Jonah, a Fish and a Vine

Week of Monday, July 8, 2002

When I read the book of Jonah I am reminded of a story told about the famous Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968). When one of his students asked whether it was really true that the snake literally spoke in the Genesis 3 narrative, Barth responded, “The important point is not whether he spoke but what he said.” You can choose to believe that Jonah is a literal, historical narrative, sacred myth, allegory or a parable, but either way the point is the same, that in it God wants to speak a prophetic word to us. Jewish tradition accepted the book as historical, and the mention of a Jonah in 2 Kings 14:25 would support that view.

If you think for a minute, it is strange that Jonah is even included in the canon. The Hebrews classified it among the prophets even though it reads like historical narrative. The prophecy, such that it is, is not to Israel or Judah, or even to one of its enemy nations (as Obadiah was to Edom). It is not directed to a specific historical situation as, say, Amos. Whereas the personal details of most all the other prophets elude us, Jonah's prophecy comes to us in the form of biography. Finally, this personal biography of Jonah and his stormy controversy with Yahweh is about as unflattering as we could imagine.

God's prophetic word came to Jonah, telling him to go to the city of Nineveh and preach to it a message of repentance. But he refused and fled. In fact, he fled about 750 miles in the precise opposite direction. Nineveh was east of Palestine whereas Tarshish was west, probably in southern Spain. It is easy to criticize another person's disobedience, even a flagrant disobedience like that of Jonah's, until we know or experience their own situation (conversely, we easily forgive our own lapses). But consider the enormity and difficulty of what Yahweh was asking Jonah to do. Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria, Israel's traditional enemy and eventual conqueror. With a population of 120,000 people, some classical accounts say it was the largest city in the world in its day. The text tells us that its pagan sinfulness was legendary, as was its cruelty: “It was the people which scorched its enemies alive to decorate its walls and pyramids with their skin.”¹ Yahweh asked Jonah to go to this city and preach repentance. It was like asking a French person to go to Berlin to preach repentance in 1942. The task was impossible, and Jonah fled.

But Jonah was not just fleeing an unpleasant calling. No, he was “fleeing from the Lord” (1:3), a fact which he freely confessed to the sailors on board the ship he had hopped (1:10). He then descended into a suicidal death wish (the first of three such death wishes: 1:12, 4:3, 4:8). Remarkably enough, and here is a prophetic word of grace for me and you today, God did not desert Jonah to his disobedience or give him up to his own poor choices. Instead, Jonah 1:7 tells us that “the Lord provided.” The provision was a fish that swallowed, saved and then vomited Jonah back on shore. Sometimes God's gracious provision does not even wait for us to turn around; He even takes a suicidal death wish like Jonah's and turns it into an occasion of grace and provision. So Jonah is saved.

God's prophetic word came a second time to Jonah and this time he obeyed. He traveled to Nineveh and preached to his own country's pagan conquerors. It took three days, and then the unthinkable happened. The city famed for cruelty and wickedness actually believed the message and repented. The king proclaimed a national day of civic repentance. Nineveh, we read in the text, despite its wickedness, cruelty and enemy status, was a city “important to God” (3:3), a city for which he had great compassion (3:10), a city that attracted His tender concern (4:11). Just as God did not desert Jonah to his own disobedience, He would not even desert a pagan enemy city like Nineveh. Here too is a prophetic reminder to me for all those occasions that I am tempted to call down divine wrath on people I self-righteously reject as extreme sinners. Jesus rebukes me for this, just as He rebuked James and John who wanted to destroy the Samaritan “sinners” that had not welcomed Jesus's advance team (Luke 9:51–56).

This, of course, is Jonah's greatest failure and, oddly enough, he recognizes and confesses it: “But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord, ‘O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live’” (4:1–3). Jonah's disobedience in his initial call was one thing, perhaps understandable due to the magnitude and improbability of the task, but there is something very dark in his second failure: why do we sometimes prefer misfortune for others, divine judgment, rather than God's grace?

The New Testament version of this tragedy is found in the older brother of the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15). The older brother, you remember, was flabbergasted and outraged at his father for the grace he had lavished on his younger, scoundrel brother. The elder brother seethed with resentment, anger, and bitterness. Had he not been the obedient son, the model child? And for what? Clearly, in Luke's parable the elder son was in need of redemption as much or even more so than the younger son, for like Jonah he became outraged at God's outlandish, amazing grace to repentant sinners.²

But there is more. Yahweh did not desert Jonah in his disobedience and fleeing, or even wait for him to repent before meeting him. Neither does he desert him now in his bitter attitude of ungrace, or even wait for Jonah to change his attitude. No, just as the text tells us that “God provided” a fish to save him from his disobedience (1:17), I do not think it is at all coincidental that here again we read the identical phrase that “God provided” a plant to comfort him and teach him a lesson. As Jonah sulked east of Nineveh, watching and waiting to see what would happen, God provided a vine “to ease his discomfort” (4:6). Just as Jonah was concerned about the demise of this fragile vine, should not the Lord of all the nations be concerned about the possible demise of Nineveh due to its sin?

I love how tenderly Yahweh describes Nineveh. From one perspective they are Israel's conqueror and enemy, cruel, pagan and outrageously wicked. But God pitied them in their sin rather than condemning them, for, tragically and sadly, the people of this great city of 120,000 people “cannot tell their right hand from their left...Should I not be concerned about that great city?” (4:11)?

We are not told if Jonah accepted this second lesson, but that is besides the point. For all its quirkiness Jonah bears a powerful, prophetic word for you and me today about divine grace offered to me even in my own disobedience, and a warning about how easy it is to desire that grace for yourself but to deny it to others.