The latest issue of Touchstone has a remarkable article surveying children’s versions of the story of Jonah—and showing just how badly wrong they get the book, on the whole. (About halfway through I got up to check our copy of The Jesus Storybook Bible, which I posted on a while back, to see how it answered the challenge; it did better than most, but was not without flaw, cutting Jonah’s story off before chapter four.) There’s no question that most adults (even in the church!) have a seriously distorted mental picture of the book of Jonah, one which rarely gets beyond the question, “Was it a whale or was it a fish?” (Answer: to the ancient Jews, they were both fish.) From Ronald Marshall’s survey, it’s not hard to understand why.
What I particularly appreciate about the piece is that his analysis of the matter goes beyond anything I’d thought of. I’d always figured that most of the sanitizing of the book was rooted in the fact that Jonah, as an anointed prophet of God, ought to act like a hero and doesn’t—that the primary concern was squeezing him as much as possible into that mold. Wouldn’t do, after all, to admit that one of God’s prophets could be such a whiny, priggish, self-righteous, hateful jerk. The Rev. Marshall goes further, though, suggesting that “Jonah is a horrifying book”—which he’s right, it is, though I’ve never particularly felt that—and that the main concern has been to neuter it, to remove the horror and render it “safe for children.” (C. S. Lewis would have had a pungent comment about that, I think.) The problem is, as the article’s subhead puts it, “In removing the fear from the story of Jonah, children’s versions remove the gospel, too.”
This is because the great truth at the heart of the book of Jonah is the juxtaposition of God’s holy fury at human sin with his holy will to show mercy to human sinners. God’s hatred of the evil practiced by the Assyrian Empire was so great (with good reason) that he wanted to destroy Nineveh; yet he preferred to destroy them as his enemies by bringing them to repentance, so he sent Jonah to preach a message of warning to them. God’s hatred of Jonah’s rebellion was such that he sent a storm to drive him into the ocean, into the terror of drowning and the hell of the stomach of the sea-beast; yet he desired to show mercy to his recalcitrant prophet, and when Jonah prayed for forgiveness, he relented, and Jonah was vomited up onto the shore. And when Jonah sat down to try to shame God into destroying Nineveh despite its people’s repentance, God made the shade tree grow, then killed it, in an effort to bring Jonah around; where Jonah’s motto seems to have been, “Hate the sin, hate the (non-Jewish) sinner more,” God seeks to teach his prophet to love mercy.
In all this, of course, God isn’t nice to Jonah; one could easily argue that he’s far more considerate of the Ninevites who would destroy his people than he is of the prophet whom he called to serve him. But then, Jesus wasn’t nice to those who were leading his people astray, either—nor was God the Father nice to Jesus. God’s purposes are far, far bigger than being nice to us and making us comfortable and happy; his hatred of our sin is no less real and great than his hatred of the sin of others, nor is his desire to show mercy to those others any less than his desire to show mercy to us. If we’re seeking a God who’s “on our side,” we’re looking in the wrong place. The Bible doesn’t give us a God who’s on our side, it shows us God and calls us to be on his side. (This is the greatest error in all typically American forms of theology, including even black liberation theology, which is rooted in the great truth that God lifts up the cause of the oppressed.) To the extent that we resist what God is doing, he isn’t on our side at all. As Rev. Marshall puts it, working from Kierkegaard:
Kierkegaard stunningly ties this story to Jesus’ instruction in Matthew 5:44 to love our enemies. When God destroys the tree, he is being “so terrible” to Jonah. If this is the way God loves his servants, there are no “syrupy sweets” in it at all. Rather, the “strenuous and sacrificial” marks this love.
Because God is so rough on us, Jesus said we should love our enemies—knowing full well that God is our “most appalling enemy.” Loving our enemies is primarily about loving God. Therefore, Kierkegaard concludes, “God wants you to die, to die to the world; he hates specifically that in which you naturally have your life, to which you cling with all your zest for life.”
God makes Jonah miserable, but for his own good. He breaks apart his worldly hopes and dreams and pushes him into a new life. He shows him that his own comfort does not matter. He calls Jonah to set his mind “on things that are above, not on things that are on earth”—things like some wilting shade tree (Col. 3:2). And for all this cruel treatment, Jonah is to love God anyway, simply because Matthew 5:44 says we are to love and not hate our enemies.
This is the hard truth of the life of faith, that following God isn’t about “our best life now” and God helping us realize our potential as we see fit, according to our own desires; it’s about denying ourselves, even dying to ourselves, and God killing that part of us that needs to die. Granted, he does so in order “that we might have life, and have it abundantly,” but it isn’t our best life, it’s his; and getting there means confronting our darkness, and the horror of which we’re capable, head on. It means understanding both the full measure of the awesome wrath of God against sin—and the fact that our sin deserves that wrath—and the awesome depth and breadth of the mercy of God for sinners, which took that wrath upon himself on the cross. Just as Jonah sacrificed himself to save the sailors from the wrath of God (though he did so because he preferred death to obedience), so Jesus sacrificed himself to save “the entire boat of humanity” (in St. Jerome’s words). And as Jared’s been arguing over at The Thinklings, and as C. J. Mahaney talked about with Sinclair Ferguson, it’s only if we understand that fact in its full significance that we truly understand the gospel.