Have you ever thought what it must be like to be swallowed by a fish? Not ripped to pieces, as a shark would do, but swallowed whole - whole enough to offer up a confident prayer at the end of three days and three nights.
The book of Jonah is comfortably short and easy to read. Like the first half of the book of Daniel, it is not a book of prophecies. It is a book about a prophet. It tells a story with a message.
Most of us know the outline of the story, though we may be rusty about the details. The chief character is Jonah, son of Amittai, a prophet mentioned in 2 Kings 14:25 as active during the reign of Jeroboam II in the mid-eighth century BC. God calls him to go to Niveveh. Shortly after Jeroboam's time Nineveh became the capital of Assyria, and remained so until it was overthrown by the Babylonians and the Medes in 612 BC. The prophet Nahum was active at the time Nineveh was destroyed, and for him it was a "city of bloodshed, utterly deceitful" (Nah. 3:1), but the story of Jonah is set before the time of Nineveh's final destruction.
The Ninevites never had a good reputation, and Jonah does not feel like telling them how wicked they are. So he books a ticket in the opposite direction, for Tarshish, modern-day Spain. God frustrates Jonah's plans by "hurling a great wind on the sea". The ship nearly sinks, and the sailors, a heathen lot, call on their gods, with no result. Then they realize that Jonah is sound asleep and ask him to call on his god, but before he has a chance to do so, they have cast lots and realize it is Jonah who is the reason for the storm. Jonah tells them that he worships "the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land", which worries them even more. He advises them to throw him overboard, and after trying their best not to treat a fare-paying passenger like this, they do so. The storm stops.
"The LORD provided a large fish." Unlike the sea monsters the sailors probably worshipped, this was a friendly creature. Jonah finds being in it is rather like being in Hell, and in his psalm he worries about being "driven away from God's sight." But God is present even in "the Pit", and God arranges for the fish to vomit Jonah on to the shore.
God reminds Jonah of his original call to go to Nineveh. So he goes, and lo and behold, the Ninevites repent, and God, who had given them forty days warning, thinks again, and decides not to blast the city out of existence.
Jonah is not impressed. God is supposed to look after Israel, not after these foreigners. "You are gracious, merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love," but surely only to your own people? He goes and sulks in the desert. God makes a bush spring up to shelter him from the sun, but sends a worm the next day to wither it up. When Jonah is angry that God could do this to the bush, God reminds him: "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow. Should not I be concerned abut Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?"
So this is a story not about big fish, but about God's love. This love extends even to the depths of Hell - for Jonah's psalm from "the belly of Sheol" makes it clear that the fish is a symbol for all those dark places which we sometimes think God cannot reach. And the love extends not just to God's own people, but to everyone, even if they do not yet know who it is that loves them. When we despair of our own condition, or of the world around us, we should turn to the story of Jonah, and remember that no situation is so dark or so remote that God's mercy cannot redeem it.
HD