a light to the world, to show the world the
redeeming love of God.
A calling they haven’t lived up to.
There’s a question, then, that lurks in the story of Jonah:Can you forgive your worst enemy and be a channel through which God’s redeeming love can flow to them?
It’s a question for Jonahbecause it’s the question for Israel.
This is why the book of Jonah doesn’t end with a conclusion or a judgment or details about what Jonah does next.
The book ends with a question, a question God has for Jonah: Should I not be concerned about that great city?
It’s a question for the Jonah character in the story,but
at a far more significant level it’s a question the author is asking
the audience, an audience who we can only assume would have had many,
many personal reasons to answer…
no.
That said, what about the fish part?
Next: What is the Bible? Part 4: Fish#2
