"Jonah: A Wild Ride"
Jonah 2
17 But the LORD provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. (Jon 1:17 NRS)
Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish,
2 saying, "I called to the LORD out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.
3 You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.
4 Then I said, 'I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?'
5 The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head
6 at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the Pit, O LORD my God.
7 As my life was ebbing away, I remembered the LORD; and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.
8 Those who worship vain idols forsake their true loyalty.
9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the LORD!"
10 Then the LORD spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.
I sat in the metal cage, trying to breathe calmly, telling myself I was perfectly safe. But as the cage began to move, slowly at first, then faster and faster, my heartbeat quickly soared. The cage began to swing forward and back, then to flip all the way over, sending the blood rushing to my head. Over the next two and a half minutes, I flipped and spun, back and forth, up and down, with no predictable pattern. And when it was over, my legs were jelly and my throat hoarse from screaming.
My friend had talked me into going on a carnival ride called “The Zipper,” which Wikipedia describes as featuring “strong vertical G-forces, numerous spins, and a noted sense of unpredictability.” After several deaths in the late 1970’s due to doors coming unlatched and numerous incidents of whiplash, back injuries, and heart attacks, the ride also has a reputation for being extremely dangerous. My friend had informed me of this just after the ride began, increasing my sense of terror.
Reading the book of Jonah, I get a sensation similar to that of riding the Zipper. I know, it may not sound as exciting as being trapped in a metal cage, flung in the air, and rolled around four times a minute. But these experiences really do share a lot in common.
Jonah is flung into the sea and tossed around unpredictably. His story is filled with descriptions of going up and down, back and forth, and his reality is upended over and over. Instead of a man catching a fish, a fish catches a man. Instead of a man killing and eating a fish, a fish rescues and vomits up a man. Everything in this story is backwards and upside down. Nothing follows a predictable pattern. In fact, the many elements it shares with other Hebrew literature are all subverted in some way in this tale. And then there’s the vomiting at the end of today’s segment that clearly has parallels with riding the Zipper.
Reading English translations of Jonah, we might not fully appreciate the vulgarity of the language in today’s story. This segment of the tale is bookended with a great fish “swallowing” Jonah and then “spewing” him out on land. Both of these words in Hebrew are simply gross.
The word used for “swallow” is not a polite term for eating. It implies devouring or gulping down. This story always goes over well in children’s Sunday school classes because you get to say the word “spew” or “vomit.” There are actually more genteel words the writer might have used here. The great fish could have deposited Jonah on dry land or delivered him safely to try land. But the word used here is the same one used to describe what happens to someone after a night of binge drinking. The fish was sick of Jonah, literally. The fish vomited up Jonah like it had just been for a spin on an aquatic Zipper ride.
Of all the ways Jonah might have imagined his day would go after he was hoisted off the ship, he did not see this one coming, nor is it what he would have asked for. As he flailed in the stormy waters, he might have prayed for death. He might have prayed for another ship to come by and pick him up. He might have prayed for a sea turtle to give him a ride on his back. But he would not have prayed to be gulped down by a great fish and vomited up near Nineveh.
None of this what Jonah would have prayed for. But the fact is, Jonah didn’t pray. As we heard in last week’s chapter, Jonah slept while others prayed. Even when the ship captain ordered him to pray, we don’t see him on his knees or hear his supplication.
It is only after three days and three nights in the belly of the fish that Jonah finds a voice for prayer.
Three days in Biblical time has so many references that it would be impossible to determine precisely what it is meant to symbolize. Three-day periods feature in Genesis and Exodus, Joshua, Judges, and Esther, and, of course, in the death and resurrection of Jesus. While these three-day periods have a variety of outcomes, from deliverance to doom, repentance to resurrection, they all seem to signal what Jewish scholar Erica Brown calls “a period of anticipation and preparation for radical transformation.”
For three days in the belly of the fish, instead of being digested, Jonah has the opportunity to digest what is happening. The first chapter of Jonah’s story is filled with frenetic action – fleeing and fighting a storm and finally being flung into the sea. But here the action comes to a dead halt. For a whole chapter in this brief, 4-chapter book, nothing really happens. There is an eerie quiet in the belly of the fish. Jonah is alone, trapped, like in the metal cage of the Zipper ride. There’s nowhere he can go. And the sense of danger is palpable.
And here, Jonah is able to begin processing his experience. He is forced to stop and face the reality he’s been trying to avoid. Brown says that three days of waiting “reminds us that liminality is not something to be feared but a time of indeterminacy and possibility that gives us the inner strength to face circumstances we may not have bargained for.” Jonah didn’t bargain for this assignment to Nineveh. But he now knows he can’t outrun it. In the fish, he must face it.
Most of this chapter is consumed with the psalm Jonah composes after he’s had three days to think about what he’s done. We might expect a psalm of repentance, or even lament. Jonah’s psalm echoes the penitential psalm 130, which begins, “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.” But Jonah doesn’t speak of God marking iniquities or forgiving and redeeming. Jonah laments with the words of Psalm 42, “all your waves and your billows have gone over me.” But Jonah doesn’t share that Psalm’s expression of longing for God. Jonah’s psalm also reflects the cursing psalm 69, which begs God to “Save me..for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.” But Jonah curses no one. He doesn’t name an enemy that is oppressing him.
Perhaps that is because he’s realized that his greatest enemy is himself. But that isn’t what we hear in his Psalm. No, Jonah twists the narrative we’ve heard to reflect favorably on himself and to implicate God in his present predicament. In a moment of selective amnesia, Jonah forgets how he fled from God, how he passively accepted death instead of repenting and accepting his assignment from God, how he forced the sailors to throw him overboard rather than jumping in himself. Jonah composes a revisionist history, claiming that “You, [God], cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas.”
Curiously, scholars classify Jonah’s psalm as a psalm of thanksgiving. His words certainly sound similar to the thanksgiving Psalm 130, which says, “O LORD my God, I cried to you for help, and you have healed me. O LORD, you brought up my soul from Sheol, restored me to life from among those gone down to the Pit.” But this thanksgiving provides yet another nauseating flip in this story. Jonah composes a psalm of thanksgiving instead of the expected atonement, one that includes self-aggrandizement rather than confession.
And while Jonah praises God for answering his cry of distress, he also blames God for causing this calamity. He describes his decent into the watery depths, into the belly of death, and thanks God for a deliverance that hasn’t really occurred yet. He congratulates himself for remembering to pray, after he refused to pray during the storm on the ship. He chastises those who worship idols, while he commits to making sacrifices and vows, and yet he neglects to repent of his failure to follow God’s original command to prophesy to Nineveh.
Even in this chapter that is lacking in movement and action, the unpredictable flips can leave us feeling like we don’t know which end is up. And the result, for the fish at least, is nauseating.
From beginning to end, Jonah is a cautionary tale. Scholars have different opinions as to who the original intended audience was. But it has plenty of caution and conviction to offer us today.
The first thing we can take away from this segment of Jonah’s tale is God’s deliverance can come in forms we’d never imagine and might not really appreciate. Sometimes when we’ve gotten ourselves into a big enough mess, cleaning it up is itself a messy process. If you are in a place that feels uncomfortable and even gross, that doesn’t mean it isn’t exactly where God wants you to be. Sometimes that is a stop along the way to greater faithfulness and new life.
Second, we can learn from Jonah’s story that sometimes we need a break in the action to be able to talk to God. When we’re running scared, or hiding out, or giving up, or flailing for our lives – we are not always in a place where we can really process and articulate what we’re experiencing. So if there are times when you feel like you can’t even pray, when the experience is too big, too terrifying, too revolting – you might just need to pause the narrative. God may need to lock you up for a day, or three, whether you like it or not. You might need some time alone, even if it’s scary and not where you want to be.
We are terrible at stopping and being with ourselves. It is something we avoid like the plague. The second we are alone and things get quiet, instead of digesting our experiences, we divert ourselves with cell phones and social media and anything else that will distract us from transformational silence and inactivity. Stopping the storyline is sometimes the only way for us to speak to and listen to God. It is sometimes the only way to get our stories back on the right track.
Third, we will do anything to avoid taking responsibility for our own actions. Jonah’s psalm is a ridiculous parody of a psalm, mashing up lament, penitence, and curses into something that ultimately sounds like thanksgiving. And all of this is to avoid the truth about his own story. He doesn’t commit to one category of speech because he can’t really face what he’s done. We would rather insincerely blame and praise God in the same breath instead of sincerely repenting or even lamenting.
But finally, what is at the heart of this story, from beginning to end, is God’s faithfulness and love, God’s compassion and grace. God doesn’t punish Jonah; God pursues him. God doesn’t judge Jonah; God redirects him. God doesn’t abandon Jonah; God encompasses him.
When we find ourselves hitting rock bottom, running from God and from ourselves, drowning in a churning sea of our own foolhardy choices, God is not interested in punishing or judging us, and God is not about to abandon us. God will pursue us with love, redirect us with compassion, and be faithfully and gracefully present with us in whatever we are suffering. There is nothing we can do to make God love us less. There is nowhere we can flee from God, and that is good news. And God has ways to get us back on track, though they may be messy or boring or frightening. And God will do this even if we won’t recognize it, even if we rewrite our stories to make ourselves the hero.
Life is a dangerous ride. It is filled with unpredictable and sometimes-nauseating flips and twists. We can sometimes feel so up-ended that we are incapacitated, our legs like jelly and our throats hoarse from screaming.
But when I wobbled off the platform of the Zipper, I was filled with gratitude. Gratitude for life. Gratitude for courage and friendship. Gratitude that I didn’t ever have to ride the Zipper again. I had nothing left to prove.
Gratitude might be the one thing Jonah gets right in this whole story. Though his praise for God is tinged with accusation, I believe it was still authentic. Though his vows and commitments may be short-lived and tinged with judgement, I believe they were sincere. He has come through the wild ride, he has lived to see another day, and he never has to try to run from God again. He has nothing left to prove, just a job to do.
Though our praise may be imperfect and our commitments unreliable, our gratitude can change the direction of our story. And because our story is never just ours alone, gratitude can change the direction of all the stories that intersect with ours. If we only get one thing right in this wild ride called life, may it be gratitude.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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