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The Story of Jonah:

Reluctant Missioner and God’s Humour

Who was Jonah? We all know very well about the story of Jonah which was told over and over again from our Sunday School days. It is a remarkable story in which many implied messages are contained.

Jonah appears in the Old Testament (II Kings) as a prophet in the northern kingdom. However, scholars say that Jonah in this short story and the prophet may not be the same person. At any rate, the story suggests that God has called him to serve the prophetic ministry, which he tried his best to run away from.

Jonah wanted to run away from God. Tarshish in Spain may have been a very attractive business town and the farthest point to the west which the Mediterranean mariners could reach. Surely Jonah was afraid to go to Nineveh because he was certain that the citizens of the big city would not welcome the message he was to preach. Not only would people not listen, but also there maybe a great

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risk regarding his own safety. So he rushed off to Tarshish to be away from the reach of God (1:3).

There was also, it seems to me, another reason why Jonah did not feel keen to go to Nineveh. Nineveh was a great metropolis, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, whose notoriety was established for its strength and cruelty. As the empire expanded, countless numbers of poor people had been tormented and enslaved. For the people of Israel, Nineveh was a concentration camp as well as a genocidal camp. It was a city which combined the terrors and evils of Sodom and Auschwitz. The story of Nineveh is not an isolated historical event and there are many other contemporary parallels of mass displacement of people and genocidal terrorism in order to suppress people's attempts to become truly human.

The story of Jonah has been interpreted in a whole variety of ways and I do not intend to make an additional attempt to do a scholarly interpretation. What I am hoping to do is to draw a few insights from the story and see their relevance for our contemporary situations in Asia.

Reading the story, one gets an impression that Jonah may have been a young person, rebellious at some points and extremely frank at others. His spiritual struggle throughout the story resembles those of contemporary youth who are finding the process of growing up as a responsible Christian. He was running away from God's call and at the same time, he was trying to go to the Mediterranean business centre, Tarshish. We see a conflict between the natural inclinations of a youth and an inner struggle of spirituality.

When the captain asked his identity, Jonah gives an explanation by referring to his God, Jahweh. He declares himself as a Jew. It almost sounds like a confession of his

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faith. However, he still does not wish to go to Nineveh by changing course. It required the experience inside the belly of a big fish. When the lot fell on him, he admits that it was he who was the cause of the tempest and appealed to the shipmates that he be thrown into the sea. Jonah appears to be honest and exceedingly frank, as well as charitably concerned about the safety of others, but he was doing all this by an act which appears to be suicidal.

The crew of the ship seemed to be multi-national. The mariners were afraid and each cried to his god. Already the Mediterranean marine enterprises were taking cheap labour from the outlying countries and their employment conditions would be almost that of slaves. You see this situation in the lives of bonded labourers in certain countries in Asia. They were multi-religious. Their religious differences did not seem to create impossible tensions. Ancient people must have learnt the lessons of religious tolerance better than modern people. Mutual acceptance and co-existence was the rule these people accepted and observed.

In modern history, when the international marine transport business was dominated by the West, many Western mission enterprises established "Mission to Seamen". All around the world one finds a "Seamen's Mission" established in the major seaports. In some places you will find denominationally run facilities existing but we hardly see sailors from the Western countries. Many of the crews today are recruited from Asian countries because their labour can be bought rather cheaply. Some of them are Christians and many of them are not, but they live in situations which recognize human compassion regardless of religion or nationalities. What should be the shape of today's Christian "Mission to Seamen" (it is still a male-dominated occupation and yet a ship is still referred to in the feminine)?

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These ancient people had also a keen sense of the value of a human person. We tend to feel that we, the moderns, have a better sense of the worth of a person. That is to say, we have a better sense of value and, therefore, are more civilized than the ancient people. While we recognize the technological and scientific advances and discoveries made in the modern period, it is also true that much of the earliest wisdom and indigenous technological ingenuities have been lost. These losses are more keenly felt by us as we become increasingly sensitized about environmental issues. The paradigm of Western science and technology and the underlying philosophical premises are not able to answer the delicate relationship between humans and nature. It seems that the ancient people had a better intuitive sense.

When Jonah offered himself to be thrown overboard, he was not doing it as a religious act of self-sacrifice, nor did it appear he was doing it in a true sense of repentance with a feeling of remorse. If he were repentant he would have appealed to the Captain to return to where they had started from. It was an act of resignation and self-abandonment. But on the contrary, the crew, after having heard Jonah's story, tried to reach land by rowing until it became impossible, before they actually threw him overboard.

It is quite interesting to stretch our imaginations to picture the scene. Now they are about to throw Jonah into the sea by taking Jonah at his word. Yet, the people felt they had to talk to this unknown God, whose anger Jonah was talking about. The God who has supposedly created the sea and the dry land must not punish them for what they are about to do. They are insisting that they are doing it because Jonah says that he is the cause of all this, yet they are sensitive about Jonah's innocence. It was not an abrupt action on the part of the crew to get rid of him quickly and bid him good riddance.

This is the essential element of genuine compassion

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which is an important prerequisite for our human right; involvement. That is to say, human rights concerns have never been, and should never be, the monopoly of Christians. It is a task of all of us across religious and ethnic boundaries, working together compassionately.

Another insight I would like to draw our attention to is the aspect of the multi-religious and multi-ethnic community such as the crew of the ship trying to survive the storm. They did two things: a) row the ship towards land, and b) throw the wares overboard to lighten the ship. In the stormy sea without the mast and sail, the only power available to the crew to move against the waves and the wind was to row. They were rowing the ship toward the land but the sea grew more and more tempestuous. To row the ship she had to be reasonably light. For their survival they were throwing their wares into the sea. They were ready to throw away all the non-essentials and just keep things that were indispensable for their survival. Each ship had to be selfreliant for they had no way to communicate with other ships that could come to their aid. They had the knowledge and the wisdom to know what it takes to survive in a situation like this.

Whether we live in industrialized and economically affluent societies, or in the third world situations, all of us are, in one way or another, infected by the fever of modern consumerism. Propaganda psychology and modern techniques of advertisement endlessly stimulate our sense of acquisitiveness. Material wealth is esteemed and seems to be the highest goal which most people in our societies seek.

Obviously, this is clearly a choice the people in our societies have and with only a handful of people enjoying most of the wealth we recognize the need for distributive justice. Therefore, wealth seems neutral and the only thing

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that matters is how we distribute it.

To use the language of economists, wealth may be understood as a sum total of value added, or in more simple terms, accumulated profit. If this definition is acceptable, the notion of wealth cannot be neutral. It invites an ethical question. The problem arises when wealth is pursued indiscriminately, ignoring and even suppressing any sense of justice and ethical questions.

There is yet another more sinister pursuit of the modern world. That is the choice we make about power. Power again is understood in terms of the physical world. Science and technology helped contemporary people to harness unheard of energy and power. It has progressed without restraint to the point that we are practically capable of annihilating the whole of our civilization.

The pursuit for a better and happier world somehow went haywire and we are now forced to rethink and reshape our priorities in order to safeguard the survival of our civilization. This means we need to, once again, clarify our vision for the future world.

To do that we may be asked, collectively as well as individually, to relinquish these non-essentials in an ultimate sense and keep that which is indispensable. What are the non-essentials which are threatening our survival? This is an important question.

Jonah finally reached Nineveh. He came somehow, but still full of complaints and cynicism. He was watching the city, probably concealing his secret desire to see his enemies perish; or, like a contemporary radical, felt that Nineveh had to go through a radical transformation structurally, and to achieve this he was anticipating fundamental, socio-political upheavals. Surely, for the evils committed by the Assyrian military power, God should (Jonah may have

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thought) punish Nineveh. But God had given an ultimatum namely, the grace period of 40 days to the city of Nineveh. Of course, 40 days is a number which appears in the Bible on several occasions with a symbolic meaning of salvation. What actually happened was a decisive act of the city choose the alternative. The people heard the message doom and the promise of salvation and they made the choice. It was not the king who ordered the citizens. The people’s movement created the momentum and finally the message reached the king. Imperial authority, the ancient despotic tyranny, had to yield to the pressure and cry of the people, the gentile people, the enemies of the Hebrews.

Jonah cared for the plant for which he never laboured. The plant grew in the night and withered during the d under the sun. The message of God to Jonah was how much more God would care for the people of Nineveh. Our conviction about justice and God's mercy are sometimes irreconcilable. We want God's judgment to be consistent, but Jonah's story God can change his mind because God fundamentally "love". This is our spiritual struggle to reconcile justice and love.