Some find it
hard to believe that a man should have actually been swallowed by a
whale and survived the ordeal, but apparently Jonah wasn't the only one.
Until the
last half of the nineteenth century, there was no archaeological
confirmation of the existence of the city of Nineveh, lending further
weight to the assumption that "Jonah" was just another figment of the
fantasy of those religious nuts who wrote the Bible. Until it was
unearthed one day. Still, the textbooks of particularly catholic clergy
and theologians view Jonah's tale as fictive, but of course not as much
so as the even more incredible account of Creation in Genesis 1.
But of
course, then there are those who question the existence of any of those
men the Bible talk about altogether, including Jesus... After all,
we're all living in such an enlightened world today!
As for me, I
believe my good old friend Jonah. For one thing because I can relate to
him. I'm so much like him. I know exactly how he must have felt when
God called him to preach to a people he possibly didn't know very much
about, and he evidently didn't like very much. After all, they were
heathen gentiles, pagans. So what if they die?
No, Jonah
booked a ticket in the opposite direction instead, and consequently,
being outside of God's will, had to insist on his fellow travelers to
toss him into the sea. I can imagine that he wasn't very much concerned
about his own survival. "Just end this nightmare!" And there, in the
belly of the whale, he finally came to the enlightenment that
"Salvation is of the Lord!" It's not by anything we can try to do
ourselves, it's the Lord Who is going to have to do it through us and
for us. Why, He's even the One Who has to give us the grace to obey Him
and do what He says, when it comes down to it.
And so,
finally Jonah went where before he did not want to go and preached to
the pagans in Nineveh. After all, what did he have to lose? Nobody knew
him there, and after 40 days God was going to destroy them all and he
would never have to deal with them again, his job would be finished and
he could go home, right? Right?!?
Well, as
Isaiah, the naked prophet tells us in his message from God: "My ways
are not your ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are
My ways higher than your ways..." (Isa.55:8, 9).
God
sometimes works in mysterious ways. Usually, in fact. Besides, in the
verse right before this message Isaiah says: "Let the wicked forsake
his way... and return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him
and...abundantly pardon (Isa.55:7)."
What's the
worst thing that can happen to a prophet of doom? When the doom doesn't
set in as predicted, right? Of all the nasty things in the world God
could have done to him, that was the one. The Ninevites - of all things
- repented, and God spared them, and Jonah felt like going out in the
garden to eat worms.
In fact, he
went out of the city and wanted to die. But God miraculously caused a
gigantic pumpkin to grow so fast and tall that it would give him shade.
It cheered Jonah up a bit, probably thinking, "Well, at least the Boss
still does eke out some ol' magic for me, doesn't He?" But then God
sent a worm which ate up and destroyed the pumpkin, and Jonah again was
torn in shreds.
The lesson
was evident: he was making such a fuss about the pumpkin, but couldn't
have cared less if all those thousands (120.000) of Ninevites had
died...
Unfortunately,
a lot of us tend to be that way. We love our cars, our computers, our
gardens, our dogs, more than we do certain people, especially people
who are strange to us and different. But the gist of being a prophet, a
child of God, or simply a good person lies in loving others, for in
loving others, we also love God (see Matthew 25:40).
