Jonah - discovering God's immensity

The strange story of Jonah is not just the tale of a runaway prophet and a very large fish.

It’s also an instructive parable with a provocative and global message.

I think it speaks boldly to the current debate about mosques in a post 9/11 America.

God refused to write off the city of Nineveh despite their vice and violence. God sent Jonah east to give them the word, but Jonah went west instead. He wasn’t about to risk his life or reputation for such unworthy and improbable converts.

In truth, Jonah could see where God was going with this mission – and he refused to accept.

But God is relentless. The runaway preacher was plunged into a nightmare storm and then into the briny deep, tangled in sea-weed and on the verge of drowning.

Water is a good teacher, but God sent a fish to take him even deeper. His three-day confinement in the fish-prison was a living death, a divine time-out so a willful child could realize the folly of his ways.

Before Jonah could tell others about God, he first had to encounter his own defiance and ineptness as an ambassador of this God. He sank deep into the mire of religious pride and smug indifference to the brokenness of others.

God lets Jonah marinate (pun intended) in the stupidity of sin and the immense mercy of God. I wonder how long it took before he began to pray.  It is a severe mercy – and the story is only half-done.

Jonah gets a second chance to tell Nineveh about God. He sees them grasp mercy instead of death and discovers depths to his own bitterness and resentment toward God.

Jonah's story is told with immensity – big storm, big sea, big fish, Nineveh – all are immense. Jonah’s folly, bigotry, terror, God’s patience and mercy – also immense.

It’s a story about being engulfed by an infinite God, whose love dwarfs our shallow imagination. When this God engages us as partners, it will shatter our pettiness; it will transform us and enlarge our horizon and our hearts.

No wonder Jesus used Jonah’s story to illustrate his own mission in the world.  It was the Ultimate Over-whelming! When Jesus carried out God’s purpose of rescuing the nations and destroying death, there was no escaping the immense horror of the aloneness, the agony and the injustice of it.

But death did not undo him. Jesus over-whelmed Death, broke its tyranny over our race and transformed it into the door-way of Hope. Instead of judgment, we Ninevites got mercy, get mercy, and learn to give mercy.

I'd say that’s immense!  It makes me wonder . . . who I might be excluding from my world.

Excerpt from Jonah Chapter 2
Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from inside the fish. He said,
You threw me into the ocean depths,
and I sank down to the heart of the sea.
The mighty waters engulfed me;
I was buried beneath your wild and stormy waves
The waters closed over me;
Seaweed wrapped itself around my head.
But you, O LORD my God,
snatched me from the jaws of death!
As my life was slipping away,
I remembered the LORD.
And my earnest prayer went out to you
in your holy Temple.
Those who worship false gods
turn their backs on all God’s mercies.
But I will offer sacrifices to you with songs of praise,
and I will fulfill all my vows
For my salvation comes from the LORD alone.”
Then the LORD ordered the fish to spit Jonah out onto the beach.
NLT