Responding to God’s Call
The story of Jonah is a story in scripture that, far too often, is left in the church nursery or the children’s sunday school room, rarely seeing the light of day in a sermon or in “serious” conversation about Scripture and Theology in the church.
We know this story. Jonah runs away from what God asked Jonah to do and, in going the opposite direction, Jonah finds himself on a ship. The ship becomes beset by storms because of Jonah’s presence and so he jumps off of their ship to save it, only to be eaten by a humongous fish.
He remains in the fish’s belly for three days and three nights (three days…. hmm. a familiar time frame…) and then Jonah prays a prayer and God has the fish spit Jonah back up onto dry land.
Normally that is where the story ends in the church nursery. But that is only 2 of the four chapters of Jonah!
The book of Jonah is weird. It’s considered to be among the book of prophets, but the only prophecy Jonah proclaims is five verses long!
For us, I think Jonah’s story can illuminate some challenging truths about God. I am sure many of us have heard and taken great comfort in God being this unmoveable and unchanging constant in our lives. Yet in Jonah, we hear explicitly that “God changed his mind.”
Change is hard. Living in the world today, it can feel like all of the very rapid change we experience (just think how much has changed from before the Pandemic to today!) is chaotic and leads to suffering and struggle. We might desire to turn to our God who is a constant in the chaos, a stable port in the storm, a rock standing firm amidst sinking sand.
But in scripture, we see that even God changes God’s mind.
Jonah also presents us with a challenging truth about Justice: sometimes justice isn’t very personally satisfying. When we think of Justice we think of a wrong being righted, of someone who did harm getting their “just” reward, or for punishment to be meted out to those who deserve it. God’s justice in Jonah provides none of that.
Frederick Buechner, a theologian and biblical scholar once wrote in response to a question about why some of our stories in scripture stay in the nursery and rarely make it out into the realm of “adult” conversation and discernment: “Not, I suspect, because children particularly want to read them, but more because their elders particularly do not want to read them or at least do not want to read them for what they actually say and so make them instead into fairy tales, which no one has to take seriously. But for all our stratagems, the legends, the myths continue to embody truths or intuitions which in the long run it is perhaps more dangerous to evade than to confront.”
Ultimately, this story about Jonah is a story about God calling Jonah to a task, and how Jonah responded. Jonah’s response can teach us a whole lot about ourselves, and about following God in the 21st century.
This week as I read Jonah, I am focusing on three things: God’s justice, God’s “mutability,” and how God’s call is not a top-down decree, but an exchange between us and God. How we respond to God’s call has an effect on the world around us!
