Wrong Fish
Jonah 1:1-4:11; Mark 1:14-20

January 22, 2006


When a whale swims right up the Thames to Big Ben, tragically it is the wrong fish in the wrong place. Jonah is always where and when he shouldn’t be. Even if it’s just a story, we find it remarkably easy to recreate his problems, with or without a big fish.

Jesus keeps talking about vocations with his first recruits, Simon and Andrew, James and John Zebedee. His invitation is not to change their profession, but to change their market. Fishing for people, catching people by the Gospel is the target.

The title should be “Fishtory,” for our history is wrapped up in the same newspaper as those fish. Jonah, who can’t get away from the whale, is more like you and me than we’d like to admit. Jesus calls us to be fishing for people as our first occupation, and the early Church used that simple icon of a fish to indicate quietly that here were people who declared that Jesus Christ, Son of God, is our Saviour (ΙΧΘΥΣ or “Ichthus”). Fish constitute our history.

Mark Twain, humourist and author, once spent a pleasant three weeks in the Maine woods. He was making himself comfortable in the train on his return to New York when a crusty old New Englander sat down next to him and struck up a conversation.

“Been to the woods, have ya?” asks the New Englander. “I have indeed,” replied Twain, “and let me tell you something - it may not be fishing season up here in Maine, but I have a couple of hundred pounds of the finest rock bass you’ve ever seen iced down in the baggage car. By the way who are you?”

“I’m the conservation officer” was the terse reply. “Who are you?” Said Mark Twain, without missing a beat, “Who am I? Why I am only the biggest liar in these here United States!”

Jonah knew what the truth was, but he too had trouble with the truth. The Word of the Lord came to Jonah in the plainest possible way: God told Jonah to go at once to cry out against the great city of Nineveh for wickedness rules there. Let’s be clear - the Word of the Lord is never typical, never normal, never often. Jonah knew exactly what it was, so he fled in the other direction, a definitely negative evaluation of the Word. How do you flee a Word placed inside your head and soul? Jonah left from Joppa to sail to Tarshish in Spain, the same route Paul wanted to take centuries later, but something always seems to happen along the way when you’re running away.

A storm happens pretty quickly, a real bad one. We readers and listeners know that it is God who sent it and the sailors sensed that this kind of storm had anger in it that can only come from a deity unhappy with someone. Through this entire story we are listening as fellow Jews with Jonah who is entangled with different Gentile groups - the sailors who have collected multiple gods in their spiritual stockpile, and the Ninevites or Assyrians, full of fierce war gods who did them well for some centuries. But Jonah, the fellow blessed with the rare Word of the Lord, while he seems to have knowledge about the way God works lacks faith in God.

Have you ever been caught up in a mess, a storm, created by someone else’s problem? Alanon people can tell us a few stories. Lots of people today have worked for a company that finally goes belly up because of the upper management’s greed, incompetence, or downright immoral behaviour. These poor sailors knew this was a killer storm, so they threw their cargo - their financial well-being - over board and it wasn’t enough. Meanwhile, Jonah was taking a good nap below out of harm’s way and away from all that anxiety about the ship sinking. Everyone loves someone like that.

The sailors drew lots to find out who was the eye of the storm, and Jonah made no attempt to deny it, perhaps his first honest move. Jonah knew God was the creator and lord of heaven and earth, that God was everywhere, right here in this storm. He knew he was still in the presence of God, even if he had tried to run away from God. He knew that to throw him overboard would end the storm. The sailors knew it could not be as simple as that, and were much more fundamentally moral than Jonah. They rowed their hearts out vainly to rescue everyone. Then they threw Jonah out and instantly it worked. Made them believers and on the spot they converted to the worship of the God of the Universe. Jonah too is saved, but not so pleasantly.

God appointed a great fish to swallow him up and for three days he was in the darkest grave, as Christian readers would eventually point out. Nevertheless, Jonah is saved somehow, and repentant he prays for deliverance, and is vomited back into the upper world.

Like clockwork, the Word of the Lord comes again to Jonah in exactly the same straightforward words. No hesitation now as he walks one-third the way into the metropolis, and simply declares that they have 40 days to straighten out. The Ninevites immediately, surprisingly, unbelievably, decide to straighten out.

Lots of speculation why Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh in the first place. It was a dangerous, hostile place, and few of us are courageous or unsmart enough to go into foreign hostile places and declare the Gospel - and some of those foreign places are in Canada, and some are in Regina and Saskatchewan. I certainly would not volunteer to go preach on the streets of Nineveh today - that is, Mosul, Iraq. Is there anybody here who finds it easy to go into their workplace or school today and talk about church and faith and worship and reading the Bible? I know from lots of school and other outside activities that once people figure out that I am a minister, they start sliding down the other side of the bench, stop telling those dirty jokes, and apologize a little too much for the profanity of their language.

So Jonah can be excused a little. The Ninevites straightened out big time: from the king on down they did penance and worship and reorganized their way of life. If the Ninevites could change, then a change of mind was in order for God as well. Many theologians grumble about the impossibility of God actually changing, for a real God can’t change. With God, however, nothing is impossible.

Jonah was infuriated because he believed too that this was supposed to be impossible. Yet he knew it all along. There was the theory that if God saved the Gentiles it would mean the destruction of Israel, which would be a cause for concern, especially if you were the agent. What really gets Jonah angry is that he expected to witness the annihilation of these ultimate bad guys and wanted them punished to balance out good and evil, and he is deeply disappointed when God forgives, as Jonah knew God would do. That is who our God is, but somehow it just doesn’t seem right. In a world of guerilla wars, terrorism, and executions by the state, God doesn’t seem right.

Jonah, meanwhile, shrinks smaller as a person, sulking under a shady plant, and finally fading away in the narrative. We don’t know what happens to Jonah, to whom the Word of the Lord came twice.

You and I still have this avocation of fishing. The University of Bonn in Germany has an institute for the study of early Christianity whose website has an interesting logo. An ancient fisherman is standing on a rock on the edge of water with a simple pole and line reaching into the water. At the end of the line is a fish with the word “Ichthus” written beside it. Has the fisherman just caught the Gospel of Jesus Christ, or is he fishing with it? It works both ways: you are caught first, and as the Word of the Lord comes to you, maybe not with the big message to Jonah, it’s your Word now and there is nowhere to escape the presence that annoys as well as blesses you, not even in a handy whale. Get fishing, you have the bait. God knows what you will catch.

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