Christchurch Parish News, September 2016
As we reach the turning point of chapters one and two of the book of Jonah, what does the story so far have to teach us about prayer?
If you know nothing about the story of Jonah, you know this: ‘And the LORD appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.’ Having been thrown overboard during a fierce storm by the sailors in a last- ditch attempt to save their skins, Jonah is unexpectedly swallowed by a great fish (note, not a whale as commonly depicted). ‘And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and nights. Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish.’
Next month, we’ll turn to the substance of Jonah’s prayer but this month I want to focus our attention on the overall shape of the first part of story and where that takes us theologically. Simply stated, the theme is one of descent into the depths. At every stage of the first part of the story, Jonah goes down, and down, and yet further down.
At the beginning of the story, Jonah’s whereabouts are unclear. But on receiving the word of the LORD, Jonah goes down to Joppa. That’s the first movement down. Then when Jonah is in the boat, he doesn’t stay up on deck. Instead, we read that Jonah ‘had gone down in the inner part of the ship.’ That’s the second movement down. Then having drawn lots and the lot having fallen on Jonah, the sailors throw him into the sea. That’s the third downward movement and it’s one that is very important because at the time, especially for the original hearers of the story, the sea would have symbolised chaos. Think how the Bible begins with ‘the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the waters’, ‘when the earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep’ (Gen 1.2). In other words, the waters symbolised the primordial chaos prior to even the creation of light. And it is into this that Jonah descends. But even then, there is one more downwards movement to come: the great fish sent by the LORD swallows Jonah up and he ‘was in the belly of the fish three days and nights.’ That the LORD commands the great fish and the great fish obeys further underlies God’s sovereignty over all creation (in various places, the Old Testament speaks of the LORD defeating Leviathan, the great sea monster of the deep; nowhere is beyond the sovereignty of God and now all creatures, even those previously opposed to Him, obey — all, of course, apart from Jonah!).
This prophet of God has been brought as low as he could be. Not that the LORD has instigated all these descents. At the beginning, Jonah could have immediately headed east to Nineveh, where the LORD had commanded him to go, rather than west and down to the coast to board the ship. But no, to Tarshish we shall go, he says. So the LORD sends the great storm to overwhelm the ship. Jonah advises the sailors to throw him overboard. He’s plunged into the sea. The LORD sends the great fish to swallow him up.
And then, and only then, when he’s in the belly of the great fish in the depths of the sea, does Jonah pray. Note that Jonah doesn’t pray when he’s summoned by the LORD to go to Nineveh. He doesn’t pray when he’s on the ship and it’s nearly sinking (in fact, he’s sleeping like a baby in the hold). He doesn’t pray to the LORD to stop the tempestuous seas; instead it’s the pagan sailors who pray to the LORD to do that. He doesn’t even pray to the LORD when the sailors throw him overboard. It’s only when he’s in the belly of the great fish, in other words when he’s symbolically reached the very bottom, that finally, he actually prays.
How true to life this is. I don’t know about you but I find myself much more minded to pray when things are going badly and I could do with a bit of extra help than when things are rolling along nicely. To take a simple example, I used to play a bit of golf when I was younger. And oftentimes you’d hear people on the course, myself included it has to be said, uttering very short, monosyllabic prayers, often invoking the Lord’s name in vain, not when the ball was flying down the middle of the fairway, well away from all danger, but when it was careering off into the trees or towards a cavernous bunker.
In other words, when things are going well, most of us are not so minded to pray. But when things go badly, boy, do we pray! Even if you’re not sure who exactly it is that you’re praying to, nonetheless, you pray.
And on the one hand, we could get all down on ourselves about this and feel guilty for our being more likely to pray when in a tight scrape than when all is going well. And, yes, one could say that a sign of a maturing faith in God is one where there’s an increasing sense of gratitude when all is indeed going well, as we realise how dependent we are at every moment on God’s good grace.
But, on the other hand, we all have to start somewhere. And prayers that come from a broken heart or a place of panic or desperation, or a sense of feeling overwhelmed by the flux and contingency of life, have at their heart a quality that is so important in all prayer: honesty.
Which is one of the reasons why the psalms in the Bible are so important because they are so often raw, honest prayers, which when you get to know them, as so many of you reading this will know, make you realise that you don’t have to pretend with God. Quite the opposite. There is a searing honesty that runs through so many of the psalms which when we become familiar with them, gives us the example that it’s OK for us, too, to be honest in our own prayers to God.
And sometimes we may think we know what prayer is. But it’s only when we’re brought to breaking point, when we may even think that we’ve passed that point, that our prayers, which by that stage may not even be intelligible words, but simply groans or silent tears, it’s at that point that we can find that there is a depth to these prayers, which we would never have realised if we had not been brought so low.
So with all this in mind, next month, we’re going to turn to Jonah’s prayer to the LORD as he spends three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish in the dark depths of the sea.