Rector’s Reflections
Tuesday 18th February 2025
What’s in a Story? Jonah and the Whale
Today I thought I would start a fresh series of reflections, looking at one of the most well-known of the many stories found in the Old Testament: the story of Jonah and the Whale. How should we interpret this story? What does the story mean? Does it have a spiritual message? What might it have to say to us today?
You will probably remember the story. The story starts with Jonah receiving a message from God, telling him to go to the non-Jewish city of Nineveh, and denounce it for its wickedness. Perhaps understandably, Jonah is not keen on accepting the mission. It was a mission which was unlikely to end well. So Jonah fled from God, travelling in the opposite direction, towards the city of Tarshish. The journey to Tarshish involved a sea journey, and in the course of the journey, the ship was threatened by a great storm. In order to save the ship, the sailors decide that someone has to be thrown overboard. Jonah is unlucky: the lots falls on him, and he is duly thrown overboard.
However, things turn better for Jonah than he might have expected, even in his wildest dreams. He is swallowed by a great fish, traditionally pictured as a whale, in which he remains three days and nights. During his time in the great fish, Jonah offers up a psalm. The great fish then vomits him upon the shore.
Jonah then changes his mind, and decides to carry out the mission God which God had given him: he goes to Nineveh, and preaches God’s judgment on their wickedness. However, there is a further surprise: Jonah’s preaching is so effective that the King and the entire population of Nineveh proclaim a fast of repentance, and so the threat of destruction is averted.
Now you might have expected that Jonah would have been happy that the inhabitants of Nineveh had repented of their evil ways. Not a bit of it. Jonah is angry that God has shown mercy on the pagan inhabitants of Nineveh, and so he sits in a shelter under the shade of gourd, having a good old moan. But then a humble worm intervenes in the story. The worm comes and eats up the gourd, so Jonah is exposed to the full power of the sun. Jonah is understandably upset that the gourd has been eaten up, and so no longer able to provide him with shade from the sun. God then uses this to teach Joanah a lesson: if Jonah is unhappy at the destruction of the gourd, surely God will be even more unhappy at the prospect of destruction of the city of Nineveh, with it all its people and animals.
The story ends at this point. What happened next? We don’t know. And who was Jonah? Again, we don’t know. We can perhaps identify the Jonah of the story with an Old Testament prophet of the same name, who lived back in the 8th Century BC, and who is mentioned very briefly in the Book of Kings (2 Kings 14, verse 25). This doesn’t help much, as we know nothing more about the prophet Jonah, other than he came from somewhere called Gath-hepher, a couple of miles from Nazareth.
The fact that the Jonah of the story shares the same name as the 8th Century prophet might well account for the fact that in the Bible, the book of Jonah is found among the collection of biblical writings known as the Minor Prophets. As a work of literature, Jonah is totally unlike the other Minor Prophets, and by rights it probably should have been included among a collection of biblical books known as the Writings. But there was clearly a strong tradition among the Jews that the book of Jonah was as much a book of prophecy as say the books of Micah or Zephaniah, or the much longer prophetic works, such as the Book of Isaiah or the Book of Jeremiah.
So what should we make of Jonah and his whale? The Jews of Old Testament times clearly valued the book and the story it tells, and regarded it as an important part of God’s word. That’s why it forms part of the Bible. But how are we to engage with the story in our own day? What message might it have to us today?
We shall explore this further in the days ahead.