Jonah and the Whale
Driving into the
old Israeli port of Jaffa, which today is part of the modern city of Tel Aviv,
I caught sight of a number of paintings of a huge fish, or whale perhaps. Then
to cap it all off there was this large sculpture of a big fish. Then it struck
me. Jaffa? This is the Joppa of biblical times and Jonah comes to mind.
That big fish in Jaffa with a smirk on its face. What is it thinking?
When I think of
Jonah I can't help thinking about a ditty that we young fellows would sing
years ago. We called it Sunday School Stories, but I think it had a number of
other titles. It began:
Young folk, old folk, everybody come
Join
our little Sunday school and have a lot of fun.
Be
sure you check your chewing gum and raisins at the door,
And
we'll tell you bible stories that you've never heard before.
Then there was this verse with the line I always remember when the name
of Jonah came up. It went:
Pharaoh had a daughter with a most
bewitching smile
Who
found the baby Moses in the rushes by the Nile.
She
took him to her dad who said, "That's a likely tale,
It's
just about as probably as Jonah and the whale."
Most of the stories, especially from the Old Testament were given a
mention. Which ones depended on whom one was with. We would also have hours of
fun sitting around making up our own versions. But getting back to Jonah. His
contribution (with many slight variations) went as follows:
Jonah was an emigrant, so runs the Bible
tale,
He
took a steerage passage in the belly of a whale.
He
was crowded in the belly and was feeling so compressed,
That
he pushed a little button and the whale did all the rest.
The details found
in the biblical account vary somewhat from this. It has Jonah running away from
the Lord, going to Joppa (Jaffa) where he paid for a passage to Tarshish
instead of heading to Nineveh to preach to them about their wickedness. It is a
colourful story full of irony and fanciful episodes. The part most people best
remember is when Jonah was tossed overboard and swallowed by a whale.
At which stage the
biblical purists would say that it wasn't a whale but a "great fish"
(Jonah 1:17). Nowhere is there a mention of a whale!
It is comments
like this that miss the point of the whole story. This is the attitude targeted
by the original authors of the Sunday School ditty. Their complaint is not
against the Bible, the stories, the message these stories convey, but against
those who insist on taking a completely literal understanding. It is against
those who argue whether it was a whale or a "great fish" or those who
spend time trying to discover where exactly Tarshish might have been.
The essence of
this story is not in details such as these. It is at the end that the point of
the story comes out. God has concern and passion for the whole world and not
(as many Israelites though at that time) just for them. That is why Jonah was
running away. He was running away from this truth with which he did not agree.
He did not see why the sinners in Nineveh should be given the opportunity to
repent and look to his God. Let them suffer and not taste God's compassion.
Guarding God's compassion? Not really, just a coastal cannon in Jaffa from the Ottoman period of occupation (1515-1919).
Mind you most people today would also think twice about going to
Nineveh , or the modern city which has grown up where Nineveh was located.
Today it is called Mosel in northern Iraq!
I look at that big
fish sculpture in Jaffa see the slight smirk on its face which seems to be
saying: "You know, God still has compassion for the whole world, even for
those you might think do not deserve his love. Nothing has happened to change
his mind."
And I say:
"Fish, I agree with you. But the Jonahs of today are not running away but
locking themselves away from the rest of the world."
No, they cannot
shut themselves away from this basic truth about God. Maybe a giant worm will
emerge from the depths with its mouth wide open.
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