Sermon: Jonah: Beyond the Whale

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Jonah: Beyond the Whale

By Warren Robertson

July 29, 2001

en I led the Bible 101 group here at Christ Church, those who participated sat around the table in the now gutted Guild Room while I stacked a variety of books in the middle of the table. We were there to talk about the Bible, of course, but I had brought a tote bag full or other books: a history book, a science book, a novel, a biography, poetry, a childrens story, a foreign languages grammar, an anthology of mythology, a letter, devotional literature, a textbook on religion, a hymn book, a cookbook, a manual of law, even a road map. I was trying to get us to think about, and realize the variety of genres and writing styles found within the covers of the Bible and their purposes, and the many ways different people approach the Bible, all expecting to find something meaningful in it. While all those books and writings mentioned do not directly apply, and while we could add others, the point is that the Bible is not one book, it is many, 66 to be exact (at least by the way we Protestants count), and those books differ, indeed parts of books differ, in style and purpose. It is a bewildering conflation, but pushes the point that we cannot approach all parts of the Bible the same way.

The question that usually comes up when focusing on the book of Jonah is the question a member of First Baptist Bristol, VA asked me one Sunday evening at the close of Evening Worship. We had looked at Jonah that night. He came forward after closing prayer, and asked, Do you think that Jonah was a real person? That the things that take place in the story actually happened as such?

The historicity of biblical characters and events is no doubt questioned more today than at any time in history. But, this sort of question is not exactly new. It is relatively new when applied to Jesus, whom I think was indeed an historical figure. It is relatively new when applied to Jeremiah, whom I take to be an historical figure. The question has been put to David, Moses, Abraham, Noah, Adam and on it goes. Had my friend in Bristol asked me of these, I would have said: David, yes with some exaggeration of his exploits; Moses, yes with even more exaggeration; Abraham, probably; Noah, probably not; Adam, well I suppose someone had to be first, belly button intake or not.

But when it comes to Jonah a simple no suffices.^[1] The probability of him or anyone else living in a whale for three days is hard to swallow, so to speak. And as it turns out, the question of historicity (did it really happen?) is not new when applied to Jonah. A more thorough investigation than I have been able to do would prove very interesting, but for now lets take this one finding. Jewish scholar Uriel Simon points out that Joseph ibn Caspi, another Jewish commentator on Jonah acknowledges that all do not agree on the historicity of Jonah, especially chapters one and two where we find the whale. While assuming Jonah himself was an historical figure, some, he says, say that the events described was a dream. Or maybe Jonah had a prophetic vision.^[2] One way or the other, it is argued that the whale episode was not an actual, historical event. Joseph ibn Caspi lived in the late 13th to early 14th century.

It seems to me that the story makes no claim to being a historical account. In fact, it has the feel, especially the sound, of an artful, entertaining, even funny story. Can't stories be historical? one may ask. Yes, but this story does not set itself in a particular time.^[3]

Talk of a part of the Bible as a story without a point-for-point correspondence to historical event makes some folks very uneasy. As I heard from someone not long ago, If one word of the Bible is false (read un-historical or un-reliable in all matters), its all false! Still others might conclude, If the Bible is just a collection of stories that I can not accept as believable, then why give it any series consideration at all?^[4] But one need not equate a story with either falsity or disregard. On the contrary, stories convey experiential, spiritual and eternal truth on our most common and crucial concerns and experiences. This is the way I take Jonah. And perhaps such a look gives us a second chance to hear and respond to its message even as Jonah had a second chance to hear and respond to Gods call.

I want to briefly point out some features that mark Jonah as a good story. First, everything in Jonah is big and to the extreme. Nineveh, for example, is a three days journey across. A three days walk across? How far can a person walk in a day? 20 miles or more if you are up to it. Thats at least 60 miles! No doubt Nineveh, in fact a real city in place and time, was big, but 60 miles across? Nineveh then is aptly refereed to as the big city (1:3, 3:2) ; the Lord hurled a big wind on the sea (1:4); and a big storm came up (1:4, 12); the sailors were scared in a big way (1:10); Jonah was swallowed by a big fish (2:1); he was very afraid (4:1); then he was very pleased about the plant (4:6).

Second, more than a little personification is going on in the story. The whale gets most of the attention when we think of the challenges to our rationality, but what about the claim that animals took part in repenting of wrongs? The decree to abstain from food and drink and to put on sackcloth is addressed to humans and animals! (3:7-8). Animals are acting like humans. And did you notice what the ship did in the storm? It thought to break up, or it reckoned itself splinters as I put it (1:5).^[5] And the storm walks and rages on the sea (1:11, 13).^[6] I think of the scenes in cartoons or childrens books when the clouds of the storm form a person who is huffing and puffing and blowing on the water making it heave.

One other story-tellers craft^[7] that we see in the story of Jonah is irony. It is abundant. When the storm blows up, the sailors, non-Israelites mind you, come off more pious than Jonah, the Israelite prophet. They immediately pray to their gods. And where is Jonah? Sound asleep in the cabin below (1:5). When Jonah suggests they throw him overboard, they first try to get the boat ashore (1:12-13). They are the good guys. Jonah is the wayward prophet. When the sea finally calms, they fear God and offer sacrifices and make vows (1:17). Meanwhile, Jonah is getting a mouth full of the Mediterranean. Then, when finally in Nineveh, the Ninevites become

the model of piety. They put on sackcloth and ashes; they believed in God (3:5), even if a bit to readily to be convincing. We could mention more irony, but lets stop with this: Jonah, the prophet, gets one line of prophecy and it doesn't even come to pass. And he sits down east of the city, his garments pulled up around him, arms crossed, turban pulled low, teeth set on edge, to sulk.

But there is one thing in the story that is not ironic: that God proves merciful and inescapable. Jonah himself says that God is merciful. He gives the common Old Testament formula for Gods character: God is a God of mercy and compassion, slow to anger with abundant loving kindness and hesitant to do evil (4:2).^[8] After all, Jonah knows Gods mercy first hand. And he knows first hand that God is inescapable. For he tried to run from God. He turned from God (as all Israel had done so often), he refused the burden of Gods call to him. When called to go to Nineveh in the East, Jonah turned to the West toward Joppa and on to Tarshish.^[9] When called to set out and walk to Nineveh, he sprints in the opposite direction.^[10] When called of God to arise, to get up and go, Jonah starts a downward turn. He goes down to Joppa, he goes down into the ship when he pays his fare. And he goes further down into the inner recesses of the ship. And when hurled over board in the midst of the storm, he goes down, down, down to the bottom of the sea, to the very roots of mountains (2:5-6).^[11]

So far as he knew, he had accomplished what he wanted to do. When setting out toward Joppa, when sailing toward Tarshish, as far in the opposite direction as he knew to go, he wants to get away from the presence of the Lord (1:3) When going down as far as one could go, Jonah hopes to get away from the presence of the Lord. He is as far away from the presence of God vertically and horizontally as he can imagine. There he is far from the peaceful shore, seeking to rise no more.^[12]

But even in the depths, God is there!^[13] And God does not leave him alone. And God does not let him die at the bottom of the sea. The Master of the Sea heard his despairing cry, and lifted him from the waters to safety.¹¹ God appointed a fish, of all things unbelievable, a fish brought Jonah up from the depths and put him on dry land. Jonah was right about one thing, Deliverance belongs to the Lord! (2:9). Then God gave Jonah a second chance. God called Jonah a second time. God saved Jonah and gave him another chance at life.

Now I want to ask you, isnt that a true story after all? don't we get down? don't we sometimes think that we are so far down, so far out that nothing can bring us up? Isnt it true that some, like Jonah, even wish that their life would come to an end? (4:3). And isnt it true that when we are down and out, that we turn to God for strength and find a very present help.¹²

In the movie 28 Days, Sandra Bulluck plays Gwen Cummings, a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. At the beginning of the movie, she makes a spectacle of herself at her sister's wedding, upsetting the family and friends, not to mention the bride and groom. In a drunken stupor, she leaves the wedding reception, driving the limousine that was to usher the happy couple to their honeymoon. She runs it through someones yard and smashes into a house. Soon afterward, she finds herself with a court order to undergo substance abuse rehab. She has 28 days there or a jail term. It will be the longest 28 days of her life.

When she arrives at the rehab center somewhere in the Tennessee hills, she thinks she is different from all the rest of the those inside. They are all screwed up, not her. They are dependent on drugs and have done a whole lot of things she wouldn't dream of doing, or at least that she doesn't remember doing. They chant in a circle. They sing Lean on Me and Gospel ditties. She doesn't need that. But when withdrawal sets in, she finds out how desperate she is, first for drugs, but then for life. Within a few days, she has good intentions and throws the pills her boyfriend smuggled to her out her second story window. Later that night though, she climbs out of the same window to get to them. She falls, hits the ground in a slump and passes into a deep sleep.¹³

Someone passes by. A big guy, big enough to pick her up. We don't know why he does this. Apparently, he just thought it was the right thing to do. He bends down and gently takes her up in his arms and takes her inside where it is warm and dry. This is the turning point. She made it through a critical point in her withdrawal, with some help out of the blue that she didn't ask for. In fact, she is known as one who does not ask for help. But that changes too. She sees her potential for starting life over. Its a hard struggle. And strangely enough, it begins by helping others, by helping the person closest to her at the time, her roommate. Then she reaches out to her estranged sister. And even though her roommate ends up killing herself, and even though she must leave the rehab center, and even though she must leave behind her old life and her old friends, there is hope that she will make it. She learns she is like other people who have problems, for we all have something to face. She learns to ask for help. She learns to reach out to others. She learns the healing potential of love. The movie ends when she happens across a fellow rehab patient. He too is struggling with maintaining the new life. She understands. They embrace, with tears and smiles.

A movie, a story, but very real. Merciful deliverance was there when Jonah was at his lowest. We see in Jonah, that we cannot escape Gods loving presence. As Paul says neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.¹⁴ Thanks be to God for we need help.

Amen.

^[1]Same for Job.

^[2]Uriel Simon, Jonah (JPS Bible Commentary, trans. by Lenn J. Schramm; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999), xv-xvi. It was 20th commentators like A. J. Wilson who defended the possibility that a human could survive inside a whale. See The Sign of the Prophet Jonah and its Modern Confirmations, Princeton Theological Review 25 (1927): 630-42. Well, even if a person could live inside a whale, this doesn't prove that Jonah did. Possibility does not equal probability.

^[3]Nonetheless, I would say it is out of particular time. It is a story from an historical context, but it is, I think, a story with an intended message for an intended audience, but not so tied to its particulars that we don't find it meaningful in different contexts. This, of course, is so for most of Scripture and would never have survived this long if it were not so. Also, I am intentionally not using the term myth. Defining myth is elusive and in most people minds, myth equals falsehood. To list 10 myths about . . . is to list ten things that are not true. Here, I am trying to say that Jonah, while not an historical account, is true. Also, the term should be reserved for a particular genre rather than used as a broad category for anything not strictly an historical report.

^[4]Reinhold Niebuhr is reported to have said something to the effect that fundamentalism was hopelessly wrong because it took Christian myths literally, while liberal Christianity was hopelessly wrong because it failed to take Christian myths seriously. Gary Dorrien, The Origins of Postliberalism: A Third Way in Theology? The Christian Century July 4-11 (2001): 16.

^[5]Most English translations do not render the Hebrew this way. NRSV has the ship threatened to break up, which is personified as well. This would be a great study. It is hard at this point to simply say isnt that clever of the writer as so much literary criticism concludes; rather, I wonder if we might find a more thorough going thought of animism or something like that if we looked into this question with other texts. In other words, I don't think it is enough to stop with pointing out clever literary techniques; rather, we should ask, of what significance was this technique for its time and place; does it point to something beyond itself? See the paper on puns as incantations delivered at SBL 2000.

^[6]NAS the sea was becoming increasingly stormy or NRSV the sea was growing more and more tempestuous just doesn't cut it.

^[7]Im assuming an oral tradition that precedes writing even though this assumption is not so fashionable these days (and Im still young!).

^[8]See also Exodus 34:6; Numbers 14:8; Nehemiah 9:17; Psalm 86:15; 103:8; 145:8; Joel 2:13.

^[9]Consensus has Tarshish to be further West of Palestine, across the Mediterranean. The TEV renders Tarshish as Spain. See Baker, David W. Tarshish. Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by D.N. Freedman. New York: Doubleday, 1992.

^[10]An opposition of motion not often highlighted.

^[11]The Hebrew verb yrd he went down is used in each instance (1:3[2x], 5; 2:7). See among others Phyllis Trible, Rhetorical Criticism. Fortress Press, 199-.

^[12]Verse 1 of the hymn, Love Lifted Me.

[13]Cf. Psalm 139: 7-10.

¹¹Ibid. The hymns of deliverance from the sea (the emphasis on deliverance) are of great interest to me. Many of them were written in the 19th and early 20th century when sea travel was the going mode of transportation, the only mode for transatlantic transport. Death at sea was a great threat, but rescues were made. The advent and advancement of aviation eclipsed travel on the sea, except for luxury cruises of course. There was a transition in overseas travel though: the boat plane. In case the plane didn't make it, they could land on the water. With air travel, hymns have not followed. There is far less chance of survival, after all, when an airplane crashes.

¹²Psalm 46:1.

¹³See the pattern with Jonah?

¹⁴Romans 8:38-39.