Quirky stories: Jonah

Pastor Holly Johnson

Spirit Garage

Jonah

July 7, 2024

Spirit Garage is a creative, quirky and curious faith community. This summer we’ve been exploring the idea that God is also creative and quirky and curious.

One of the quirky stories to explore is the story of Jonah.

Here’s a reminder about the story. Jonah was told to go to Ninevah, that great city, and to tell them that in this period of time, God is going to destroy them. 

He doesn’t want to go. He doesn’t want to have anything to do with these people. He does not wish to go to Nineveh to preach repentance to the people, as God has commanded, because he feels they are his enemies, and he is convinced that God will not carry out his threat to destroy the city. 

Instead he boards a ship for Tarshish, which is in the opposite direction. Well, actually no one knows where it is. It may have been a word used to describe the farthest place you can think of. Soon a raging storm causes the crew to cast lots and determine that Jonah is the problem. They throw him overboard, and he is swallowed by a great fish. In its belly for 3 days and 3 nights, Jonah repents of his sin to God, and the fish vomits him up on dry land. Jonah then makes the 500-mile trip to Nineveh. That’s the short version.

Barbara Brown Taylor tells us “Ninevah was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, a country now known as Iraq.  The Assyrians were pagans who had enslaved the Israelites and warred against God’s people for centuries.  They were indeed the classic enemy.  And Jonah did not want any part of proclaiming God’s message of repentance to the Ninevites because he was fairly certain they would ignore him at best, or kill or imprison him, since the story says even the king was wicked through and through, but still quite powerful.” Plus, these people had killed his people.   

He’s to go warn them about what God is about to do. When he does, he ends up leading the city in a great revival.  And by that I mean he walks through the city saying “in so many days God is going to destroy you.” For some reason the city listens to this enemy’s message and they change their ways, turn to God and live differently. 

Jonah pouts when this happens. He goes out of the town to watch it destroyed and instead watches it get saved. This is what he knew would happen. He would rather die. 

It’s a great dramatic story, right? The whole story is filled with ridiculousness. The farthest town away, the worst storm, the biggest fish, the worst people on earth. An angry prophet, a boat, The huge fish swallows a person but doesn’t actually digest him; so he just hangs out there for three days in the belly of the whale before being spit out, when he goes to walk through the streets in a city full of enemies, with a message from God. And every last soul living there repents, even the cows.

I’ll borrow from a Native American way to begin a story and say about this one, “I don’t know if it happened this way or not, but I know this story is true.” A story can be true whether it actually happened or not. This is a parable with a powerful message.  

What is true about it? There are all kinds of texts in the bible that have God punishing people, using divine violence. Barbara Brown Taylor says that these texts tell us not about God, but about ourselves. Because we project our biases, angers, fears, and all the negative things on God. 

Including our terrible parenting habits. I swear a number one parenting rule is that you don’t threaten punishments you aren’t willing to follow through on. But in the bible, the prophets do this all the time. Even Jesus does this, or at least the author who wrote the book of Matthew SAYS that Jesus uses this tactic, as he’s always talking about people being thrown into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Jonah doesn’t want to do it because he KNOWS God won’t follow through with it.

The Bible contains all kinds of literature: it’s like a library with a poetry section, a science fiction section, maybe a historical fiction section—a large portion of the prophets for instance could be compared to a show like Mash, which was a dramady about the Korean war that was giving people commentary on the current times with Viet Nam. It allowed some distance—so you could talk about old times, and maybe that gets through and teaches some kind of truth about current times without you getting in trouble for being, “too political.” That’s a lot of what the books about the prophets are. They were all written hundreds of years after the supposed prophet was speaking, so someone was choosing to tell these stories for a reason. What stories pop into your head? The ones you need to hear; the ones you need to tell. Because they’re telling you something about your time.

But this book-the story of Jonah, also a prophet, is in an entirely different section of the library we call the bible. 

Some pastors will tell you that it is different than the other prophets because the other prophetic books contain a lot of prophecies, and this one has the adventure tales of the prophet named Jonah. 

No. Well, it’s fine if you believe that. I read it differently, and I’d invite you to consider that. 

This book of Jonah in the library belongs wherever you’d find the stories of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. They are tall tales. It is folklore.

I am told the way the book of Jonah begins in Hebrew is with words that mean, “And it happened” much like “once upon a time.” And we all know that when you hear a story that begins “once upon a time” someone is telling you a story right?

To try to be literal about this story is more than a distraction, it would require mental gymnastics and suspension of disbelief larger than our politics today require. It's a true story. I don’t think it happened. 

The quirky thing about God is that God has chosen to make Godself known, in some little ways, through this book we call the Bible, which contains writings from all kinds of people through several hundred years, or more like a millennium of stories that tell us about various groups of people working out their understanding of who God is. In various ways. Through writing poetry and songs, through telling their own stories about their origins, through telling campfire stories, through warnings, through unsavory characters and metaphors and a bunch of other things. 

It’s rather trickster-ish of God to do this–a trickster is a character in a story who exhibits a great degree of intellect or secret knowledge and uses it to play tricks or otherwise disobey normal rules and defy conventional behavior. God is a trickster all the way. Playfully disrupting normal life, crossing boundaries, upsetting the status quo, reversals and surprise. It’s a quirky way to be. 

This is how God reveals Godself, And since God is so big, and so far beyond what we’re able to fathom, these little surprising glimpses, through stories like this, through poetry, through song, in all kinds of ways-these are the gifts we get from God revealing who God is. 

And it is a generous God, whose ability to be serious about “all means all” is far greater—so much bigger than we will ever be able to be. And that’s the truth in the story. 

Let us be quirky like that. 

Amen.