Jonah preaching in Nineveh, Andrea Vaccaro As a boy, my favourite Old Testament heroes were the prophets Elijah and Jonah. Elijah’s story is like the ‘Die Hard’ of the Old Testament – instead of John McClane single handedly taking out a building full of terrorists, it’s Elijah singlehandedly overcoming the evil King Ahab and the 450 priests of the demon Baal, whom apostate Israel had fallen into worshipping.
Even Elijah’s entrance is cool: “As the Lord lives in whose presence I stand” – he has taken his stand with the Lord, and so the Lord’s fearsome power is at work through him; he declares that the Israelites will have no rain until they repent.
Immediately, Elijah goes into hiding. The prophet’s heroic faith allows him to work hand-in-glove with the mysterious arrangements of Providence. Moving from one hiding spot to another, like Jason Bourne or some action hero on the run from a corrupt organisation, he is fed by ravens in the desert, then told to take refuge in the house of an unknown widow in a foreign city. We see a sort of international, underground resistance movement of the Friends of God, operating like splinter cells awaiting secret commands from above.
Finally, like a knight errant or an old western gunslinger, Elijah returns and challenges the evil king Ahab to a duel for the soul of Israel. Before the crowds he overcomes the 450 priests of Baal; and in sheets the rain returns to Israel.
Defeat
Then, a complete reversal. Suddenly he’s on the run again from his enemies, as if his victory had meant nothing. He gives up. “Elijah went into the wilderness, a day’s journey, and sitting under a furze bush, wished he were dead. ‘O Lord’, he said, ’I have had enough. Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers.’ Then he lay down and went to sleep.”
Is that it? He fought to the end; does it really end like this?
All you frustrated and upset at God, who have given up: The book of Jonah is God’s response to you”
I was always strangely drawn to this image of the hero at his lowest moment, melodramatic teenager that I was. Somehow, the prophet’s defeat resonates more profoundly than his victory.
Jonah too gets the hero’s call: “Up! Go East to the great city Nineveh, and cry against them, because their wickedness has come before me.” How does Jonah react to the excitement and privilege of the prophetic call? He runs away. Sound familiar?
For all you depressives and half-hearted heroes, who feel like you have run away; all you frustrated and upset at God, who have given up: The book of Jonah is God’s response to you.
Jonah boards a ship for Tarshish, in modern day Spain, which is about as far west you could go in the ancient world. But what happens when you try to run away from God? Instead of going West, Jonah goes down, down, down: down to Joppa, down into the hold, and eventually down into the depths of the sea.
When God sends a storm on the ship because of Jonah, his all-too familiar reaction, at a moment of crisis, is a refusal to respond: he goes to sleep. Viktor Frankl relates how, in his time in Auschwitz, cigarettes were a currency essential for survival; once an inmate started smoking their cigarettes instead of trading them for food, he knew they had “give-up-itis”; they wouldn’t survive.
Chances
Yet being thrown overboard is the best thing that ever happened to Jonah: as he sinks into the depths, he remembers God, and prays: and a giant fish swallows him, and vomits him out on the dry land, right back where he started. So, now we know where running from God gets you.
Jonah has been given a second chance. Again, God calls him, and he goes to Nineveh, the rotten capital of all that was rotten and vicious in the ancient world. Three days walk in breadth, Jonah makes only a half-hearted one-day journey into it. But even his lukewarm efforts result in unimaginable success. After hardly a few words, “the people of Nineveh believed in God,” and they all, praying and fasting, to the last man repent. “And God relented, and did not inflict on them the disaster he intended.”
What does Jonah do next? He becomes angry and sullen at God’s goodness, and says “Now, Lord, take my life, because it is better for me to die than to live.” And he wanders out and sits himself down in the wilderness.
God makes a plant grow to give him shade from the sun for a day; then the plant dies, and Jonah is again angry at God”
Both Jonah and Elijah are in the wilderness, and both have given up on life. What is the Lord’s response?
Elijah wakes to find a jar of water and a bread cake beside him, and in the strength of this food he walks forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mountain of God. Here, God asks Elijah twice: “What are you doing here?” and Elijah twice renews his mission.
For Jonah, God makes a plant grow to give him shade from the sun for a day; then the plant dies, and Jonah is again angry at God. God asks him twice, “Do you do well to be angry?”
God’s answer to Jonah, and to Elijah – and to you – is to draw near, gently question, and then draw your attention away from yourself. The book of Jonah ends with a question. God says: How could I not have pity on the Ninevites and send you to them?
After all the ups and downs: Isn’t the sky still blue? Isn’t God still good? Doesn’t He come back for me after all? And aren’t there people whose futures will yet be changed by how I act now? Those who ask, “What have I left to hope for from life?” need, in a sense, to have their world turned upside down, like Jonah’s was. It is God who questions us: “Will you choose me, or Baal? Will you stand with me, like I’ve stood with you? Will you believe?”
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Jason Conroy is a philosophy student from Co. Kildare, currently studying at KU Leuven, Belgium.
Reading between the lines
Jonah is the son of Amittai, which means ‘dove’, linking his story to psalm 55: “O that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest… I would wait for him who saves me from the raging wind and tempest.“ Jonah also learns the lesson of Psalm 139: “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand hold me fast.” Jonah’s reaction to the Ninevites is comparable to Cain’s reaction to Abel, (whom God also questions: “Do you do well?”) and the Elder Son’s reaction to the Prodigal Son. Jonah is “vomited out” like the lukewarm in Revelations 3. In Matthew 16 Peter is called “Simon son of Jonah!” Peter also runs away, in the hour of the cross, and then is reconciled to God after jumping into the sea; Like Jonah and Elijah, God repeats the same question: “Do you love me?” In the misadventures of Jonah, we see glimmers of one who also slept during a storm and calmed it, who went down to the depths and came up again on the third day.