Beyond the Whale

Beyond the Whale--February 22, 2019

"The LORD God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, 'It is better for me to die than to live.' But God said to Jonah, 'Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?' And he said, 'Yes, angry enough to die.' Then the LORD said, 'You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?'" [Jonah 4:6-11]

It really makes a difference to get the whole way through a story.

Fans of mid 1990s "Must See TV" from NBC's old classic line-up will know that.  If you were a fan of the show Friends at all, you are likely familiar with the classic episode where Phoebe (played by Lisa Kudrow on the sitcom) says how much she hates that "sad movie" called It's A Wonderful Life, and how much she loves the happy story of Old Yeller, because she has only ever seen the first two-thirds of both movies.  And of course, there's the joke--she has never seen the classic Frank Capra happy ending of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas classic, complete with Clarence getting his wings, and so she doesn't know that It's A Wonderful Life leaves everybody smiling. And she has never made it to the end of Old Yeller, so she has never had to see the good and loyal dog be put down when he gets rabies at the end.  Phoebe has her movie reviews backwards, because she has never made it the whole way through either story.  And in both of those cases, the ending is really what the whole story drives toward.  

That's not only a helpful hint for your movie viewing, but it's also essential for reading the stories of the Bible.  And Jonah's story is a classic case in point.  If you stop halfway through, you will likely assume Jonah's story is a morality tale about doing what God says or else risking punishment (like getting swallowed by a great fish).  But that's not what the point of the story was ever really about.  Making it all the way to the end of Jonah's story is much more dangerous to our sense of religious self-righteous.  Be careful--if you keep on reading past the famous fish scene, Jonah's story just might make you rethink your whole faith and revise the way you see "the other."

It's a shame that in a lot of church life, we stop at the part of the story where Jonah gets spit up by the great fish.  That much, almost everybody knows.  The Sunday School flannelboard version of Jonah's story that I grew up with boiled down to something like this:

"God told Jonah to go to Nineveh.  

Jonah said, 'No,' and went as far away in the other direction as he could.

God punished Jonah for disobeying by first sending a storm at sea and then sending a great big fish to swallow Jonah up.

God only let Jonah out when he finally promised to do what God said.

And the moral of the story is--do what God says or else you'll be punished."

Nobody in my recollection ever bothered pointing out that there was another two chapters to the story, and that maybe, just maybe, the actual turning point of the story was yet to be told.  In the Respectable Religious version of Jonah's story, Jonah is basically Goofus from the old Highlights' "Goofus and Gallant," giving us an example of what not to do if we wanted to avoid God's wrath.

But really, once the great fish vomits Jonah out at the city limits of Nineveh, the story takes a couple of unexpected turns.  Once we get beyond the whale, Jonah goes into the city of Nineveh--the capital city of Israel's sworn enemy, the cruel Assyrians--and he begrudgingly announces God's judgment on their cruelty and wickedness... only to have these terrible, no-good, hopeless, pagan Ninevites... change.  They turn from their wickedness and cruelty, so the story goes, and God decides to be merciful.

That was exactly what Jonah had been afraid of.

Seriously.  Jonah is angry with God, because he knew--he just knew--that if he did as God told him and announced his message to Nineveh, that they would turn from their wickedness and God would be merciful to them.  And Jonah didn't want that.  He complains to God, saying, "I knew it--I knew you would do this, because I know that you are gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love!"  Jonah gets upset that God is gracious to these... others... these enemies.  

This is the real issue of the story: Jonah wants permission to hate these people because they are from a hostile foreign country.  And he doesn't want to listen to God's summons to speak to them, because he doesn't want them to be eligible for mercy.  He just wants a justification for his own hatred of "the other." And that willful ignoring of God's love for these enemies consumes Jonah. Truthfully, he has been swallowed up long before any whales get to him.

So after Jonah has his hissyfit with God, the last scene of the story unfolds.  Jonah is wallowing in his own bitterness over God's choice to show mercy to the people Jonah hated, and so God gives another chance to Jonah to "get it," just as God had given the people of Nineveh another chance to "get it," too.  God shades the self-pitying, miserable prophet with a miraculous bush that grows overnight  (take that, Jack and the Beanstalk!), and Jonah loves the plant for its shade.  Then, when God lets a worm eat the plant in a second night, Jonah is upset at the loss of this random shrubbery.  This is God's entry--this is where divine mercy gets a toe in the door.

"You are upset about this plant, Jonah?" says God.  "You are sad for the loss of a shrub, which grew up in a night and which you had nothing to do with taking care of--and yet you wanted me to destroy a whole city full of people?"  God forces Jonah to see how divine love for "the other" really works.  Jonah has felt compassion for a plant--so how much more should Jonah have been concerned for the lives of men and women and children (and many animals, as the text notes, too!) in Nineveh?  Jonah had wanted to see divine wrath consume the city in fire and brimstone... and instead he saw divine grace envelop the city with love and mercy.  So God refuses to give up--not on the despicable Ninevites, and not on the despairing prophet, either.  And the last line, the question that God puts to Jonah, becomes a question put to us, too--can we dare to allow that God loves the people we have sworn off as our enemies?  Could we bear the thought that God just might send us to be the means of redemption for the people we wanted to hate?

This is what the whole story of Jonah has always really been about.  It's just that most of the time, we never make it beyond the whale.  But what a dramatic turn, if we actually make it through to the end of the story.  What at first sounds like a straightforward morality fable about what bad things will happen to those who disobey an angry and almighty God turns out to be a story about a grace that will not stay contained within the boundaries we want to put up.

Look, let's be honest: we are burning with our own personal hatreds for people we don't like and don't want to like.  There is a near daily ritual on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media in which we collectively post angry words about how "Nobody else sees what's going on!" while we rattle off our personal list of our favorite villains to hate--the political party you despise, the dangerous outsiders you want to get rid of, the dangerous influences affecting our children... the whole nine yards.  I'm pretty sure Jonah gave a speech like that to God listing all the reasons that God was not allowed to forgive the Ninevites.  You can easily imagine the reluctant prophet lecturing God about "those godless people of Nineveh" and how big a threat they are to Israel's national security--how they must be gotten rid of, not forgiven, and how anyone who shows mercy to "those people" must be hopelessly naïve or brainwashed.  Jonah is basically everybody's one rage-filled uncle who goes off on tirades about all the dangerous bad people we all ought to be afraid of.

And in a wonderfully ironic twist of grace, even that bigot of a prophet is given mercy, too.  Rather than just zap Jonah with a final lightning bolt or have the big fish just digest him at the bottom of the sea, God gives Jonah the chance to be changed by grace, just as much as the Ninevites are changed by grace and set free.

See, here's the thing about grace: the moment--the very moment--that we set up a boundaries beyond which we say grace is not allowed to go, God deliberately goes there and showers mercy on the people we were hell-bent on hating.  Godless, conniving Ninevites?  Grace.  Bitter, hateful Jonah?  Grace.  The people you and I are damn sure are beyond the reach of God's love?  Grace.  You and me for thinking that someone else was beyond the reach of God's love in the first place?  Guess what--grace, too. Jonah's story is precisely about how God chooses to take the side of the "other," even when we don't want to see it.

If we stop at the great fish, we'll never get any further than tired old moralizing that reinforces our old hatreds and justifies our old bigotry.

But if we go beyond the whale, we will find God has been leaning against castor bean plants and standing with the people we wanted to hate.

It really makes a difference to make it all the way through the story.

Lord God, whether it's by fish or plant or the voice of a friend, get our attention to love the ones we want to ignore or hate, and lead us to see the ways you have been gracious with us, too.