Go Fish
Jonah 3:1-5, 10

January 25, 2009


I don’t want to suggest mascots for the different world faiths, but if the Christian Church were to play in the CFL our name would be “The Fish.” We have always been associated with fish.

The first disciples were fishers in the Sea of Galilee and Jesus uses this famous line of “I will make you fishers of people.” Following the resurrection when Jesus meets up with the amazed disciples and wants to convince them he is really alive, he asks for some fish fry to eat. And of course, the clandestine stick-figure of a fish used as the code for the worship centers of early Christians with the intriguing and ingenious acronym - ??T?S - ichthus - the common word for “fish” in Greek, but also “Jesus Christ Son of God Saviour.”

Then there’s always Jonah, swallowed up and residing in a big fish, not exactly a whale, for three days. To be sure, Jonah is a Jewish story, but that never stopped Christians from adopting the tale and reinventing it as a Christian episode. Some readers say that we should never do that: interpret an Old Testament book as a Christian story. However, we can’t help but look at matters and scriptures through Christian lenses, and we should never stop doing so. Otherwise, being Christian doesn’t matter. Otherwise, being human doesn’t matter.

What we cannot read into a story such as Jonah is an attack upon the Jewish faith and people that the author of the book doesn’t make. The Old Testament prophets make the most incisive remarks against the failures of Judaism anyway, and Judaism’s failures are even more our Christian failures as a faith.

Like most of the books of the prophets, Jonah simply appears with God shouting into his ear with a very specific task, “Go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before me.” Nineveh is modern-day Mosul, Iraq, still in the news, and for Jonah there was no wiggle room. But Jonah wiggled all the way out to Joppa on the Mediterranean and booked a space on a ship heading towards the end of the world in Tarshish, Spain.

Immediately the story hits us with two odd, even ridiculous items about which Jonah was fully aware. First, how and why would you run away from a God who is everywhere? Jonah would tell the sailors on the storm-battered ship that his God was the creator of heaven and earth. He didn’t want to go to Nineveh, so the opposite direction, the end of the world, was the only thing he could try. It did not take long before God caught up with Jonah and left him no choice.

Next, the reason Jonah fled in the first place eventually becomes clear. He is afraid God will act like God. In fact, he knows God will act like God. Jonah would preach before these treacherous and lecherous pagans and the Ninevites would repent their way of life and then God would repent and not destroy them. God is grace, God is good. Jonah, however, hated the big city and wanted to see them burn and God being God was going to ruin it. Perhaps, Jonah thought, if I don’t do it, Nineveh will get worse and God will have to destroy them.

But with God, the medium is the message, it had to be Jonah. You know the story, a storm is sent upon the ship and the sailors are desperate, but Jonah is asleep down below, oblivious or perhaps avoiding. An early Christian reader noted that Jesus also had been asleep at the bottom of a boat, impervious to the desperate storm the disciples were fighting, and when both Jonah and Jesus awoke eventually the storm was calmed through somewhat different methods.

Jonah had tried to escape preaching death to the pagan Ninevites, but now here he was preaching life to some pagan sailors with his own imminent death facing him. Yet there seemed to be no way except for Jonah to be thrown overboard by the newborn converts to God, Creator of heaven and earth. Down into the dark waters he dove until a big fish was sent to swallow Jonah up and digest him for three days. For all intents and purposes Jonah was dead for those three days, just as Jesus would linger in his own dark tomb for three days. Both tombs would spit him out on the third day and they would come back to the dry land and the fresh air to live in a new way.

The story now shifts its center of gravity, as Jonah trudges back to Nineveh and this time without hesitation delivers his blistering sermon to Nineveh, “Yet forty days!” He is not nice and turns the screw as hard as he can, and everyone gets the point, including the king of Nineveh. Jonah is portrayed as a darker and darker character, full of vengeance and the words of an angry god. The king truly repents and urgently exhorts his people to do the same and with great thoroughness the Ninevites repent. Christian readers understand this repentance as more genuine than most Jews and Christians; the hero in the story becomes the now righteous pagan king who is willing to humble himself and accept the weight of his real sins. “Who knows, God may yet repent?” he hopes out loud. And God will be God, for seeing genuine repentance God turned away his fierce anger, and the 40th day dawned and the sun rose and Nineveh was alive. Now God had to turn to the problem of Jonah.

Jonah knew that God was a gracious God of whom forgiveness is a first characteristic. He knew how forgiveness works and so do we. It’s one thing to sit back and pontificate about the worthiness of forgiveness, it’s another thing to be forgiving when it comes to the Nazis after World War II, the Viet Cong, the South African security police, the Taliban and Al-Qaida right now. Jonah is a prophet of a forgiving God, except could you leave out forgiving the Ninevites?

Furious about a forgiving God who forgave, he sulks out to the east of town in a remarkably childish way. I am going to sit here and die in the heat because no one cares. God did care and sent, if that’s the word, a plant to shade him from the sun. Jonah liked it, a lot. So much so that God had a hunch and played the hunch out by again sending a worm to kill the plant and kill the shade.

The hunch was right, for Jonah was distraught over the limp plant scorched at his feet, more distraught over this vegetable than he would have been over a hundred twenty thousand scorched Ninevites had God punished as Jonah wanted. Plants are more precious than the bodies and souls of foreign pagan people. Especially, all those plants that give us physical and psychological comfort and pleasure.

This story, of course, is told in very human details for a piece of divine scripture. Now it is finally dawning upon God what kind of prophet he has here. To our knowledge, this is the only Biblical book to end with a question. “Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

An odd way to end a book, and no, I do not know whether cattle know their right hooves from their left hooves. The question in the first instance was asked of Jonah, a rhetorical question, but now the question is asked of you and me. It is therefore no longer a Jewish or Old Testament question, it is no longer rhetorical in a world such as this. It is a Christian question.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan