Jonah

Jonah is one of the most unusual books in the Old Testament and one of the most carefully constructed. It is the story of a prophet who runs away from God, is swallowed by a great fish, is returned to the shore and goes to preach in Nineveh, the capital of Assyria and one of the most feared cities in the ancient world. What makes the book remarkable is not simply the fish. It is what the book reveals about the heart of God and the heart of His reluctant prophet.

God commands Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach against it. Jonah boards a ship heading in the opposite direction. A violent storm threatens to sink the vessel. The sailors, men of various nations and beliefs, pray desperately to their gods. Jonah is found asleep below deck. When it becomes clear that the storm is connected to Jonah's flight from God, Jonah asks to be thrown overboard. The sailors are reluctant. They pray and row hard before finally throwing him in, after which the storm immediately ceases.

Swallowed by the great fish and held there for three days and three nights, Jonah prays a psalm of thanksgiving from the belly of the fish. He is vomited onto dry land. He goes to Nineveh. He preaches eight words in Hebrew. The entire city, from the king to the cattle, repents. God relents from the disaster He had announced.

And then Jonah sits down outside the city and is furious. This is exactly what he was afraid God would do. He knew God was gracious and compassionate and he did not want that grace extended to Nineveh. God patiently addresses his anger through the withering of a plant. The book ends with a question from God that has hung in the air for thousands of years: should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh?

Jonah the son of Amittai is mentioned in 2 Kings 14:25 as a prophet from Gath Hepher in Galilee who ministered during the reign of Jeroboam II in the eighth century BC. The book of Jonah is written in the third person, which is unusual for a prophetic book, and may have been composed by someone else drawing on the tradition about Jonah, or by Jonah himself writing in this style.

Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire and a symbol of power and cruelty throughout the ancient Near East. The Assyrians would eventually conquer the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC, which gives Jonah's reluctance to go there a historically understandable dimension. The book is placed among the twelve Minor Prophets and was consistently received as Scripture by both Jewish and Christian communities.

Jesus refers explicitly to Jonah in Matthew 12:39–41 and Luke 11:29–32. He says that no sign will be given to that generation except the sign of Jonah: as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Jonah's time in the fish is presented by Jesus Himself as a direct anticipation of His own death and resurrection.

Jesus also uses Jonah to confront the religious leaders of His own day: the people of Nineveh repented at the preaching of Jonah, and something greater than Jonah is here. The willingness of Gentile Nineveh to respond to God's message while Israel's own religious establishment resisted is a pattern that runs through the Gospels and into Acts.

The grace of God that extends even to the enemies of His people, that Jonah found so objectionable, is the same grace that Paul celebrates in Romans and Ephesians: the mystery that through Christ the Gentiles are fellow heirs. Jonah's discomfort with God's mercy toward outsiders is a mirror for any instinct in the human heart to make the grace of God smaller than it actually is.

"Salvation belongs to God." — Jonah 2:9

"When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, He relented and did not bring on them the destruction He had threatened." — Jonah 3:10

"Should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left?" — Jonah 4:11

The mercy of God and the narrowness of human hearts is the great tension Jonah holds open. God's compassion is wider than Jonah expects or wants. The Gentile sailors, the Ninevite king and the entire population of Nineveh all respond to God with more genuine fear and humility than the Israelite prophet who knows His name. The book asks, quietly and persistently, whether those who know about the grace of God have actually allowed it to reshape them.

The book is also about running from God and the impossibility of doing so successfully. The ocean and the fish are agents of God's purposes. There is nowhere to go that is outside His reach. But the remarkable thing about God's pursuit of Jonah is that it is not punitive. It is persistently redemptive. Even from the fish, Jonah prays and is heard.

Jonah is a searching book for anyone who has ever been selective about who deserves the mercy of God. The prophet's anger at God for forgiving Nineveh exposes an instinct that is not confined to the eighth century BC. It is the instinct that draws sharp lines around who is welcome, who is too far gone or whose repentance should not be accepted. God's question at the end of the book is addressed to every reader who has ever felt that His mercy was being extended too generously.

The prayer in the belly of the fish in chapter two is one of the most striking prayers in Scripture. Jonah prays a psalm of thanksgiving before he has been rescued, from the worst possible place, on the basis of who God is rather than what his circumstances look like. It is a model of faith that trusts in God's character in advance of the evidence.

Jonah also models the uncomfortable reality that God does not discard reluctant servants. He works with them, pursues them, allows them to experience the consequences of their flight and then recommissions them. For anyone who has run from something God called them to, or who feels they have failed too badly to be sent again, Jonah offers both a warning and a remarkable encouragement.