The Runaway and the Big Fish

In the days when Amos was warning Israel about fairness, God gave a prophet named Jonah a job.

"Go to Nineveh, that great city," God said. "Shout against it."

Nineveh was a giant city in Assyria, Israel's enemy, famous for hurting the people it conquered. Jonah got up and ran the other way. He went down to the harbor, sailed for the far end of the sea, and went down below deck to sleep. (Jonah goes down a lot in this story. Soon he will go much further.)

Then God threw a great wind at the sea. The sailors heaved the cargo overboard. Splash! Splash! Down below, Jonah snored.

"How can you sleep?" the captain shouted. "Get up and call on your god!"

The sailors drew lots to see who was to blame, and the lot fell on Jonah. "I worship the LORD," he admitted, "the God who made the sea and the dry land. And I'm running away from him. Throw me into the sea, and it will calm down."

At last the sailors cried, "LORD, don't let us die for this man's life!" and threw Jonah overboard. At once the sea went still. One man had gone into the water, and every sailor lived.

God sent a great fish to swallow him. For three days and three nights Jonah sat in the dark, smelly belly, and he prayed, "Only the LORD can save!" Then God spoke to the fish, and it threw Jonah up onto the beach.

This time, when God said go, Jonah went. He marched through the city shouting, "Forty more days, and Nineveh will be knocked down!"

The people of Nineveh believed God. The king climbed off his throne and sat in the ashes. "No one eats!" he ordered. "Not people, not cows, not sheep! Everyone wear sackcloth and stop your cruel ways!" Even the cows wore sackcloth, the scratchy cloth that showed they were sorry. And God did not destroy the city.

Jonah was furious. "This is why I ran!" he prayed. "I knew you are kind and full of mercy, slow to get angry and rich in love. So take my life, LORD!"

Jonah stomped out of town to watch. Overnight God grew a leafy plant to shade him, and Jonah loved it. At dawn God sent a worm. Nibble, nibble, chomp. The plant shriveled. Then the sun beat down, and Jonah felt faint.

"Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?" God asked.

"Yes!" said Jonah. "Angry enough to die!"

"You feel sorry for a plant you didn't even grow," said God. "It came up in a night and died in a night. Shouldn't I feel sorry for Nineveh, that great city, with more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who don't know their right hand from their left, and lots of cows besides?"

The book ends there, with God's question hanging in the hot air.

About eight hundred years after Jonah, another man fell asleep in a boat in a storm, and when his friends woke him, he told the wind to stop, and it stopped. The only sign he would give, he said, was the sign of Jonah: three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. Jonah had sat outside Nineveh hoping his enemies would be destroyed. This man hung outside Jerusalem and prayed for his. He went further down than Jonah ever went, all the way into death, one man given up so that everyone else could live, the way the sailors lived. And on the third day, Jesus came back up.