Christchurch Parish News, July 2016
Who’s to blame? Why the sailors’ response to Jonah might surprise us.
Jonah’s to blame. The sailors now know this. The storm that threatens to overwhelm their ship and kill them all is down to Jonah. They know that he is fleeing from the LORD, because he told them.
The sailors deliberate. What are they going to do? Somehow they’ve got to find a way of placating the god that Jonah is trying to escape from, ‘for the sea was growing more and more tempestuous’. Their lives are at great risk because of this one man’s actions. But how they respond is unexpected. Rather than conferring amongst themselves and then proceeding to throw Jonah overboard without further delay, instead they turn to Jonah and ask him ‘What shall we do to you, that the sea may quieten down for us?’
This is simply remarkable. If you think about it, the basic plot of the story wouldn’t be changed one bit if the sailors just rushed Jonah, grabbed him and hurled him overboard. Jonah would still end up in the water and the story could still proceed swiftly to the next scene where the LORD provides Jonah with a great fish to swallow him up. It would be the same basic plot. But instead the narrative gives us something very different. The sailors respond to Jonah with great generosity. They seek his advice, asking him what they should do to him. They grant him a say in his destiny.
At this point, we do well to remind ourselves that the original audience of this story was the people of Israel. And so far, the character in the story who is representing the people of Israel, Jonah, has acted very badly, specifically by disobeying the call of God. By contrast, the sailors, each of whom in this story worships his own god, are acting righteously, treating the stranger in their midst with great respect.
Jonah answers their question. ‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quieten down for you for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come up on you’. The agency of the sacrifice that is about to take place shifts. Rather than it lie with the sailors, the decision rests instead with Jonah. He willingly gives up his life so that they might live. He is prepared to be thrown into the storm-tossed seas so that these sailors who don’t worship the LORD might live. He gives them license to proceed. By doing so, he removes the guilt that they would have borne had they just rushed him and thrown him overboard without any hesitation.
One of the reasons why I’m deliberately reading the story of Jonah so slowly is to notice the nuances in the narrative. Oftentimes, especially with stories we think we know well, we can miss these different shadings in the way the story is depicted. And this is one of them. Jonah is not simply depicted as a black and white character. Yes, he disobeys the LORD and refuses to go to Nineveh. But here at this moment in the narrative, he also acts self-sacrificially. He is prepared to give up his life so that others, strangers even, may live. He’s a more complicated, conflicted character who sometimes does the wrong thing, sometimes does the right thing. In other words, he’s very human. Of course, another way of reading it is that he’s completely apathetic about his life. He doesn’t care any more, as if he’s saying, ‘Just throw me overboard and be done with it. You’ll survive and I won’t and then I’m well and truly out of this wretched business of trying to flee from God’. But even then, if he were, as a devout Jew, verses from Psalm 139 would be nagging at him, ‘Where, O Lord, 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’.
Either way, he’s told the sailors what they have to do. Throw him overboard. And that’s what they do. Well, no, it isn’t. At least not yet. The narrator continues the story, ‘Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land’. The reaction of the sailors continues to confound stereotypes. They know what they need to do, throw Jonah overboard. Jonah has said to them that that is what they need to do. He has even given them permission, accepting responsibility for the situation they’re unexpectedly facing. And do they? No, the sailors row hard to bring the ship back to land. They don’t want to throw Jonah overboard and kill him. They want him to live just as much as they want to live. They want to get back to Joppa and share a drink together and laugh with relief at their narrow escape. And that includes Jonah. Again, just as with their generous reaction previously where they asked Jonah what they should do to him, at every stage of the story (and we’ll see that this continues into the second half of the story when we reach Nineveh), the narrator presents all the non-Israelites in the story in a very good light. At each stage, they try to do what is right. And this is deliberate because the narrator of the story of Jonah wants the listener to be surprised and sympathetic to the behaviour of these foreigners, thereby prompting someone hearing the story to turn to his or her Israelite neighbour and say, ‘Well, I didn’t see that coming. I wouldn’t have expected the sailors [or the Ninevites] to have behaved like that. Hmm…’ The story is inviting the listener in all sorts of subtle ways to think differently about the other, be it the foreigner or the stranger, be it people who worship other gods or even people who are your sworn enemies.
But the storm rages on. They can’t make headway ‘for the sea grew more and more stormy against them’. So what do they do? As they did, when the storm first began to rage, they cry out. But this time, the one to whom they cry out is different. But that’s brings us to the next step of the story which will be our focus in August.