Jonah - Chapter 2

Dear Friends,

When I think about characters in the Bible, it’s easy to see them two dimensionally without a story or a life, beyond what is told to us. But Jonah had a story and stories bring empathy. Knowing a person’s history and hardship has the potential to soften our own hearts and relate to that person differently.

We don't know much about Jonah, about his life circumstances or upbringing. We don’t know what kind of loss he had experienced or the times of joy in his life. We do know that life wasn’t easy in many ways because of the culture and time in history with the Assyrian’s bloodthirsty oppressive violence over Israel. And based on human psychology, we can infer that Jonah’s upbringing came with inter-generational trauma and difficulty. He came from survivors and survivors carry the traumas of their surviving. When you aren’t sure how to make ends meet, how to feed your kids, when you’ll be called off to war, or hearing that the next city over has been burned to the ground, there are certain traumas that become a foundational bedrock to how a person navigates through their life.

For Jonah, his upbringing, more than likely, was rooted in those generational traumas and daily uncertainties. 

I’m sure this shaped how he saw the world. Similarly, the difficult and traumatic life experiences you’ve had has the potential to shape the way you view the world making you wonder why God didn’t protect you from that thing or that experience. Friends, it’s really challenging to respond to God’s direction with joy when loss and uncertainty has paved your way into today. And if that’s the case for you and me, I can’t begin to imagine how it was for Jonah.

But whenever Jonah needed grounding, he could find it in the Temple.

The Jerusalem Temple housed the presence of God and everything that a Jewish person did was rooted in the admiration of and distinctness of Temple life. So, whenever Israel was subjected to foreign oppressive powers, they would turn their focus towards the Temple with the knowledge that God's presence still resided there and this reoriented their perspective in whatever storm they faced. 

The Temple was also a constant, physical reminder of God’s covenantal relationship with God’s people—that God loved them with an unbreakable love and desired them to follow God’s ways. Covenants weren’t something God made up. It was an ancient practice that tribes and peoples used to signify a mutually beneficial promise being made between them. For example, the son and daughter from two different families of similar wealth and power would marry to benefit both.  Or two tribes would make a promise to have each other’s backs or not go to war against each other.. 

To make a promise with another person or between tribes, the leaders would cut a covenant. They would take an animal, kill it, cut it in two, place each half just a part from the other, and then walk through the animal. This signified that the promise they made to each other was for life. If either party broke the covenant they were essentially saying, “May it be to me as it was to this animal...Till death do us part." 

If I break this promise, you can walk through my blood.

In Genesis 15, God used this ancient, barbaric human-made and understood promise and pledged Godself to a people. God cut a covenant with Abraham, knowing full well that human beings could never uphold the promise of relational fidelity.

As God’s prophet, or God’s mouthpiece, Jonah's prophetic role was to remind Israel that they were to be faithful to following God and the ways of God no matter their circumstances. I’m sure Jonah took his role very seriously. Calling people back to God can be an emotionally and mentally exhausting job and can be super depleting when people just don’t want to listen. 

So when the word of the Lord came to Jonah to speak second chances over Jonah’s sworn enemy, over the people who may have murdered and mutilated Jonah’s own family members and demolished his countrymen over the past hundred or more years, of course Jonah wasn’t super stoked. This wasn’t just the graciousness of God. This seemed like a breach in God’s covenantal fidelity and promise. This word of the Lord would have felt like God was sleeping with the enemy and would certainly cause Jonah to wonder if God kept God’s promises. 

It would have felt like betrayal, abandonment, treason. 

I bet everything Jonah thought he knew about God, everything he’d worked for and preached about began to unravel and come apart. His faith, his theology, his religion fell apart like a house of cards, so what was the point of living when everything you’ve ever known now seemed like a lie? Of course you would run away and get as far as you could from where your life began to crumble. 

He boarded a ship for the farthest place he could think of and while on this ship, a fierce storm kicked up and began tearing the ship apart, threatening to sink it. While the sailors did their best to survive by throwing their livelihood overboard and crying out to their gods—screamed prayers carried away by the wind and rain—Jonah headed down below deck to sleep it off. 

When grief hits you hard because everything you thought you knew about your own life expectations or how your life was supposed to turn out falls apart like a house of cards, it’s really hard to function. 

Jonah avoided reality, numbed the present, and sunk below the ship because grief will do that to you.

Once the sailors discovered that the storm was from Jonah’s making and after deliberation, they woefully decided to throw him overboard. 

And this is where the big fish comes into the story. Throughout chapter two of Jonah, we don’t read about the details of his experience in the belly of this big fish. We read about his prayer life.

Jonah had no idea how long he would be in this situation or if he would survive it. We know it would be three days but all he could probably see was a slow death and the torturous existence of a claustrophobic grave.  But in the middle of despair, he fixed his perspective on what he knew to be true. “I remembered you” Jonah said about God. I remembered your faithfulness. I remembered your love. 

Jonah prayed, I remembered you. He didn’t know what the next moment would bring him but he did know that when he walked through the valley of the shadow of death, God wasn’t waiting for him on the other side, beckoning him closer. He knew that God was with him in the valley, in the grave, in the depths of such unknown and impossible places. 

Jonah remembered God and decided to fix his eyes on God’s holy Temple. He looked towards the Temple and could know that God was with him. 

Friends, when you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, I want you to know that God is with you in that. God walks it with you. And this valley might be of your own making, like it was for Jonah. It might be from someone else’s making. It might be from nothing you can actually point towards and blame, it's just hard right now. Some of you might feel like Jonah, totally irritated and frustrated that life isn’t turning out the way you had imagined it because you thought you’d be married by now or that your marriage would be healthy by now or your kids would be kinder by now or you would have the right career by now. And to be told by God to walk in obedience when things are such a mess feels like an impossible task. It feels like God hasn’t kept God's promises to you.

But some of you might feel like you’re in the belly of the grave, barely surviving or holding on. There is a level of loss and grief that has buried you and it’s been way longer than three days. You’ve lost the ability to sing, pray, or trust that God is with you at all. 

So, look towards the Temple. (What does that even mean for us in the West?)

Friends, if you’ve given your life to Jesus and invited him to be your Lord and Savior, the power and truth of his Holy Spirit dwells in you. When Jesus was being crucified and was on that cross, he looked out over his murderers and mockers and enemies with the deepest amount of compassion and love and said, “Father forgive them because they don’t understand what they’re doing.” And he breathed his last breath and he died, the Bible says that the thick curtain that separated the area of the Temple that contained God’s presence, that no one could access, was ripped down the middle. 

God’s presence couldn’t be held back for a minute longer. 

Jesus brought forth a new covenant through his sacrifice on the cross because blood was required. The covenant God made was broken by human beings and because blood was required in a broken covenant, God slipped into skin to be near humanity and to die for humanity so a new covenant in his blood would overshadow everything else. When Jesus died on the cross, the presence of God became accessible to all people! The Church became the temple that houses God’s presence. You are the temple and together, the Church bears witness to God’s love and grace to every person, especially our enemies. So when life feels impossible, when you feel like you’re drowning in a watery grave without any knowledge of how long you might be buried in the deep, know that you are not alone. Look towards the Temple, towards the Church, towards within you.

Because the power that raised Christ from the dead can raise you from your watery grave as well! 

With (love),
Bethany