BEATING JONAH ONE MORE TIME
Jonah is one of those people it’s easy to pick on; a handy whipping-boy and a convenient place from which to launch a stream of criticism leveled at modern Christians who don’t stress the “love” of God in its coziest forms—the all sugar and sweetness kind of thing. Jonah is presented as the “heartless” and graceless bigot who isn’t willing to give Nineveh access to God’s grace because, while he might know all the verses, he doesn’t know the gracious heart of God. From Jonah we then move to modern Christians who might have “correct doctrine” but like Jonah they’re heartless and graceless because they don’t know the gracious heart of God and so don’t want anyone saved but themselves. [This appears to be the main purpose for touching Jonah at all.]
This view of Jonah and the book of Jonah has recently been presented as new and startling but it’s nothing but more of the same—it’s the kind of thing we’ve read and heard for generations.
The bigoted and graceless Jonah is set up and contrasted with Matthew 18, for example, as if these two sections of God’s word to us were in some way parallel when a single glance at them tells you that the situations aren’t at all alike!
In Matthew 18 you have Jesus and two covenanted individuals who are called to work out some offence. In Jonah you have an enraged spokesman for God’s covenanted people and a predatory nation that ravages the earth [and God’s covenanted people along with it].
The usual “let’s whip Jonah and his modern counterparts” completely ignores this. A better parallel would be to have Jonah stand for a Jew in the Nazi hell-holes called Dachau or Auschwitz and have Assyria stand for Hitler’s death-camp villains.
Ask that “Jonah” if he’s happy with God offering the death-camp creators and executioners full forgiveness and you’re beginning to get a sense of the biblical Jonah’s agony.
Imagine that “Jonah” as he watches children hanging, unable to die quickly because they don’t weigh enough for the rope to choke them quickly, as he watches them innocently herded off to the gas-chambers [one of them even taken by the hand and helped up the steps by a camp-guard because the child couldn’t climb them on his own!], as he watches the torture and purposed extermination of his entire nation—imagine all that and then ask yourself why the biblical Jonah ran off to Tarshish. Imagine all that and then tell me that you don’t know why the biblical Jonah said he’d rather be dead than see the present Assyrian empire survive.
Heartless? His heart was so huge, straining at the seams with love for his people that he was willing to disobey God himself! Call a devout Jew in those camps that defy description, standing there bareheaded in speechless horror while his family and friends are raped, tortured and exterminated—call him heartless because he wants this heathen empire to be destroyed and you rightly lose all credibility with anyone with feelings or who has read the book of Nahum where God came over on to Jonah’s side.
Those who use Jonah as a whipping-boy to urge us moderns all to be nice to one another present no challenge from the book of Jonah—they offer nothing but more of the glib sameness to a Western society of “consumers” that is awash with grace talk. In light of this kind of treatment of Jonah, everyone gets grace extended to him except the confused and tormented Jonah
Jonah is a man torn between profound love for the elect of God and his full awareness that God will be gracious because it is how He is! He is having trouble working out how God is gracious to his covenant people while he extends grace to an empire that rapes the earth. It was precisely because he knew full well that God was full of grace that his torn heart drove him to Tarshish [Jonah 4:2-4]!
“Ah, yes,” the critic will reply, “that’s my very point; he had the right doctrine but no heart! He knew God was gracious but he didn’t want him to be gracious to Nineveh.”
There’s some truth in this, of course, but all in all it’s more of a slander. In order to call Jonah heartless you have to subvert his prayer in chapter 2 and turn it into what it clearly isn’t. Read it for yourself—there’s remorse, thankfulness, a turning to God’s temple in prayer. One writer, anxious to beat on Jonah [and his modern Christian counterparts] turns 2:8 into Jonah’s bigoted gloating over idolaters rather than what it plainly is—a word of praise for the true God who is unlike idols—idols that can’t show covenant love as God can to those who pray to him. That’s why Jonah will pray to the one true God and sacrifice to him rather than to idols [2:7-9]. In saying this he is saying nothing more than what Isaiah and Jeremiah said with blunt developed speech dripping with sarcasm and when he argues with God he’s no more blunt than Jeremiah who said scathing things to God. But no one berates Jeremiah or Isaiah the way some of us berate Jonah and his alleged modern counterparts.
[If we want to have a go at the modern Church of the Lord—let’s go for it but let’s not pretend we’re expositing the message of Jonah!]
Should we forgive our enemies? Of course we should! Doesn’t God do that when they repent?
But should we call God heartless or graceless when he destroys Nineveh for the very things that enraged and tortured Jonah? [Read Nahum!]
Is a longing for the righteous judgment of God on pillaging empires the fruit of bigotry and heartlessness?
If you stood paralyzed with horror in Auschwitz and longed for God to destroy the Nazis should we call you “heartless”? Whatever else we call you, should we call you a ”heartless” bigot?
This liberal Christianizing of OT prophets is certainly not bringing out the meaning or depths of these prophets.
It’s probably true what they say. They say if absolutely nothing can make us angry there’s something essential missing in our make up.
When God asked Jonah (4:6), “Have you any right to be angry?” he wasn’t short of information; he wanted to draw the prophet out. Jonah must have fumed when back home but it was only later that he exploded into speech about the wideness of God’s mercy.
The temptation is real for us to dismiss the righteousness of Jonah’s anger because God is gracious but whatever his limitations [and he had them] Jonah wasn’t angry for nothing.
The same God we extol as full of grace [and he is!] in the book of Jonah is the God who drove the Assyrian kingdom down to Sheol in the book of Nahum. God did in Nahum what Jonah wanted in the book of Jonah and God did it for the very reason Jonah wanted it done!
The painter G.F. Watts produced a direly needed portrait of the tormented and enraged prophet. Jonah is pictured as a green, wild, thin figure with arms raised aloft to heaven. His head is titled back skyward, his mouth is open like a bottomless pit and his eyes are white with madness. The background, blended in with all this, is a collage of scenes in which the cruel Assyrians are brutalizing and enslaving the peoples of the world. GK Chesterton captions his portrait: I Do Well To Be Angry.
There’s something about that picture by Watts that should throw a whole new light on the book of Jonah and put an end to our trotting out one. more. time. what we’ve heard for generations—Jonah is the bigoted and graceless donkey we’re to beat before we move quickly to our real target—his alleged modern counterparts.
Here’s a question: Is the book of Jonah really about how gracious God is and how heartless Jonah was?
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
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