Jonah

The Methodist Church, for whatever reason, decided to make June 2018 the month when we would all read and think about the book of Jonah. This circuit asked for volunteers from among the preachers to offer to preach on this book to enable churches to have a series of themed services on the four Sundays in June. I didn’t sign up to this because, at the time, I didn’t think I had anything to say about the Book of Jonah.

Then I read this book: Crisis, Call andLeadership in the Abrahamic Traditions.

It’s a collection of essays by Christian, Jewish and Islamic scholars, which came out of a project involving people from these three religions – known collectively as the Abrahamic Faiths – meeting together for sessions of what they called Scriptural Reasoning.

This involved studying in depth passages from the scriptures that underpin each of these religions: the Hebrew Scriptures (which we know as the Old Testament), the New Testament, and the Qur’an. They also studied mediaeval commentaries on these scriptures, dating back to an earlier time when Jews, Christians and Muslims coexisted reasonably peacefully in Moorish Spain.

I’d like to share with you today the ideas presented by William Stacy Johnson, who is a Christian theologian, in his essay entitled “The sign of Jonah: A Christian Perspective on the Relation of the Abrahamic Faiths”.

He begins by pointing out that the book of Jonah has been used by many different preachers and teachers as a parable to illustrate a message that they wish to get across. For example, in Matthew chapter 12, Jesus responds to people, who were calling for him to show them a sign to prove that he was a prophet, by telling them that the only sign he will give them is the sign of Jonah. He then goes on to compare the three days that Jonah spent in the belly of the fish to the three days that he would spend in the tomb.

In this essay, Johnson, points out that there are three distinct groups of people in the story of Jonah, and that they each go through a distinct type of conversion experience.

In chapter 1, we see the sailors converted to worshipping Jonah’s God, who has saved them from the storm.

In chapter 3, the people of Nineveh respond to Jonah’s message from God. They repent and are saved from God’s wrath.

Jonah goes through two conversion experiences in chapters 2 and 4, eventually accepting not only God’s commission to preach to the people of Nineveh, but also God’s right to withhold his judgement on them when they repent.

Johnson goes on to suggest that these three groups and their three conversion experiences typify the three different ways in which the three Abrahamic religions approach God. We can, therefore, see the story as a parable that throws light on the relationship between these three faiths.

Before I go on, I need to remind you that, of course, it is impossible that this is an interpretation that was intended by the original writer of the book of Jonah, which pre-dates the rise of both Christianity and Islam. But we are constantly reflecting on and reinterpreting the Bible to make it relevant to our own time and place – as Christians have done throughout the centuries since the books of the Bible were collected together to form what we call the Christian Canon. Biblical stories are many-layered and can speak to us in many different ways and at many different levels.

In this interpretation of the story, Jonah represents Judaism. I’m no scholar of Hebrew, but I know from my Local Preacher’s training that the Old Testament has several different words for God. In this story, Jonah is particularly associated with one of them: Yahweh, which is the personal proper name of the God of Israel.

The Ninevites, by contrast, are associated with the word Elohim, which means God in the sense of defining the all-powerful being who controls the world. Yahweh is a name. Elohim is an occupation, if you like. They represent Islam, which has as its central (and much-repeated) tenet: there is no god but God. The Arabic word Allah is derived from the same linguistic roots as the Hebrew Elohim.

The sailors are portrayed as worshipping many gods, not just the One True God, whom they assume is just one god among many. They represent the Christians, most of whom converted from polytheistic paganism.

Let’s explore this a little further.

At the beginning of the story God is referred to exclusively as Yahweh – incidentally, that’s the word that we used to think was pronounced Jehovah – but when the sailors start panicking because they think the ship’s going down, they each call on their own local deities (referred to by the plural word elohayw). When this doesn’t work, they turn to Jonah, who explains that he is a Hebrew and worships “Yahweh the God (using the singular word elohe) of heaven, who made the sea and the land”. Thus Jonah is drawing a distinction between the sailors’ local gods and the One True God, who is universal.

The sailors discover that they are in the hands of this unknown god, Yahweh. Jonah tells them that, in order to be saved, they must throw him into the sea, to atone for his disobedience. They reluctantly do so, and the storm abates. The sailors then worship Yahweh and make vows and sacrifices to Him in thankfulness for their salvation.

This can be seen as a parable of conversion to Christianity from paganism (or in our modern world, perhaps from atheism, agnosticism or vague “spirituality”). The process involves recognition that none of the things that we have relied upon up until then can save us from disaster, followed by putting our trust in God and following His commands, discovering that it “works” in some sense, and then making vows to follow Him.

Moreover, taking up Jesus’ own analogy, we can think of Jonah as representing Christ, who allows himself to be sacrificed to save mankind. And whom God rescues, against all the odds, and brings safely to land three days later.

Now let’s turn to the city of Nineveh. The Ninevites hear Jonah’s prophecy and believe his words. They repent of their sins and turn to God, but not Yahweh, the personal God of Israel. They believed that God – Elohim – is more than just a tribal god, specific to the Israelites.

Yahweh sends Jonah to Nineveh and the Ninevites believe the words of Elohim and repent. This underscores the fact that Yahweh and Elohim are the same.

If we think of the Ninevites as representing Muslims, the king of Nineveh, who proclaims the fast and requires everyone to cease their evil ways, represents Mohammed, the prophet of God – Allah or Elohim. The prophet delivers God’s message but, unlike in the Christian narrative of the sacrificial saviour, it is for the people of Nineveh, and their king, to take the initiative and act on God’s words. Jonah – the Hebrew prophet, Jesus – is superseded by Mohammed, or more precisely by the Qur’an, which Muslims believe to be the most perfect rendition of the word of God.

Finally, let’s consider Jonah’s conversion. At one level, he does not need to convert. He starts out with a relationship with Yahweh that is sufficiently intimate that God entrusts to him the task of warning the Ninevites of their imminent destruction. And he ends in a very similar position. But he does undergo change – twice, in fact. He repents of his disobedience when he is facing death at sea, and accepts God’s commission after he saves him from death. But then he feels that God has made a fool of him when Nineveh is not destroyed as he prophesied it would be.

Then God teaches him through an acted-out parable involving a bush which grows up and then is eaten by a worm. He shows Jonah that God’s compassion for mankind exceeds his righteous anger; his judgement is always tempered with mercy.

Why can we think of Jonah as representing Judaism? Firstly because he alone in this story consistently uses the intimate name of God – Yahweh – the name that distinguishes the God of Israel from any others. Secondly, God chooses him – singles him out for a special purpose, just as the Jews are singled out to be God’s chosen people. But not for their own sake, they are chosen to be witnesses to God to the world. Remember God’s words to Abraham: “through you all the nations of the earth shall be blessed”.

Well, I can hear you saying, all that is very interesting, but what has it got to do with me? Let’s think about what this parabolic interpretation of the story of Jonah could mean for us.

I said that the sailors can be thought of as representing Christians – that is, us! What can we learn from their behaviour? They were only interested in hearing about Yahweh God when they realised that their own gods were powerless to save them from the storm. Are we sometimes inclined to forget about God when things are going well and then to call upon him to fix things when they are going wrong?

The sailors were polytheists who worshipped numerous gods. We don’t think that way anymore, but do we nevertheless sometimes allow other things – our possessions, our careers, our country, our football team …. Or whatever – to compete with God for our attention and devotion?

We can also learn from Jonah, representing God’s chosen people, the Jews. Do we, like the Ninevites, forget how much we depend on our Jewish roots? Not only is our faith based entirely on the Jew, Jesus, but the Gospel is rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures. Without Judaism, there would have been no Christianity.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? The way religions so often seem to want to get back to some pure form that reflects their founder, rejecting all more recent accretions – and yet they have little time for the religious ideas that preceded them?

The Reformation was all about getting back to Biblical Christianity and removing all the additions that had been built up over the centuries within the Roman Catholic system.

Primitive Methodism was so-called because it was an attempt to reproduce the primitive (i.e. first or original) church of New Testament times.

We reject new religions that claim to be better than Christianity or to be a new improved form of Christianity – whether it be Islam, Mormonism, Scientology or various new age religions.

And yet, Christians have often behaved abysmally towards the Jews who are, after all, merely doing the same thing – sticking with the old religion and rejecting new-fangled ideas!

And post-Christian religions can behave in the same way: Muslims, for example, may wish to get back to the golden age of the first Caliphate, while rejecting newer ideas, such as those of the Sikh or Bhai religions. Muslim attitudes towards Christians are often ambiguous, in the same way as Christian attitudes towards Jews. We are respected as “people of the book”. Jesus is revered as a prophet (and indeed as the Messiah) but there remains a suspicion that Christians, with their strange doctrine of the Trinity, are polytheists at heart.

And there is something else that we, as Christians, can learn from Jonah. If Christianity is true, then it is a sort of “Judaism for all”. The Church should be the blessing that God promised would come through Abraham. So we need to be willing, like Jonah, to go to great lengths to fulfil God’s plans for us – whatever they may be.

And we must not be angry or disappointed when God’s plans do not accord with our expectations. As John Wesley made clear, in the prayer that he wrote for the people called Methodists to use in renewing their covenant with God each year, we do not know whether God will find work for us to do or ask us to stand aside for others to work, whether He will place us in important positions or require us to take the humblest place. All we can be sure of is that, as one of His people, we can play our part in bringing blessings on the whole of humankind.

Let us pray

We are no longer our own but yours.

Put us to what you will,

Rank us with whom you will;

Put us to doing,

Put us to suffering;

Let us be employed for you,

or laid aside for you,

exalted for you,

or brought low for you;

Let us be full,

Let us be empty,

Let us have all things,

Let us have nothing:

We freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.

And now, glorious and blessed God,

Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

You are ours and we are yours. So be it.

And the covenant now made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.

AMEN