Jonah and the whale of a time
Everyone who has grown up in a Christian home, or ever attended a Sunday school class, knows the story of Jonah. God gives Jonah a message. Jonah runs away, and gets on a ship. There's a storm, and he is thrown over board. Then he's swallowed by a whale. Everyone remembers that bit. And the whale throws him up, and he starts again. Maybe most people stop there. But the story goes on. This time he gets to Nineveh and gives his message. Everyone repents. Jonah has a bit of a fight with God. The end.
That is basically the story.
But there is something about the story of Jonah that is not taught in Sunday schools. There is something about the story of Jonah that most Christians don't know. There is something very well hidden. There is a big secret about Jonah.
Last time, I said the Bible contains lots of different types of book: gospels, letters, songs, prophecy. And I think the Bible contains another type of book. What else could there be?
Because I don't think the book of Jonah is a book of prophecy. The books of prophecy are mostly about the prophet's message. But Jonah is not a book about Jonah's message. Jonah's message is just one verse out of 47 verses. The dark, hidden secret about Jonah is that the book of Jonah is not a book of prophecy.
It's a book of comedy. It is absolutely hilarious.
Of course, over the years and through translations, we have lost a lot of the humour. But Jonah is a really, really funny book. Now I know that there is nothing less funny than explaining a joke. But let's try and see if we can find some of the humour in Jonah.
Jonah is a book full of irony. You know what irony is, right? People often confuse irony and sarcasm. Sarcasm is when you say the opposite of what you mean. Usually sarcasm is used to offend someone. It sounds quite bitter. But irony is when the situation turns around in a way that is just funny.
So if it was raining heavily today, and I said ``Lovely weather today!'' that would be sarcasm. But if it was fine and I said ``lovely weather today!'' - and at that very moment it started raining heavily - that would be irony. Let's see some more examples of irony.
First, God tells Jonah to immediately get up and go. So he does - he immediately gets up, and he goes... in the other direction! That's an irony.
God told him to go east to Nineveh, and he goes down to Joppah and then west heading to Tarshish. Tarshish was in Spain; they called it the ``end of the Earth''. Jonah got up and headed as far away from Nineveh as possible.
It doesn't say why Jonah ran away. He might have been scared of God. He might have been scared of Nineveh. He might have thought that Nineveh would not listen. He might have known about Jeremiah. We'll study Jeremiah in a few weeks. Jeremiah was a prophet who spent his whole life prophecying to Israel and nobody ever listened to him. Maybe Jonah thought ``I don't want to be like that''. But it doesn't say. It just says he ran away.
In the Hebrew it says he went down to Joppah. Then he went down onto a ship. Then he went down into the bottom of the ship. He goes down, down, down and he's feeling down, down, down.
And then there's a big storm. It says literally that the storm was so violent that even the ship thought it was going to break up. The big, strong sailors are afraid. The captain is afraid. The ship is afraid. But the little, weedy prophet, running away scared, is fine. He's down in bottom of the ship, flat out, sleeping like a baby. That's an irony.
So they wake him up, and ask him who he is. He says, in verse 7, ``I am a Hebrew and I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land.'' Wow. What a fantastic prophet. How impressive is this testimony?
The problem is, it isn't impressive at all. Because he'd already told them that he was running away from God. That's an irony.
But there is a bigger irony here. Because even though Jonah completely mucks up his testimony, the sailors still fear God. They still believe in God, and they end up worshipping God.
I am so happy about this irony. It is good news for me. It means I don't know what effect my testimony will have on people. And I don't need to know. Because when we share the Gospel with our friends, we are only doing half of the job. God is doing the other half of it. And He is a lot better than we are. We can have confidence that He will use our testimony. However bad it sounds! However unimpressive it sounds!
Then they throw Jonah overboard, and he goes down, down, down into the whale. He's feeling down, down, down again. And he prays this really impressive prayer. Let's read his prayer: (2:1-2:9)
Isn't this an amazing prayer? No, it isn't! Because this is irony again. Let's have a closer look. This is verse 2.
In my distress I called to the LORD, and he answered me. From the depths of the grave I called for help, and you listened to my cry.
This is Psalm 18 verse 6:
In my distress I called to the LORD; I cried to my God for help. From his temple he heard my voice; my cry came before him, into his ears.
Here's Jonah's prayer, verse 3:
You hurled me into the deep, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me; all your waves and breakers swept over me.
This is Psalm 42, verse 7:
Deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls; all your waves and breakers have swept over me.
Jonah, verse 4:
I said, "I have been banished from your sight; yet I will look again toward your holy temple."
Psalm 31, verse 22:
In my alarm I said, "I am cut off from your sight!" Yet you heard my cry for mercy when I called to you for help.
And so it goes on.
Jonah is not coming up with a fantastic, inspiring prayer to God. Jonah is running away from God. He has just been thrown off a ship. Now he's is in the middle of a whale. He is completely freaking out. He is trying to remember how to pray. ``How do I pray? Oh, I know, Psalms!'' He half-remembers bits of the Psalms and he sticks them all together, and that is his prayer.
But God still hears him. It doesn't matter how messy our prayers are. Actually Jesus said that long and clever prayers don't impress God at all. He is more interested in what is in our heart. And this is a prayer from the heart.
God hears his prayer, and Jonah is given a second chance. Jonah has disobeyed God in the most blatant way possible. God told Jonah what to do and he did the exact opposite. But God gave him another chance. He didn't even give up on Jonah or send someone else. God just forgave him and sent him out again. God hits the reset button on Jonah's life. This is our God. He is the God of second chances.
This is the gospel; it is good news. God can take a life which has been completely disobedient to him, and let you start again.
Like I said last time, I spent two years running away from God. I was not living right. Like Jonah, I was just disobedient and running away. And when I came back to God, I felt like I had completely wasted those years.
In another prophet, Joel, God says ``I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten''. This is one of my favourite verses in the Bible. I don't think we have locusts in Japan. When locusts sweep through a field they eat everything. They strip it completely bare. The field is a waste. There is nothing there at all. It is just completely useless. That is how I felt about my life at that point.
But with God nothing is useless. With God, nothing is a waste. God has taught me such about that time; He has used that time in my life. I now feel like God has repayed me for those years. And I know that God always gives a chance to push reset and start again.
So Jonah has a second chance, and this time he's going to get it right. He goes to Nineveh and prophesies. Jonah goes to a foreign country, to people who don't know God. They don't know what God is like. They don't know he's the God of second chances. All they know is what Jonah says: ``Forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed.'' They are not told to repent. They are not told that God will forgive them. They have no idea what they should do. All they know is that God is going to destroy them. But they all repent, from the king down to the servant. So God gives them a second chance too.
And this really, really annoys Jonah. Jonah was looking forward to fireworks. He wanted to see these wicked evil-doers burn in fire. Now we finally find out why Jonah ran away. Jonah says ``I knew this was going to happen! I knew you weren't really going to do it! I knew that you were just too nice!''
Jonah just got a second chance from God. He was the wicked evil-doer. He completely disobeyed God. He deliberately went in the other direction. Basically, he was rubbish. But God gave him a second chance. God let him hit the reset button and start again. And now, when Nineveh does the same, he gets really angry.
So he goes out of the city and sits down. You can just see him: he sits there, and folds his arms. And he watches the city, just to see if God will burn it down after all. ``Come on, burn!'' Jonah's all angry and hot nad bothered, and the sun is beating down on him. Jonah is the one who ends up getting burnt. Irony, again.
God gives him a plant to give him a bit of shade. Now the Hebrew text literally says ``The little plant made Jonah very happy.'' I sometimes wonder if the reason we use Jonah as a children's story is because it is a children's story. I don't know. I hope so. I like to think so. Because I think it would be very sad if the Bible didn't have a children's story in it. But I do know that this is definitely not a serious work of literature. Someone is having a laugh. Sometimes I am very glad that God has such a sense of humour.
And then God takes the plant away again, and Jonah gets angry again. Jonah was angry and annoyed that the little plant went away. And then God says ``You're annoyed because you care about the little plant. And you don't understand if I care about this big city?''
See, this is the big irony about Jonah. He was a prophet but he didn't want people to listen. He didn't want people to get saved. He actually really didn't want other people to know God. We can get like this. We can be so happy with our little club and our little idea of God. We can forget that God does not want anyone to perish, but he wants everyone to be saved. Jonah wanted God to be nasty and punish everyone.
But everywhere he went, God used him to save people. The sailors, the people of Nineveh, they all turned to God. Even though the prophet that God sent really didn't want them to! It's a big, big joke. But in the end the joke is on Jonah: because God does want to save. He does want to give people a second chance. He wants to push that reset button and let us try again. He wants to repay the years that we feel we have wasted. And if we try to say that He doesn't want those things, He will probably make a fool of us. But He'll save everyone who comes to Him anyway. He's that sort of a God. And that's definitely something to laugh about.