But as the Book of Jonah reminds us, that’s not always a dreadful thing.
My brother and I were raised by our grandmother, Genevieve. On more than one occasion she told me and Derrell that falling down was a part of life. She told us that there was nothing bad about failing or falling down. What’s most important is not that you fell, but that you were willing to get back up, fix your mistake, and try again. In addition to regularly helping us get up and dust ourselves off, she would encourage us to never let our mistakes hold us hostage. She would tell us that our past mistakes did not have control of our futures.
In a sense, in Jonah 2, the book’s title character is on the way to learning this same lesson. The protagonist dealt head on with the fact that he had sinned when God called him to deliver a message to the inhabitants of Nineveh. By refusing to go to that city, he had fallen short, made a mistake, or whatever way we want to put it, and he had to deal with the consequences of not getting things right. But, before it was all said and done, Jonah was reminded of God’s love towards him, even though Jonah had failed.
In Jonah 1, God gave Jonah a simple task: preach repentance to the people of Nineveh. The problem was that Nineveh was home to the mortal enemies of Jonah’s people. Jonah didn’t want to see the people of Nineveh repent and receive God’s grace. He wanted them to suffer and die for everything wrong they had done to the children of Israel. So, instead of going to Nineveh as God had commanded, he boarded a vessel that was going in the opposite direction of Nineveh.
Before any of us pass judgment on Jonah, if we all were to be honest, we could probably acknowledge that Jonah acted as many of us would if we were given such a task by God. We would put ourselves in the position of judge and jury and determine that our ought against a person or group of people was more important than their livelihood. They would not be given the opportunity to offer forgiveness for their sins that we hold tight to. Like Jonah, we too would have likely gone in the opposite direction. And we would have felt righteous about doing it.
But Jonah’s sense of justice was misplaced. God’s ability to love and forgive was not focused solely on Israel. It also included their enemies. The problem was that Jonah couldn’t accept a God who could have a change of heart. He couldn’t accept God’s conception of justice. Jonah’s conception of justice resembled what modern Christians have called a good works philosophy, where deliverance must be merited by the cumulated actions of a lifetime.
For Jonah, Nineveh was the symbol of all that was evil in the world and representative of all the people who opposed God. Thinking that any repentance from the people of Nineveh would likely be short-lived, Jonah couldn’t picture himself participating in such a traitorous act. So, Jonah does what he thinks is best, and tries to run in the opposite direction. But Jonah couldn’t flee from God’s will and he eventually found himself sinking to the bottom of the sea after he was thrown from a ship during a tremendous storm. The saving grace of the ordeal was that his descent to a murky grave was prevented by a great fish that swallowed him.
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