“Man and beast shall
be covered with sackcloth
and call loudly to the Lord…” (Jonah 3:8)
and call loudly to the Lord…” (Jonah 3:8)
The book of Jonah is collected with the prophecies of the Minor
Prophets in the Old Testament, but it contains no actual prophecy, instead it
is a comical short story about what it means to be a prophet. It is such a simple story it feels like a
fable. And because it is so very familiar to all of us with its story of a man
swallowed by a whale, we feel like we know it, even if we’ve never read a word
of it. But, I challenge you to open your
Bible and find it (between Obadiah and Micah) and take a few minutes to read
it. It truly is a SHORT story. Four
brief chapters, in my New Jerusalem Bible Jonah takes up two pages; if the
print in your Bible is larger it may stretch to three. But you can definitely
read this story in about 10 minutes. I
highly recommend it. Ten minutes will rarely be spent more productively and
delightfully.
It is a masterpiece of comedy. A satire about an unwilling
prophet and his efforts to escape God’s call, it also contains a beautiful message
of hope about the mercy of God and His transcendent love.
The basics of the story are this: God calls Jonah to go to
Nineveh and preach to them about their wickedness. Nineveh was the capital of
Assyria, a nation that had been terrorizing the world (and the Israelites) for a
century or more, sacking, looting, plundering, dragging people off to slavery
and worse. Jonah doesn’t want to go, so
he runs away from God’s call and tries to hide in a distant land. That is where
the whale comes in and before long Jonah is spit out on the shore and walking the
streets of Nineveh proclaiming that the end is near! But the people of Nineveh hear this and take
it to heart and they repent and God relents and shows them mercy and Jonah falls
down in the dirt like an angry child and says: See! I knew you were going to do that! That’s why
I didn’t want to come here in the first place.
What I find so fascinating in this tale isn’t the famous
whale that swallows the prophet and vomits him up on the beach, but the
depiction of a man (Jonah) trying to escape God’s call, because he thinks he
knows better. There is a great deal of
spiritual sustenance to be found in this tale. Heck, even Jesus found it
important enough to mention it a couple of times. But, you have to read it yourself. Let yourself get lost in the story. Let
yourself laugh at the foolishness of men, and the strange wonders of God’s
workings. Let it seep down into your soul. And when you get to the part about even
the sheep and cattle dressing up in sackcloth and ashes, see if you don’t find
yourself grinning at least a little.
Something we too often forget is that reading the Bible can also
be fun. If you are curious about reading scripture, this story is a great place
to start. And when you are done, you may want to look
up the charming Veggie Tales movie version, too! I love those darned pirates
who don’t do anything, and their catchy
theme song.
