Jonah always takes me by surprise. Well, not Jonah really;
he is utterly understandable, completely relatable and fits nicely into my
expectations for reality, because I can see me in his footprints. I know his
merciless, biting words in a crumbling city, his desire for vengeance, because
I’ve tasted them in my heart, caught before they catch my tongue, but still
there, like diluted poison.
What does take me by surprise, pulling my heartbeat
along by a string, is the God who follows Jonah. He is incredible, like the
good king in a fairy tale you believed in until you grew up and found the only
king around wearing an expensive suit in a big white house, lies dripping
through gleaming white teeth. And then, just when you thought all the stories
with happy endings and the hero on the white horse was confined to the realms
of fiction, a bitter man cries out over an entire city of people who were lost,
“For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and
abounding in steadfast love!” and all those people are saved, forever. It’s
like a fairy tale (Disney, not Grimm), seemingly too good to be true, when God whispers back to the
bitter man the exact number of children he saved in that city.
I can see, really, how people might have trouble believing
it. We’re so used to the cold, the biting sting of what we think is reality, how
could something so good be so real? I trip over it sometimes, blink in the
blinding light and find the darkness behind my eyelids. But then I open my eyes
again, and I know, like a pillar in my heart that bridges empty spaces, that
this is real. I know because I have been Jonah, bitter, and angry, and I have
been Peter, alone and afraid, and I have been ancient Israel throwing myself
down at the feet of another alter like a whore. I have been all these, but I am
none of them now.
Sometimes I see a glimpse of her, the one I would have been.
She is a terrible thing to see, selfish and withdrawn, worshiping and
despairing at herself all at the same time as her life passes like grass burning.
But I am not her. I am me; Jonah drawn out of the pit, crying, “When my life
was fainting away, I remembered the Lord!” I stand on the shore, washed clean
and free, like the pit never happened as he takes my hand and whispers, “Come
away with me.” And that is more real than anything.
Now, go read Jonah and keep a few things in mind:
- Nineveh was really, really bad. They did some pretty horrible stuff to a lot of people, including Jonah's people, the Israelites. You know the story of Corrie ten Boom forgiving one of her guards from the concentration camp when he came to her asking for forgiveness? Think along those lines. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/boom.html
- Notice that Jonah's only message to Nineveh was about oncoming destruction, they sought salvation even though no one was telling them it was being offered.
- Jonah didn't want to go to Nineveh because he knew the goodness of God, that God would want to and take any opportunity to forgive and deliver Nineveh, and Jonah hated Nineveh and wanted it destroyed.
- This one left me in tears when I realized. Read the last verse of the book of Jonah. "120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle." Do you know what God is referring to there? Children and animals, Nineveh's innocent.
