The man who tried to run from God

The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: “Go to  the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me”. But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish… Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah, and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. Jonah 1:1-2, 17

Poor Jonah! There’s nothing to suggest he was anything but a true Israelite who, under normal circumstances, was keen to do God’s will. Yet in the course of these four little chapters it’s hard to imagine how he could have got things more completely, totally wrong!

He attempts to run away from God’s call to him, but God refuses to let him. He ends up “in the belly of a huge fish”, from where he prays a heart-felt prayer, acknowledging his hopelessness and despair; whereupon God causes the fish to “vomit” him onto dry land. By now he has got the message, so he gets on and does as God had first instructed him. The result: a massive revival across Nineveh where everyone, both king and people, humble themselves before God.

This, surely, is every preacher’s dream. Yet Jonah remains in a thoroughly bad mood, still questioning God’s purposes (“I told you so, Lord!”, 4:2) and, for all we know, never becoming reconciled to them. We say good-bye to him in this angry, sulky mood.

The first two chapters of the book involve Jonah and the pagan sailors whose lives he has put in danger – plus God, of course. There is much we can apply to ourselves to warn and challenge us.

First, the person who tries to run away from God is on a fool’s errand.

Did Jonah really believe that jumping on a ship and heading in the opposite direction to Nineveh would do any good if God had really made up his mind? It would seem that yes, he did. His faith in God may have been entirely genuine, but it doesn’t seem to have been very mature (though who am I to judge!).

The fact is that wilful disobedience to God is always a flight into the darkness, and though our circumstances today may be far less dramatic than Jonah’s, exactly the same thing applies to us as Christians. Disobedience to God robs us of our overall purpose in life, of our inner peace, and threatens to lead to disaster.

Is this a word to anyone reading this?

Second, the mind of God is far more generous and loving than we can fully grasp.

Jonah no doubt had his reasons for rebelling against the purposes of God. True, the people of Nineveh (Assyrians) were bitter enemies of Israel. True, God was specifically “the God of Israel”. But hadn’t God called Israel precisely in order to be “a light to lighten the gentiles”, not just a harsh condemning voice? True, Jonah was called by God to “preach against” Nineveh  because of their “wickedness”, which sounds pretty severe, but the closing verses of the book make clear that God’s ultimate purpose is gracious, to show compassion (“. . .should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh?”).

As Christians we are well-attuned to the call of evangelism and, hopefully, we take it very seriously: Jesus is for every human being on the face of the earth! Yet we can still maintain a narrow, mean-minded spirit towards people who, deep down, we have decided are “not like us”. (A young eighteenth-century Christian had begun to feel a strong sense of call towards the teeming millions of China. When he shared this vision with older ministers he was told by one, “Young man, if God decides to make the gospel known to the people of China, he is perfectly able to do that without any help from you”.)

Are any of us guilty of prejudice of any kind – racial, religious, social or whatever? Let’s never forget: God loves sinners, strangers and outcasts. He loves failures and even those we may cruelly dismiss as odd-balls.

Is it time for a re-think of some of our attitudes?

Third, what are we to think when non-believers behave better than believers?

I have to admit that the more I read the story of Jonah, the more sympathy I feel for the unnamed sailors whose lives were endangered by his folly as they went about their day-to-day business. Putting it briefly, they did all they could to rescue him: “each cried out to his own god”, and they jettisoned their no doubt valuable cargo (verse 5); they reasoned with him (verses 6-12) when it must have been tempting to tip him overboard pronto; and in the end they only did that when all else had failed and they had reached the end of their resources (verse 13).

In a word, they showed him kindness; their actions were better than his. And haven’t we all known times when we have been put to shame by non-Christians who have outshone our response to a particular situation?

It’s true that the sailors’ kindness might have involved a strong element of superstition – they might have been afraid of incurring the anger of their gods if they put Jonah to death. But on the principle of always believing the best of somebody’s motives rather than the worst unless there is some very good reason to do otherwise, why not accept that, while they were no doubt sinners like the rest of us, they were motivated by goodness of heart? Why need we doubt that God was happy to accept their sacrifice and vows (verse 16)?

I like to imagine the mood on that ship as Jonah’s body sank, as the sea grew calm, and as those men rested on their oars in exhaustion. I like to think of it as one of a deeply serious peace.

It had been anything but a normal day at the office, certainly – yet had they not met with God that day?

Father, we can all smile at the folly of Jonah as we think of our own stupid blunderings and sins, our acts of weakness and disobedience. We can all see ourselves in him. Lord, have mercy upon us! Amen.