A Missional Reading of Jonah 1–2

Dispatches from Urbana 25

The book of Jonah served as the theme text for Urbana 25. In some ways, it appears easy to make connections between Jonah and Christian “missions,” especially at a conference where the underlying point is to usher students into a reckoning with God’s call. The question, then, is: if God says, “Get up and go” (1:1), how will you respond?

Then the story seems to invite an examination of the prejudices (Jonah evidently hates the Ninevites) that interfere with missionary obedience. Who are “our Ninevites”? Who does God love and send us to serve despite their otherness from our perspective?

And, even if it’s not really spelled out, the text dangles a useful threat over the conference. What will happen if you refuse to go? One of the speakers even exhorted the audience to “skip the whale”!

There might be some problems with this use of Jonah. I can imagine some Old Testament scholars cringing—or yelling at their screens (to be fair, I suspect they might do the same with my reading). And I can imagine careful readers wondering about some important details that get lost in this use of the text.

I would like to offer a brief missional reading of the text for comparison. Hopefully, it will indicate some similarities and differences between missional hermeneutics and interpretation that merely centers “missions.” I’ll consider Jonah 1–2 from four angles: theology, narrative, location, and equipping.

Missional Theology

It’s right to begin with God, who speaks to the church through the text of Scripture. We ask not only what Jonah “says” but what God is communicating. Already, we might attend to our location as readers—the here and now of God’s communication. For now, however, I’m thinking about some broader theological points of departure.

The purposes of the Triune God revealed in the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit guide our reading. God sends Jonah to “cry out against” the “evil” (raah; 1:2) of Nineveh (capitol of the ancient superpower Assyria, perpetrator of atrocities) in keeping with God’s good purposes revealed in the law and the prophets and embodied in the work of Jesus through the power of the Spirit.

Notably, Jonah 1 emphatically calls the reader’s attention to the presence of God (1:3, 10). Jonah’s flight to Tarshish (in modern Spain) is not, as one might suppose, away from Nineveh but from the presence of the Lord. As the narrative and Old Testament theology more broadly affirm—and Jonah evidently (and ironically!) knows well—this is a futile endeavor. But the phrasing highlights the question of where God is present and, from a missional perspective, presently at work. Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the fish focuses on God’s presence in the temple (2:4, 7), further suggesting a contrast between God’s special relationship with Israel and his presence in Nineveh.

Jonah clarifies his motives later in the book: “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” (4:2). He realized that his mission (sending) to cry out against the evil of Nineveh was not about vindictive judgment but an extension of the grace and love that Israel knew through redemption and covenant even to their violent, oppressive enemy. This is the nature of the God whose presence Jonah did not want to meet in Nineveh.

There is no need to import a version of Christian missions into the Old Testament. Jonah is not sent to make disciples or even converts to Judaism. He is not a herald of the good news of the kingdom of God in the Christian sense. He is, however, a type (in the sense of biblical typology) of Christ—at least according to Jesus himself (Matt 12:39–41). As Jonah was delivered from “the belly of Sheol” (2:2) after three days and then extended God’s grace to the nation of Nineveh through repentance, so Jesus was delivered from the realm of death on the third day, resulting in the extension of God’s grace to all nations through repentance. In other words, Jonah prefigures not only Jesus’s death and resurrection but the broadening of God’s redemptive purpose through it.

There is a robust theological connection between Jonah’s mission and Christian mission, but not simply because God sent Jonah as a messenger to a foreign nation like Jesus sends his disciples as messengers to foreign nations. That is not the primary analogy! A Christological reading is not about our story but Jesus’s and, therefore, the Triune mission of God at work through recalcitrant messengers like Jonah because of the power of the resurrection at work in him.

Missional Narrative

This Christological clue to the meaning of Jonah is a sign of what holds the whole of Scripture together as one story, the story of the work of God in Christ through the Spirit, the story of the Triune God. Some accounts of the biblical narrative of God’s mission focus on the role of God’s people (the cultural mandate in Gen 1:28; the blessing of the nations through Abraham’s family in Gen 12:3; the priestly vocation of Israel in Exod 19:6; the role of Israel as a light to the nations in Isa 42:6 and 49:6; the commissioning of the disciples in Matthew 28:18–20 and John 20:21–23; the ambassadorship of the church in 2 Cor 5:18–21; and so on). Certainly, these indications form part of the backdrop of reading Jonah missionally. But the primacy of human agency in such renditions can obscure the story behind the narratives of God commissioning his people: the mission of God in which God’s people participate throughout history.

The story is not really about what the messengers do or fail to do. As Jonah learned to confess the hard way, “Salvation belongs to the LORD!” (2:9). The mission is God’s. Human participation in God’s mission is secondary, derivative, and contingent. It is shot through with our finitude and fallibility. It is a part of the story, but it is not what the story is about.

Not only through Jonah but despite Jonah, God is at work to bring the Ninevites to repentance. It is the resurrection of Christ, in whom all things always have and always will hold together, that drives the narrative forward.

The question, then, is not how to “apply Jonah to our lives.” After all, Jonah is not a model for us to imitate. This is why “skip the whale” does such violence to the text. It begins with the assumption that interpretation is picking and choosing which parts of the narrative are meant to be prescriptive. Do this, don’t do that. Obey the commission, don’t run away. Love “your” Ninevites, don’t be prejudiced. Celebrate their repentance, don’t be resentful. But that’s a distortion of what narrative does. Instead, the question is how our lives are being written into the same same story that Jonah’s so painfully was—the ongoing story of God’s mission.

Missional Location

So how is the story continuing around us? Where is God specifically, presently at work? In what sense is God saying, “Get up; go,” now? What is the evil? What is the message? How are we, the church, responding? (Notice I didn’t say, “How should we respond?” As with Jonah, an honest account of failure might be the point.) How is the power of Jesus’s resurrection at work in and despite us (Eph 1:17–22)?

The answers to all of these questions vary according to our “location.” There are no pat answers. Not just because we are in diverse contexts but, more fundamentally, because what God is doing, where, when, and in whom is God’s prerogative. The Spirit blows where he wills. And human participation is a variable in a multitude of ways.

Yet, the text itself invites us to examine a few locations by analogy.

Reading in relation to the empire

Here the question is not who “my Ninevites” are (the people to whom God is sending me even if I don’t like them or their culture) but what Nineveh is. Who, in other words, is the empire? We may or may not be reading “in” the empire—though if you’re a US American, I’ve got some bad news for you—but we rightly read in relation to the empire. This isn’t about disliking a people group for their particularity but hating a people who dominate, wage war, kill, and oppress for their own sake. Reading Scripture missionally requires the same consciousness that Jonah had.

Of course, if we’re part of the empire, our location is different from Jonah’s. Still, we may hate the empire from within. We should. The song we don’t get to hear Jonah sing but that resides in his heart is imprecatory, like Ps 137. Jonah’s vengeful rejection of the idea that the empire should be forgiven its sins is the right starting point. Why? Because God detests those who do what empire does, and so should God’s people. Vengeance belongs to the Lord, but his hatreds are ours to share. We can’t skip the whale, and we can’t skip the condemnation.

Why do you think Jonah is God’s prophet in the first place? He’s not just a neutral vessel regardless of his own inclinations; that’s not how participation works. He hates what God hates. He approves of the judgment. He can speak wholeheartedly against the evil of Nineveh. We'd better be willing to do the same.

Of the missional questions my friend Michael Barram has taught me to ask, here are four that come to mind as I think about my relationship to empire:

• “In what ways does this text proclaim good news to the poor and release to the captives, and how might our own social locations make it difficult to hear that news as good?

• Does our reading of the text reflect a tendency to bifurcate evangelism and justice?

• Does our reading of this text acknowledge and confess our complicity and culpability in personal as well as structural sin?

• In what ways does the text challenge us to rethink our often-cozy relationships with power and privilege?” Michael Barram and John R. Franke, Liberating Scripture: An Invitation to Missional Hermeneutics (pp. 78-79)

But Jonah’s problem is his relationship to the empire. He doesn’t want to participate in God’s relationship with Nineveh, which is more than hatred and condemnation. It is grace and mercy, patience, steadfast love, and forgiveness. So how is God working in the empire? Where? In whom? These questions specify what it means to speak against its evil and call for its repentance. And what it means to extend its people grace.

Some of us are too comfortable, too complicit to share Jonah’s hatred. Some of us are too angry, too vengeful to participate in God’s grace. How we read in relation to empire is a critical dimension of our missional location.

Reading on the ship

All of us have often and in many ways fled from God’s presence. This is not about mere “foreign missions” by a long shot. Nor, in a more literalist vein, is it about being a specially called prophet in the Old Testament sense. The Reformers did important work with the recovery of the priesthood of all believers (1 Pet 2:9). But a failure to recognize the prophethood of all believers (Acts 2:17–18) persists. The church, missional by nature, is inscribed in the story of God’s mission and, thus, the narrative of Jonah through a prophetic vocation that we continue to resist. We are to join the presence of God in the midst of empire and speak about both justice and mercy. Instead, we flee.

So we find ourselves on the ship with Jonah, trying our best to ignore what God is doing. Sleep is my preferred mode of avoidance too. Stress me out, overwhelm me, push me to do work I don’t want to do, and I’m going to bed. But there is more than one way to retreat into unconsciousness. The church is quite able to ignore, avoid, and resist God’s work. There is nothing inevitable about Jonah’s participation, or ours. This is not a story about God’s “sovereignty” forcing Jonah’s hand, any more than he forces Jonah’s perspective (spoiler: Jonah never gets on board, so to speak). There is no inevitable conclusion to this tale.

Our identity, by contrast, is a foregone conclusion. In response his shipmates’ numerous question, Jonah says the one thing that really matters: “I worship the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (1:9). That is who he is, even in flight. The church is God’s people constituted by God’s mission for participation in God’s mission. That is who we are, regardless of resistance. Resistance is not futile; it’s dangerous. God’s pursuit of his people doesn’t end with conversion. As Susan Pevensie learned in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, Aslan isn’t safe, but he’s good. What is true for the Ninevites is true for Jonah, and for us. Both judgment and grace are on the table. I recall a church leader sharing a vivid dream that his congregation was a viking ship caught in a terrible storm, about to capsize. I believe his dream was true, but it wasn’t a viking ship. It was a ship from Joppa bound for Tarshish.

God pursues his missional people, and our resistance builds into a raging storm that puts us and those around us in danger. And then God does something ironic. God uses others—those who are not his missional people—to wake us up, call us to account, and throw us back on course. Every criticism of the church—hypocrisy, inconsistency, complicity, corruption—is a version of “What is this that you have done!” (1:10). Sometimes God’s work in the people around us is about provoking our participation in what God is doing in others.

Strangely, Jonah doesn’t simply jump overboard. Would the result have been the same if he had? Is he continuing to choose a passive role? Or is this an embrace of their part in his obedience to God’s will? If Jonah is a type of Christ, then at the very least, this moment in the story is a sign of submission to the cross at the hands of others. As for the sailors, they don’t know God and don’t know what to expect: “Please, O LORD, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O LORD, have done as it pleased you” (1:14). In other words, forgive us Lord, for we do not know what we are doing! These unwitting participants in God’s salvation of Nineveh play their part and end up making sacrifices and vows to the Lord (1:16), calling to mind the centurion who recognizes the Son of God on the cross.

Reading on the ship involves waking up and coming to terms with who we are, putting ourselves in the hands of others who have a role to play, and submitting to the cross so that the resurrection can do its work in our lives.

Reading in the belly of Sheol

Before resurrection comes death. Jonah’s song comes not only from the belly of a fish but from “the belly of Sheol” (2:2). All who would take up their cross and follow Jesus must learn to sing along.

Self-denial, death to self—these precede Jonah’s repentance (change of direction). Cruciformity is the only path toward God’s presence in the lives of others. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (Mark 8:35). This is the structure of Jonah. This is the story God’s missional people are written into.

No one, Jesus included, wants the cross. It is a place of terror and loneliness. The imagery of Jonah’s prayer is fittingly horrific: engulfing waves, the oppressive deep, noose-like seaweed, a place of imprisonment. And the irony deepens. Jonah, who fled from God’s presence, now cries out, “‘I am driven away from your sight; how shall I look again upon your holy temple?’” (2:4). But again, his “death” is the path to the presence of God, not in the temple but in Nineveh. His former view of God’s presence must die in the deep.

Then he can remember the Lord (2:7) and, therefore, what he owes the Lord. In a provocative parallel with the sailors’ sacrifices and vows, Jonah finds his resolve in Sheol: “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay” (2:9). This recollection, through death, of who the Lord is and who we are is an invitation to such resolve and to confession: “Salvation (yeshuah) belongs to the LORD!” Cross and resurrection weave together memory and participation.

Missional Equipping

My interpretation of Jonah recommends a variety of practices that equip the church for participation in God’s mission. I’ll highlight three.

First, the church needs to learn to sing imprecation. That is to say, we take the wrong lesson from Jonah by concluding that the moral of the story is how much God loves the Ninevites and how much Jonah should have too. We need to put our anger and disgust at evil into words. If we can’t even say it to ourselves, how can we be expected to say it to the empire? Damn injustice, violence, abuse, avarice, and indifference. Damn the empire. Sing it out loud.

Second, we need to follow the story-teller’s lead by practicing irony. I highlighted a couple of points of acute irony, but there are many in Jonah. The literary device runs rampant in the story. And that irony is about us. It is part of coming to terms with who we are, how we flee God’s presence, and how God leads us to repentance. It is honesty. Unless we own our place in Jonah’s story, participation in God’s mission is terribly difficult. Let Scripture’s unrelenting bluntness about God’s people shape the story we tell about ourselves, lest it fail to be ultimately the story of God’s mission. But let Scripture’s artistry guide us too. Irony is honesty about internal contradictions told slant. Tell it slant.

Third, the church needs to learn to pray from Sheol. It’s a harrowing proposition, but let’s not be coy about cruciformity. On the way to participation in God’s mission, we often find ourselves in belly of the fish, in the belly of Sheol, waiting for a resurrection power that is not our own. Can we find the words for drowning? Can we lament with Jonah? Can we pray our way to memory of God’s faithfulness? Can we, from those depths, confess that salvation belongs to our God? There is no need, if we can skip the whale. Which is to say, there is great need. “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there” (Ps 139:7–8). Praying like we believe it might make all the difference for the church’s participation in God’s mission.