Christchurch Parish News, May 2016
Over hundreds upon hundreds of years and in our own time, in cultures vastly different from one another, from Brazil to South Korea, reading Holy Scripture has proven itself to be a vital source of change.
In a desperate effort to avoid the call of God on his life, Jonah has set sail on a ship that’s heading west for Spain. But, as we found out last time, the LORD’s reaction is not to sit back and let Jonah sail into the sunset. No Costa del Sol retirement villa for Jonah. Quite the opposite. ’The LORD hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up’ (Jonah 1:4).
It is at this point in the story that the mariners make their entrance. Poor sailors! Little did they know when they took Jonah on board what trouble they were letting themselves in for. For it’s not as if Jonah was walking about with a big hat with ‘Prophet on the Run’ embroidered on the front. No, he just looked like a regular guy. The sailors took his money as he paid his fare (although, as I mentioned previously, if the interpretation that some hold by, namely that Jonah commissioned the entire ship to take him to Tarshish, then probably that would have raised a few eyebrows. But, if so, money is money and you’ve got a family to feed and bills to pay, so, come aboard, mister, and make yourself comfortable. Oh, you’re going down below deck are you? Fair enough. Whatever takes your fancy …). And off they sail, without a clue as to what they’ve let themselves in for.
But soon enough they know something’s seriously wrong. A huge storm comes up unexpectedly quickly and the ship is now rocking and swaying from side to side, ever-taller waves crashing onto the deck. “All lost, to prayers, to prayers! all lost!” Their courage melting away, these experienced sailors are at their wits’ end, for this is no ordinary storm, and each cries to his god.
‘Each cried to his god’ (1:5). It’s an interesting observation by the narrator of the story, the implication being, and one which helps to give this part of the story its realistic feel, that the sailors would have come from all around the Mediterranean and therefore would have held diverse religious beliefs. Many would have worshipped the Greek gods, including Glaucus, to whom sailors would pray for assistance in times of trouble at sea (Glaucus makes an appearance in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Others may have worshipped more exotic gods, such as Isis, the Egyptian nature goddess. But whoever their god was, it wasn’t the God of Israel. The key thing to note is that the story takes for granted that there are a multiplicity of gods who are worshipped by different people from different countries. Much like our times.
I flag this up now because, as we shall see, one of the themes of the story we call ‘Jonah’, is how those who are not worshippers of the God of Israel at the beginning of the story respond to the God of Israel, be it when they encounter this God in a tremendous storm, be it later in Nineveh, when they hear Jonah’s curt proclamation of impending destruction.
For in our own time, in fact, for many years now, this is one of the issues that we as the church have been having to think through. We are all very much aware of how things have changed massively. Ask yourself, how many of your peers go to church (or a synagogue, a mosque, a temple or a gurudwara, for that matter)? If you have adult children and you took them to church when they were young, how many of them now, as adults, still worship? The likelihood is that if you do have friends and family who practise some form of religion, that they are in a small minority and they’re more likely to be older rather than younger.
So if that experience is true for you, then two questions follow: a) how are we to share our understanding and experience of the Triune God; and b) when we do, what expectations do we hold regarding how others are going to react? The focus of the story of Jonah is in part on question b): how do others react when they encounter or hear about the LORD?
How we think about this, like everything else, is shaped by our time and place. Most of us probably are rather wary of the reaction people will have, which then discourages us for sharing our faith in the first place. Especially because, as I’ve said before, the broader culture just doesn’t encourage us to do this in the ordinary warp and weft of our lives. Quite the opposite. Since the religious wars in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the intellectual movement that developed shortly after, which we refer to as the Enlightenment, then later the cataclysms of the first and second world wars with all their manifold horrors, to name but three moments in history, the whole momentum for us as a culture in Europe has been leading us to a place where our faith, if we hold it at all and don’t consider it intellectually and morally moribund, is understood as something best kept private. It is not something for the public sphere, the concern being that when we do bring our faith into the open, things can often and do often have a habit of turning out very badly.
Such concerns are reasonable ones. But these concerns, too, are shaped by our time and place. As a culture we haven’t always thought this way and it is highly unlikely that we’ve now finally reached the point in our culture’s history where, that’s it! forever more we will hold these concerns to be true for the rest of time and we won’t change how we look at things ever again. No, things do change. They don’t stay the same. Sometimes, oftentimes, change is very unnerving. But other times, the prospect of it can give us hope. Things aren’t always necessarily going to be as they are now.
Then the question comes, where does that hope come from? How does that glimmer of optimism break into our hearts and minds, when we suddenly find ourselves thinking that, hmm, maybe, just maybe, we might be able to conceive of things turning out differently and not just ending up always in the same, disappointing way? How can that happen? Are we not locked into our own time and place, destined to think in ways shaped only by our cultural moment and its intellectual fashions?
Simply put, no we’re not, and here’s why. Over hundreds upon hundreds of years and in our own time, in cultures vastly different from one another, be it from Brazil to South Korea to name but two contemporary examples, reading Holy Scripture has proven itself to be a vital source of change. For in reading and meditating upon the Scriptures, people’s minds and imaginations around the world have been transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit so that they are no longer conformed to the dominant mindset of their age. The stories they read in the Bible break new ground in their hearts and they learn a new way of understanding what their lives are called to be about. They come to see that the world, including their part of it, when transformed by the love of God, is a very different place.
Reading the story of Jonah can do this for us, too, in all sorts of ways, including re-shaping how we might find ourselves anticipating the way others are going to react when they encounter God. So if you’ve ever found yourself thinking things along the lines of ‘there’s no point telling Mary or John about the Lord, they’d never be interested’, tune in next month. For then we will read how the sailors respond to the LORD and we will see how favourably their reaction compares to that of the prophet of the God of Israel, ‘Get-me-outta-here’ Jonah.
But for now, we leave the sailors up on deck, reeling and staggering, holding on to anything for dear life, each crying to his god, as the waves batter not just the hull, but also their hearts.