Mulling My Inner Jonah

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Most of us, if asked about the biblical Jonah, would immediately say that he’s the guy who got swallowed by a whale. (The Bible actually says it was a large fish, but we won’t quibble.) What doesn’t stick in the brain is that the reason Jonah got swallowed in the first place is because he was running away from the mission that God had called him to do, which was to go to Nineveh and preach against the city’s wickedness.

Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh, not least because that was the capital city of Assyria, an enemy of Israel. So, instead of accepting his divine commission, he hopped aboard a ship headed to Tarshish – “away from the Lord,” as the Bible says.

But God wasn’t going to let Jonah off the hook. He called up a “violent wind … a furious tempest” that scared each sailor into calling on his god. They dumped their cargo into the sea. Finally, they woke Jonah, who was sound asleep in the ship’s hold. Jonah took responsibility for being the cause of the storm, saying, “I know it is because of me that this violent storm has come upon you.” He told the sailors to toss him overboard. At first they refused because they didn’t want to shed innocent blood, but when the storm continued to rage, they threw Jonah into the sea. The wind and waves calmed; a large fish swallowed Jonah. After three days in the fish’s belly, Jonah got spit up on the shore.

At that point, God again told Jonah to go to Nineveh. This time, the prophet obeyed. He spent three days walking through the city, calling the residents to repentance lest they be destroyed. The people of God put on sackcloth; the king ordered man and beast alike to fast, and “when God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them,” the Bible says.

This all came to mind a couple of Sundays ago, when the first reading told of Jonah preaching to Nineveh and the people repenting because of his message. In his homily at the Cathedral of the Madeleine that day, Father Dominic Sternhagen said that like Jonah we Christians are called to speak the truth, and to warn the world when it’s on the path to destruction.

Which is a wonderful message, but what neither the Scripture reading nor Fr. Sternhagen added was the rest of the story. Jonah wasn’t happy that his prophesying was successful. Instead, he was angry because God forgave his enemies. He asked God to kill him, “for it is better for me to die than to live.”

I probably remembered this part of the story because only a few days before Fr. Sternhagen’s homily I read this quote from Anne Lamott: “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

I see a lot of myself in that quote from Anne Lamott, just as I see a lot of Jonah in me. I’d rather go birdwatching than preach, and if I have to give the Good News to my enemies I’d rather do it righteously and then watch them be destroyed by divine wrath for failing to heed the message. How dare God not hate them as much as I do?

The answer to that question, of course, is that as even Jonah admitted, rather than being the god I want to have at my command, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Christian God, is “a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, rich in clemency, loathe to punish.” And he shows those characteristics to everyone, not just to me and mine, even if I don’t like it.

Marie Mischel, editor of the Intermountain Catholic, can be reached at marie@icatholic.org.