Jonah’s Lesson: A Sermon

Stuart Higginbotham

Pentecost 17, Proper 20

September 24, 2023

Jonah’s Lesson

Let only that little be left of me

Whereby I may name You my all.

Rabindranath Tagore

The story of Jonah lends itself well to Sunday School lessons with children. It’s easy to take the cutout of a man on the felt board and then set a cutout of a whale on top of it, telling the children how Jonah was thrown overboard from the ship and was swallowed by the whale because Jonah refused to follow God’s instructions to go to the city of Nineveh and tell them to repent of their evil ways. It is a great lesson for children if, it seems, you want to focus on obedience and following instructions. Listen to what God tells us to do (and clean your room, too) or remember what happened to Jonah.

In the story, the giant fish swallowed Jonah and he had three days to stay inside before being thrown up on the shore. After the aquatic regurgitation, he grudgingly decided to listen to God’s direction.

The story of Jonah is, of course, included as a minor prophet in the Jewish scriptures, and it is referenced in the New Testament canon as a typology of Jesus’s own burial in the tomb for three days. It is also included in the Quran, because the lesson it holds is so important. 

Interestingly, many cultures have myths about people being swallowed by great fish: the Finns have a myth like this, as do the Phoenicians, which the Hebrew writers would have known. An ancient story of Hercules even has him being swallowed by a great fish and being in its belly for three days. This is a story, like the flood narrative, that teaches a symbolic and spiritual lesson.

We see modern variations on this theme with Pinocchio when they are swallowed by a whale. The scene with Jonah being swallowed and returned after three days is an image that Jungian analysts and others have also turned to as a powerful symbol of death and rebirth. In the darkness, there is the chance of transformation and a return to the light, as it were. 

But what is the actual lesson that Jonah learns, and is it as clear-cut as we think it is? 

Let only that little be left of me whereby I may name You my all.

We know the basics of the story, as we have noted, with Jonah’s initial refusal to go to Nineveh. Today’s reading from Jonah picks up toward the end of the book, which gives us a chance to reflect more deeply on how the full picture unfolds. 

In today’s text, God sees that the people of Nineveh have repented, and God is pleased. We would think Jonah would be happy, but as the story says,

this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He 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.

In other words, Jonah tells God: you drug me out here, I was thrown off a boat, swallowed by a giant fish, sat inside for three days, was thrown up on the shore, ended up going to Nineveh to give your message, they ended up repenting, and you spared them. And I knew you would spare them all along because “you are a gracious God and merciful,” so I don’t know why you didn’t just spare them in the first place without having to drag me through all of this. 

Isn’t it interesting that Jonah seems frustrated by God’s mercy?

Let only that little be left of me whereby I may name You my all.

As I have sat with this story, there were two things that stood out to me. The first is that, perhaps, God desired that Jonah actually experience mercy rather than just think about it or know it on a theoretical level. Jonah says he knew God would act this way, and he is frustrated that he had to go through all his trials. It is one thing to think something, or to believe we know something as an idea, but our hearts are only transformed when we can experience the grace, and even participate in God’s grace. The practice of faith is not just one idea set out there in the marketplace to compete with all the other claims on our lives. The practice of faith calls us to embody a deeper trust, a risk to yield to God’s movement in our lives–with the awareness that we gain of God’s presence throughout all life. Jonah only thought about God’s mercy; toward the end of the story, he has seen it, witnessed it, knows it on a much deeper level–and he is convicted by it.

This brings me to the second thing I learned from meditating on this text: perhaps God’s intent was not only to save Nineveh but also to save Jonah from his own preoccupation with himself. 

Perhaps it is not that God causes Jonah to suffer, it is that Jonah is already suffering from the burden of self-centeredness. This burden of self-centeredness needed to be stripped away–washed away, to keep the metaphor close to the story itself–so that Jonah could realize how all existence is held in God’s embrace.

Jonah gets angry and says, in true melodramatic style, “just let me die.” God sends a bush to shelter Jonah, then sends a worm to destroy the bush. When Jonah complains that he has struggled more, God says

You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?

Jonah is de-centered from himself in this story. He learns the peril of merely following his own agenda, the danger of being satisfied with seeing the world through his own narrow self-centered lens. There is, to play with the metaphor of being taken inside the great fish, a metabolizing of Jonah’s personal fixation on himself. 

Let only that little be left of me whereby I may name You my all.

Don’t we see this dynamic in today’s Gospel reading as well? The group of laborers who have worked all day for their agreed wage are disgruntled when those who worked only one hour are paid the same. They complain to the landowner that this isn’t fair. This question of fairness is an interesting one, because from a perspective grounded in a self-centered posture, a human standard where we evaluate ourselves over and against one another in a zero-sum framework, the compensation was not fair.

But God operates by a different economy. 

The landowner says “Friend, I have done you no wrong.” This is such an important statement: I have not violated any agreement with you, and your compensation is not unfair for the work you have done. Rather, I am embodying mercy for those who need it. Perhaps the invitation here is to become aware of why you feel my mercy violates your sense of fairness. Does the spaciousness of my mercy conflict with the limited perspective of your vision?

It may well be that the key spiritual lesson for us today is to de-center ourselves. The quote I keep repeating is from the great Hindu, Bengali poet and author and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and I included it on one of my prayer cards that I have been using each morning: Let only that little be left of me whereby I may name You my all.

Tagore’s poetry challenges us to let only that bit be left in us that can point toward God’s presence that matters. Which means, let the rest of us that doesn’t matter, that is distracted and distracting, focused on superficial things, fall away so that we are infused with God’s love and God’s vision.

In a time when we are saturated with self-centeredness, with a culture that has unfortunately fused shallow celebrity-worship with political leadership and responsibility, when tyrants inflict so much pain just to make themselves feel powerful and establish a perceived legacy of cultural accomplishment, when so much feels uncertain and the tendency is to grasp onto whatever control we feel we can find–in such a time as this, we are invited again to pay attention to the Gospel’s call to de-center ourselves, to have the same mind as Christ, to empty ourselves so that we may be filled by the Spirit. 

I fear it will continue to be a very difficult lesson to learn, and I hope that we can learn it before something needs to swallow us in order to transform our way of being in the world.