The Old Testament tale of Jonah is often thought of
as a children's story complete with a whale & a great adventure. As a college student at Wake Forest University, I recall attending a Sunday
morning service in a Baptist church in Winston-Salem with some friends in
which there was a tent fashioned into a whale in the sanctuary area in order to
re-enact the story of Jonah for the children. All of the children entered the tent in order to
simulate the fantastic journey that Jonah took.
They were absolutely thrilled to do so. Yet, the real message of the book of Jonah is a very
adult one that gives us an opportunity to stretch our understanding of God and
the salvation we receive through his son Jesus Christ. It doesn’t matter if the story of Jonah really
happened or not. The truth contained
in its message is what matters.
Today’s first reading tells of God's 2nd call to
Jonah and his less than enthusiastic response. God tells Jonah "to go to Nineveh, the great
city." Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, an enemy nation
that had destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and that held the southern
kingdom of Judah as a vassal state for almost one hundred years. Assyria was a brutal occupying force that forever
changed Israel's future. Jonah is called out by God to go and prophesy to
the capital city of Israel’s enemy.
We could criticize Jonah for his little faith. However, it might be more helpful for us to
identify with Jonah for a moment rather than to criticize him, to empathize
with the difficult mission to which God has called him. With the difficult and challenging tasks we are
called to do in our modern world, we could consider Jonah our patron saint. The message we receive from our modern secular
world is that we cannot make a big difference in the world, that we might as
well just fall in line and make the best living we can for ourselves and our
family, concentrating on our material success and on the secular values of our
society. Our calling from God and our values may tell us we
need to head East to Nineveh, but we all too often turn around, walk away, and
get on the boat with Jonah as a means of escape. Perhaps we find it too difficult or too lonely to
walk the way of our faith, to choose the path of faith over the ways of our
secular world. By running away, perhaps we find ourselves in the
belly of the whale, or out of touch with our calling from God, or distant from
a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives.
We need to think about those things that we try to
flee in our life of faith, things that we are being called to do by God, but perhaps
we are too scared or too uninterested or just don’t have the inclination to do
what God is asking us to do. This story
of Jonah’s gives us a lot to think about, doesn’t it?
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