It’s only three pages, only four chapters, and yet almost everyone knows its story. Jonah and the Whale! Its absurdity is something that sticks out—to be swallowed in the belly of a fish and spit back out.
That’s the simple tale as passed around. But it does hold deeper elements in the story beyond what modernity would label fantasy.
Jonah is given a calling and mission from God: “Go to Nineveh and tell the city it will be destroyed for its abandonment of God.”
Rather than obey, Jonah runs. He runs from his calling, runs from his mission; and in his attempt at escape, he brings trouble to a ship carrying him away over sea. A tempest rises to stop the ship, and those on board ask who has angered God.
At this Jonah answers, and to save the ship, he volunteers his own life as offering for pacification of the waters. He is thrown into the sea, left for dead, and the storm calms.
But God didn’t want Jonah punished. He wished only for him to fulfill the mission. God saves him. It is the fish that is the absurdity and vessel that delivers Jonah back to shore and for the fulfilment of his God-told mission.
“Profess to Nineveh so that they may repent.”
Unable to further deny God’s call in the absurdity of his salvation, Jonah—this time—obeys. He preaches apocalypse and destruction to the city; and in his professions, the city repents and makes atonements to restore again into the grace of God.
Repenting, the city is saved, and Jonah appears a fool. The apocalypse professed did not happen, and in absence of God’s wrath, Jonah is mocked for the failure of his professions.
In his humiliation, when all he sought to do was serve God by professions as called, Jonah falls into despair, asking God to take his life rather than continue on in state of his humiliations. ‘
In his melancholy, God shows further signs to Jonah. God grows a vine above to shade him as he rests then, after, quickly makes it whither and returns Jonah back into harsh sun.
Jonah calls again for God to take his life rather than submit him to his pains; and God derides, “Dost thou think thou hast reason to be angry, for the ivy?”
And Jonah said, “I am angry with reason even unto death.”
God counters, “Thou art grieved for the ivy, for which thou hast not laboured, nor made it grow, which in one night came up, and in one night perished. And shall I not spare Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons that know not how to distinguish between their right hands and their left…”
What does this mean?
What is the purpose of this story?
Why is it deserving of an entire book?
I believe the answer is confusion, admitting and accepting “we don’t know.” What this book tells more than anything else is that, the designs and workings of God are a mystery to us as simple men and women in this world. His reasons and means are not meant for us to know, and why we have the freewill to be angry at an outcome, the freewill to deny our calling and run from God: God will still do what he aims to do, even when we are but a pawn that feels the fool in his workings of a greater reason not for us to know.
Sometimes, God will refuse us the ability to keep running. No matter how we try, the absurd and inescapable will draw us back and bring us to exact place and moment he called, always, for us to be.
Why?
“I don’t know.”
Often, the best that we can do is pray we played well our part, even when fool, and that our life served its purpose: even when one we will never know or understand.