THE SIGN OF JONAH Jonah 2__1-9
Jonah 2__1-9 I called out to the Lord he answered me Proper 14(A)
The Psalm of Jonah
Jonah 2:1-9
Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, saying, “I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight; Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.’ The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God. When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the Lord!”
English Standard Version
We have all heard the story of Jonah and the whale since childhood. The reading from Jonah chapter 2 is a Psalm. Echoes of Psalm 18 and others of the Psalms of David are to be found in this song of praise and thanksgiving for salvation.
This is rather a strange story, isn’t it? Here is Jonah deep in the ocean, inside a whale’s belly and he, being a proper Jew, has a synagogue service in which he chants a Psalm, “I called to the Lord out of my distress and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol (the Pit) I cried and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas and the flood surrounded me all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple? The waters closed in over me, the deep surrounded me.”
You too have faced times when you were drowning, you were overwhelmed and felt, you were sinking. We easily associate our lives with sermons that follow that line in introducing the story of Jonah.
Jonah ‘s prayer ends with thanksgiving, “. . .Yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God. As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the Lord and my prayer came to you. . . .I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”
You have heard sermons on this subject; I have read many. The story is always the same. Jonah was the prophet who rebelled against God. God told him to go to Nineveh, he decided to go a 180 degrees in the opposite direction. While he is on this excursion God sent a storm that threatened the ship. Jonah was thrown overboard but saved by a whale. He thanks God and goes on to complete his mission.
Most sermons attempt to make it a salvation story, implying a happy ending.
The Psalm Sounds great, a happy ending? Jonah was saved by the God who watched over Israel. End of the story? No. And the sermons and lessons that teach it so, I feel have missed the whole point of the story. At this point, we have not heard the rest of the story.
The ancient Jewish scholars divided their holy writings that we call the Old Testament into 3 sections – The law, being the first 5 books of Moses, The Prophets and The Holy Writings.
The prophets give the history of Israel/Judah from the death of Moses until a few centuries before the birth of Jesus.
The Holy writings were a different kind of literature. The Psalms were verses that were sung or chanted in the Jerusalem temple. The Proverbs were wise sayings, a sort of primer on morality and understanding God’s ways with men. Job is a morality play designed to illustrate the way God deals with us; at the heart of Job is the question of the purpose of suffering; the problem of evil.
What Kind of literature is Jonah?
Jonah is not like Isaiah or the other prophets though it has a strong prophetic message. It is different in that the message is not directly preached as does Isaiah and the others. The writer of Jonah so arranges his story that it is the audience who must give the final lines.
Jonah shares some commonality with Job, but it is not a morality play. What sort of literature is it? It is a story that is designed to trap the hearer, so that he passes judgment on himself.
There are other places in the Bible with small paragraphs devoted to such a story. Jonah is different in that it takes a whole book of the Bible to tell the story and to spring the trap. We don’t see the trap or feel its sting until the end of the final chapter. The thanksgiving Psalm of Jonah is not the last word, hence its meaning is lost if we stop there.
Nathan the prophet used such a story to cause David to condemn himself for stealing Bathsheba from Uriah the Hittite and arranging for Uriah’s death in battle. Nathan told the story of a rich man who had many flocks of sheep, who when he had an important visitor, took the only lamb of a poor man and had it prepared for a meal to entertain his guest. When David heard the story, he was angry at the injustice and demanded to know who it was who stole the lamb from the poor man. Nathan said, “David, you are that man.” David convicted himself on hearing Nathan’s parable and wrote a penitential Psalm as a result saying to God, “Against thee only have I sinned and done this evil in thy sight.”
Jesus used similar parables to convince the self-righteous among his countryman that they stood in need of repentance. Luke 10:25 tells of a time when a lawyer among the Jews asked Jesus, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus replied, you know the law, what is written there?” The lawyer answer “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”
Jesus said, “You have given the right answer; do this and you will live.” Then the Lawyer said, “Who is my neighbor?” Then Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. In this parable, a Jewish man was going from Jerusalem to Jericho, and was attacked by robbers, beaten and left half dead on the road. A priest passes by and rendered no aid. Like wise a Levite, also a countryman of the Jew. Then A Samaritan came by. He saw the wounded man and was moved with pity. He cleansed the wounds with oil and wine, bandaged the Jew, and took him to an inn where he cared for him, paying the expenses. Jesus then asked, “Which of these three, do you think was a neighbor?”
The Lawyer answered, “The one who showed mercy.” Jesus then said, “Go and do likewise.”
The lawyer was trapped by his own words! In this trap he saw the Samaritans, a race the Jews looked down on, as being more righteous than the Jewish religious leaders. The scribes, were lawyers who knew the 460 laws that had been constructed as a fence around the Prime law to love God and neighbor and the 10 commandments. The lawyer knew that his religion had so constricted his life that he could not reach out in mercy to his neighbors. The woman Jesus met at the well of Samaria understood that she and her people were regarded as unclean, as dogs by the Jews. It was a priest and a levite, the representatitves of the people who walked by on the other side, disobeying the prime commandment. Jesus used a parable to trap the law scribe in his own teaching.
Jesus repeated the story of Jonah in his own teaching at a time when he had been attacked by the Scribes and Pharisees for breaking the laws of ritual cleanliness, for eating with sinners, for healing on the Sabbath. Their criticism of Him became so intense that they said he could cast out demons because he was in league with Satan. Jesus response was that one should not attribute to Satan the works of the Spirit of God. He warned the teachers of the law that on the judgment day they would give account for their words. He called them a generation of vipers unable to say anything good because they were evil.
It was Jesus’ call for mercy, for concern for the poor, the outcast, the foreigner and the sinners that made him an object of hatred by the Scribes and Pharisees. The multitudes were following this Rabbi who spent much of his time, not in Jerusalem where a proper Rabbi should be praying, but out in Galilee of the Gentiles, telling these unclean people that God loved them!
Unthinkable.
Then, after seeing his healing, the Pharisees asked for a sign: Jesus said, “No sign will be given except the sign of Jonah” You have seen enough, you have heard enough, wait for the sign of Jonah. Jesus in effect was closing the book on the Pharisees. He was challenging them to reread Jonah and to think and then to listen.
There are two parts to that sign. One is the sign that would be evident to any of Jesus’ countrymen who really considered the story of Jonah. The other sign of course, was his own resurrection from the grave.
As a young man, possibly 20, I visited a Lutheran Church with beautiful stained glass windows. There among artistic symbols and scenes that I recognized from the Bible, was a picture of a whale spouting water. What was this doing in the middle of scenes of the events surrounding the crucifixion of Jesus? Why was a picture of a whale alongside that of the Cross? I thought of Jonah and the whale and still wondered. The Lutheran artist knew something that I didn’t know at age 20. He understood the sign of Jonah, that it meant the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. The sign of Jonah, that whale swimming happily in the ocean, proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus.
I like many others reading Jonah, overlooked the import of the story. I not only missed what it meant to the world after the Resurrection of Jesus, but what it meant initially to those who first heard the story of Jonah. In the many sermons and lessons I have heard for over a half a century, very few understood what that story said to the original hearers.
There are only 3 verses out of 48 in the book of Jonah deal that deal with the whale. The fish story is incidental, not the meat of the story. What is the point of the story? In what way did it prick the consciences of the ancient Jews? How did the story confront and trap them so that at the end they would not ask, “Who is Jonah”; but rather would hear their own conscience say “you are the man.”
Where-as Job begins with a scene in heaven in which there is a dispute between Satan and God, Jonah begins on earth.
The book of Jonah begins with a direct command from God to one of his prophets.
The Lord said to Jonah, “go to Nineveh and warn them that I see their wickedness.”
Jonah went the other way, to Tarshish. He is no Abraham, going as God directed.
Jonah is no Moses obeying God’s command that He go to Egypt to gain release of his fellow countrymen. When Jonah heard the word, “Go to Nineveh” he fled from the presence of God and went the opposite way.
An interesting story at this point for those Judeans who first heard it, but it presented no threat to their understanding of God or themselves. Let us go on.
Jonah decided to take a cruise, but found it was no love boat that he boarded. A storm came up that threatened the ship, the crew awakened the sleeping Jonah and implored him to pray. By divination they determined that the cause of the storm was Jonah and asked him to explain himself.
At this time, Jonah gained some self-awareness and felt a twinge of guilt. He knew he was the cause of the seamen being in peril. He asked to be thrown overboard, knowing that God was angry with him and not the pagan seamen.
The story of Jonah at this point made the devout Jewish readers uneasy for in it the Pagans sailors prayed to the God of Heaven for Him to have mercy on them and they wish to be absolved of their part in the fate of the errant Jewish prophet. They cried out: “Please, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.”
Isaiah and other of the prophets had been telling the Jews who had returned from Babylonian captivity that they had been spared from utter destruction so that they could witness to the entire world the goodness and greatness of God. They were to be a light to the Gentiles; they were to tell the glory of the Lord to the furthest islands.
But the Jews had become an elitist nation. They came back from Babylon devoted to the one true God. But they did not share the story. Now they see a feckless Jewish prophet and pagans that prayed. This made the Jewish hearers uneasy. This isn’t the way the story is supposed to go from their viewpoint.
Back to the story.
After praying, the seaman heaved Jonah overboard. Jonah 1:17 tells of the large fish swallowing Jonah and his being there 3 days and 3 nights. Jonah 2:1 says that Jonah prayed to the Lord from the belly of the fish, and then Jonah 2:10 tells how Jonah was vomited out onto dry land.
Those 3 little verses are not the story. The first half of the book told the Jews that they had a prophet who directly disobeyed God’s orders and found himself in perilous circumstances where pagans, foreigners had pity on him and prayed for God’s mercy. They repented, without even hearing the sermon.
Next Jonah offered thanks giving for God’s salvation, he has a synagogue service in which he chants a Psalm, “I called to the Lord out of my distress and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol (the Pit) I cried and you heard my voice. You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas and the flood surrounded me all your waves and your billows passed over me. Then I said, I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple? The waters closed in over me, the deep surrounded me.”
Sounds great! End of the story? No, we have hardly begun.
He who wrote Jonah was very aware of the worship services at the Jerusalem temple. Jonah’s prayer, like that of the Jews who came back from the Babylonian exile, was pious. He had been delivered, he would praise God, thank God and keep his promise by making an offering.
Isn’t Jonah a tragic yet comic figure? He directly disobeyed God, nearly dies, is rescued by God, then piously sits down and thanks God in a way that appears to be self-serving, smug.
What happened? He decided to do what his people had always done. He would go to church and pray and make an offering, then everything would be all right. Notice how self centered the prayer really is.
The writer of Jonah is setting a trap. The story, though a little strange sounds good to the readers. The story was not out of touch with his countryman’s way of doing things.
Is it over, is that the last scene?
No.
Chapter 3 begins,
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time saying,
“Get up, go to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord.”
What? We’ve already heard that in chapter one!
The Lord’s word does not change.
Jonah should feel no relief that his life had been saved, and his pretty prayers and promises did not change the fact he remained disobedient to God.
Abraham had to go. Moses had to go. “Jonah, you go,” is still the word from heaven .
Jonah went on an excursion instead of obeying God. He got into trouble, and thought that because God had saved him, everything was ok. He thought praying, singing a hymn and making an offering ought to make it all right with God.
No, Jonah, you still haven’t done your task.
The Jews in Jonah’s day would have heard Isaiah’s prophecies read in the temple and in the synagogues. They had heard that it was their job “to be a light to lighten the Gentiles.” Isaiah had told the people who came out of the Babylonian exile that their destiny was to spread the word of God to the islands of the sea. The whole world was to be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.
What did they do? They rebuilt the Jerusalem temple, sang songs, prayed, and became ever more cut off from the world around them.
The saga of Jonah continues.
Jonah did go to Nineveh. He delivered the warning, “Repent! In 40 days this city will be over thrown.”
Why had Jonah resisted the Lord’s command? Jonah didn’t want to complete this mission because it was Assyria, of which Nineveh was a city, had overrun their homeland causing massive loss of life and deportation of the citizens. This had happened hundreds of years before, but the memory of the ruthlessness of the Assyrians, lingered on. The Assyrians were still hated by the Jews.
Jonah reluctantly preached, he didn’t want to see repentance, but it happened.
The King of Nineveh called for fasting and prayer and repentance, forsaking their violent ways in the hope that God would relent, change his mind, and turn from his fierce anger so that the city would be spared.
Jonah 3:10 “When God saw what they did . . .God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”
Good news? Happy ending? End of the story? No.
This narrative would not sit well with the Jews after returning from the Babylonian captivity and building their temple at Jerusalem. They wanted to be a people apart. They wanted nothing to do with the foreigners, and especially those who had waged vicious war against them. Their sense of being a people whom God had chosen was important to them.
Jonah was displeased. (Jonah 4:1) The Psalm of Jonah, a prayer we read in Jonah 2, was not Jonah’s heart felt prayer. This was Jonah playing at synagogue. The Psalm 2 prayer of thanksgiving and promised fidelity to God, was a pious fraud. It was the expected niceties that were being carried on in the Jerusalem temple. Though he promised fidelity, Jonah still did not want to obey.
Now we hear Jonah’s true, heart-felt prayer.
“This was very displeasing to Jonah and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said,
“O Lord. Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. And ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me for it is better for me to die than to live.”
Jonah, was not happy to see the former enemies of Israel/Judah converted. In fact, it was the Assyrians who brought down the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC and were at that time knocking on the doors of Jerusalem. Jonah and his nation remembered well.
But that happened hundreds of years before. It was ancient history. When would the hatred stop?
The Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Jonah made no verbal response, but we can imagine his mental disapproval of God’s actions. Jonah made a hut outside the city and sat down to see what would happen.
He waited to see if his forty days prophecy would come to pass and the city would be overthrown.
The writer of the story lays another ambush, another trap for his Jewish readers. He reveals how petty his countrymen could be.
Then the Lord arranged for a bush to grow rapidly and give Jonah shade.
Jonah was happy for that.
Then, dawn came the next day and God made a worm cut down the bush, and sent a sultry east wind to add to the heat of the sun that beat down on Jonah’s head. Jonah again said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”
Jonah 4:9
“But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?”
And Jonah said, “Yes, angry enough to die”
Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about 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 many animals?”
That is where the story ends abruptly. The book is closed. No happy ending, as in Job. Jonah ends with a challenge to the reader, “Have you no compassion on the foreigner?” You who have the commandment to love God and your neighbor, are you Jonah the ungrateful, the unforgiving? Are you the man?
This book ends with a question not an answer. For over 400 years from the last prophet Malachi until the announcement of the coming of Jesus told in Luke, that question rang from heaven to the Jewish nation. Have you no pity, no compassion? When are you going to be the light to lighten the Gentiles, the Glory of Israel?
Jesus of course used this parable and others so that the leaders of the Jews would have one more chance to become the servant of God Isaiah had said they should be.
But the question from heaven remained unanswered. The Jews remained aloof, and despised the foreigner in spite of the teaching of Moses and the prophets. They killed God’s messenger.
Instead of the world becoming bright with knowledge of the Lord, the earth became even darker. At the time when Jesus was born, Herod, a puppet king ruling Judea by authority given him from Rome was so murderous that he put to death children when it was rumored a new king was to be born who might be the long awaited Messiah. He killed his own sons so they could not be pretenders to the throne.
At that time of deep darkness, an angel appeared to Mary and Said, “ hail Mary, greetings favored one, full of grace, the Lord is with you.” Literally, incarnate in her. By the power of the Holy Spirit a new King would lead the people into a righteous kingdom.
Old Simeon, when he saw Jesus presented at the temple was similarly guided by the Spirit to say, “Lord, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation which you have prepared in the presence of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for the glory to your people Israel.”
Luke, who along with Matthew recorded the saying of Jesus regarding the sign of Jonah, had no doubt about the meaning of the story of Jonah.
Jonah was a sign, a word from heaven that said to the nation of Judah: “Go, be a light in the world. Tell them about a merciful Father in heaven.” Don’t be a Jonah!
Judah failed in its mission until the day when Jesus stood in the Synagogue at Nazareth and read the lines from Isaiah that were from the same era as the story of Jonah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
In his sermon Jesus mentioned Naaman the Syrian cleansed from leprosy by God’s prophet and the widow of Zarephath whom Elijah visited and blessed.
Jesus at the very outset of is ministry let it be known that the love and mercy of God was for all men. Jesus was calling his countrymen to share the good news with the whole world. Luke records that the response of the synagogue at Nazareth was, “they drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill, so that they might hurl him off a cliff.”
Hardly an auspicious beginning for a ministry but it shows the meaning of the Sign of the Prophet Jonah to Judah. The intended audience understood. They got the message. They could not bear it, they decided to kill the messenger.
Do we get the message?
St Paul said that the Church of Christ is the new Israel of God.
Jesus said to his disciples and to all of us as God said to Jonah “Go to all the world, tell the good news.”
The Good news in the sign of Jonah is that God is merciful and He demonstrated it by death and the Resurrection of our Lord for all who will accept Him as Messiah, the leader sent by God to show all humanity the way to peace and righteous living, and who would lead us to the throne of the Heavenly Father.
He has promised to those who have ears willing to hear, that they can live now and enjoy the life of the world to come; but they are also to have compassion and share the Good News.
COPYRIGHT JANUARY 20, 2006
Charles R. Scott, Vicar
Church of the Good Shepherd
Indianapolis, Indiana
charlesrscott@excite.com
