Jonah is a familiar story. The prophet hears the call of God. He says no. He gets on a boat to go as far away from Nineveh as possible. There are unaccountably fierce storms, so he rightly discerns God’s judgment and has the crew toss him into the sea, where he is swallowed by a large fish—or perhaps a whale—and spit up after three days. He journeys to Nineveh, where our story picks up this morning, to preach repentance. The people repent, as does God—more on that in a moment—and then, after today’s selection, Jonah goes into a fit of pouting self-pity.
It’s an odd story in many ways, which is part of why it is one of the most memorable stories of the Old Testament. But it’s worth pointing out how the content of the book as a whole is also unusual in the context of the whole Bible. Jonah is sent not to the kings of Judah or of Israel; he is not sent to the people of the covenant. He is sent to heathen foreigners who have no direct contact with the God of Israel. In much of the Old Testament, we could easily forget that promise to Abraham long ago that in his descendants all the nations of the earth would be blessed. Yet here we have this clear insistence that God is interested in and cares for the Gentiles.
One other interesting aspect of the book is how it subtly asserts the absolute singularity of Israel’s God in the world. It wasn’t that unusual for ancient peoples to make large claims about their gods. But for the most part, those claims end at the border of the nation. It seems strange to us, but this was a typical ancient attitude: well sure, our god is the creator of all things, but by “all things” we really mean this village or this river or this nation. The other nations and cities have their own gods, and we leave them alone. Yet in Jonah, there’s this seeming ignorance that anyone even claims to worship other gods. We see God’s power first on his native turf—his call to Jonah. But then we see God’s power over the wind and the waves, his power over the animal kingdom, his power over plant life, over the sun, his power over a huge city that has never even heard of him. No other gods are even mentioned. The implication is that they are too small, too insignificant to warrant notice. Their power, if it is power, is illusory and limited. They are not really, in the end, gods at all.
But, hold on. Doesn’t Jonah’s God “repent” at the end of the story, changing his mind from the evil he intended to do to the city? This might seem the final nail in the coffin for a view of God’s transcendent, changeless perfection, but not so. First, the book as a whole seems designed to show God’s absolute singular and unique holiness in the face of the diverse powers of the world. Second, Scripture and Tradition as a whole insist that God is perfect and unchanging. How then do we interpret this line about God’s “repentance”?
We’d best go with analogy here. If you live in a hot, sunny place, and you defy the sun’s power, walking about at midday without cover or sunscreen or hydration, it may seem as though the sun is out to get you: it threatens dehydration, sunburn, heatstroke. If, however, you respect the sun’s power and prepare to be in its presence, it will seem that the sun is no longer your enemy. What once seemed the source of pain will now seem like a warm embrace. In these two scenarios, the sun didn’t change. You did.
Not that God is merely some great natural force like the sun. But for the ancient writer to say that God “repented” is a sort of shorthand for the idea that people have adapted to the reality of who God says he is, and so what once seemed like judgment now seems like mercy and grace.
Our Lord himself says, in that long conversation with the disciples on Maundy Thursday, that “in a little while” their sorrow “will be turned to joy” (John 16:20). The cause—in this case, the cross—hasn’t changed. But what changes is the disciples themselves, for when they really encounter the cross in all its power, and the one who gives it power through the divine life he most fully reveals in his resurrection, they experience it in a new way.
This radically different experience of the same ultimate reality goes at the heart of the Christian understanding of heaven and hell. We can say that hell is “absence” from the presence of God. But this is an absurdity, since God is everywhere. Hell is, rather, the experience of God’s presence as absence—or the experience of the good as something painful. It is like the person so worn down and corrupted by hatred and anger that he perceives a gesture of love as an attack.
Those aren’t perfect descriptions at all, but they suggest something of the paradox of God’s relation with the world. God never changes. But we do, and the world does. Furthermore, God has, in a mysterious way, chosen in his eternal will to allow our choice to matter. When we say that prayer matters, part of what we mean is that God’s changeless decision is to decide certain things in relation to our free will.
I think it is very much in the light of this same divine transcendence that St. Paul declares in 1 Corinthians that we should live as if we were not married when we are, as if we had nothing when we don’t, as if we were rejoicing when we are not. It seems clear that these paradoxical statements aren’t concrete instructions—elsewhere, for example, he has some lofty things to say about marriage. The point is that whatever good things there are in this world—and there are some truly good things—cannot compare with the glories of eternity. Maybe we could even describe this as a Pauline argument for wit and good humor.
Anyway, we have to hold even the best things of this world, its joys and its sorrows, with a light touch. Here the Buddhist notion of “detachment” gets it right in some important ways, recognizing that the source of much suffering comes from holding on to things that do not last. Where St. Paul and Christianity part ways from Buddhism is on the recognition that detachment isn’t itself the ultimate goal; the ultimate goal is actually to be attached, just to the right thing: God. When we orient our hearts to him, all the earthly forms of goodness can shine with the reflected light of the true sun. But if we try to take these various mirrors away from the light, they will only ever be dull and meaningless.
The true light of Christ, the transcendent and eternal divine Son, is in fact the only thing worthy of the kind of devotion we see in the early disciples. For a serious Jewish man in the first century, there was nothing more important than family and work. The only thing that could dare call one away from that was . . . well, God himself. The fact that Peter and Andrew, James and John, drop their nets and follow him, suggests that they recognized in him something precious beyond price. Nothing is more important than following him. Nothing.
Today we don’t see those old visible competitions between gods of river and mountain and nation. But there are plenty of other gods demanding their place—gods of commerce, of political party, of family comfort, of wellness and self-care, of pleasure, of self-expression, of control. All of these want a small piece of us, and it seems reasonable because they want just that little piece, and they’re fine leaving the rest to somebody else. But Jesus does claim more, because he’s not just the god of Sunday or the god of traditional morality or the god of Catholics: he is Lord of the nations, King of Kings, the Alpha and the Omega. It is God, or it is nothing.
The time is running out, Paul says. That was a theme of Jonah’s preaching too, it turns out. Maybe we’re like the disciples, or like Jonah, or like the citizens of Nineveh. We cannot run forever. The city of this world will not last forever. Our family and our work will not last forever. All the best things will pass away. But if we choose first the kingdom of God, all the good things of this life will shine with the brightness of God’s own light.