Where Are You In This Story?

 Last weeks Old Testament Reading was Jonah 3:10 - 4:11.  I have been playing around with this section of Jonah all week.  

Here is what went through my mind:

If you have never read the book of Jonah, you have missed an extraordinary snapshot of human life.

This is one tiny book, in the Old Testament, tells one vital truth about God’s unwavering dealings with the human psyche.

A story that mosts everyone can in one way or another identify with.

In a nutshell, Jonah gets mad — furious — at God for changing His mind about His  threat to destroy the City, and people, of Nineveh.  

Jonah finally did as God had asked.  He announced that the city would be  overthrown by God because of their evil ways.  

But, just as Jonah had predicted, the people — all the people — repented.  So God forgave them and let them live.

10 When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it. (Jonah 3)

That really pissed Jonah off. 

So he ran far out of the city to pout.

But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. ²He prayed to the Lord and said, ‘O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. ³And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.’ ⁴And the Lord said, ‘Is it right for you to be angry?’ ⁵Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. 

6 The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. ⁷But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. ⁸When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, ‘It is better for me to die than to live.’

9 But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ ¹⁰Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. ¹¹And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’ (Jonah 4)

I love God’s response:  Is it right for you to be angry

What we don’t have in this section of the story is what happened at the beginning when Jonah ran away from God’s request and ended up in the belly of a BIG fish.  And Jonah prayed and prayed that God would save him.

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the belly of the fish, ²saying,

‘I called to the Lord out of my distress,

   and he answered me;

out of the belly of Sheol I cried,….

¹⁰Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spewed Jonah out upon the dry land. (Jonah 2)

Biblical stories most always have two major points.

1. The story includes something familiar to the      

           culture.

2. They are also meant to expose something about 

           the human mind-set.

Things that all-to-often skew our ability to see past our own imagination of: fair, right and good.

These pointed stories challenge our set of values and expectations.  Our well defined thinking, our inability to see past life as we have experienced it.  To how things ‘should’ be — could be.

What is it that crabbed your imagination -- or tugs at your heart -- Jonah's story?

More on Jonah next time.  It might be a few days, I am leaving on a train trip tomorrow.