This Sunday I had fun chatting with my old mate Simon Holt at Collins Street Baptist Church. Watch it here, or read a rough transcript of my part below. Simon introduced the story of Jonah, with context and commentary, then moved onto these questions …
Why is the story of Jonah significant to you?
The first time I read Jonah, I was hooked. I grew up in the church, but I’ve never been an easy fit and I strongly resisted the call to ministry. So I identify with Jonah’s running away, with the humiliating revelation that pagan sailors show more faith in his God than he does, with his time in darkness and a rebirth like vomit, with his grudging performance of his task, and with his fury when everyone else seems to have a better time of it. I mean, those god-awful sinners repent and everything’s hunky dory?
I also LOVE the image of God here. We see a god who responds to human action, changes their mind, loves horrible people, favours mercy over justice, and is more alive to people outside the faith than inside: it’s the gospel in a nutshell.
Of course, for people who are assured of their righteousness and insider status, this is all deeply offensive. But for people like me, who are never quite sure of their welcome and have to fight to belong, it’s pure gift. And anyway, I’m pretty cranky. How could I not love a grumpy prophet and the God who loves to push his buttons?!
What are some key things to understand?
Simon, you’ve already reminded us that Nineveh was a major Assyrian city, and that the Assyrians gained their wealth through extraordinary violence. They were famed for their terrible tortures, their rapaciousness, their forced displacement and dispersal of entire populations, and their intentional destruction of land, language, and culture.
Many Christians treat Jonah as a finger-wagging children’s tale: do what God says, or else! But scratch the surface, and you find a text of terror. Jonah is being asked to go to the heart of empire, where he will almost certainly lose his life in an excruciatingly painful way, and to preach against it. This is the way of Christ, and Jonah, that grumpy carping comic figure, is actually a most unlikely-looking image of Christ.
What do you make of Jonah’s attitude re fleeing?
For Jonah to go to Nineveh is like a Jewish man walking into one of the Nuremberg rallies and shouting that the Third Reich is over; like Senator Lidia Thorpe naming the Queen as colonizer and refusing to swear allegiance to the crown.
Because of her stance, Senator Thorpe has endured rape and death threats. The most likely outcome for Jonah would have been to be seized, imprisoned, interrogated, tortured, then murdered and thrown on the trash heap. Running away was the only sensible thing to do; I have a lot of sympathy for Jonah.
When he does turn back, it’s not some goody-two-shoes repentance. It’s not that he went, Hey, my bad, I should’ve done what God wants. Instead, in the belly of the fish, that is, in the belly of empire, he managed to remember that it is God who gives him life and draws him out of the ways of death: and this galvanizes him to make sacrifice. And what could be a more significant sacrifice than going to Nineveh? This obedience could easily cost him his life. So I see Jonah’s turnaround as a grudging acceptance of his lot: that those who choose God must bless their enemies, and may even at times risk crucifixion.
Have you ever said, ‘God, that’s not fair!’
I suspect it’s impossible to be alive and engaged in the world without saying this daily! But I think you want a personal answer. Simon, I’m a lady minister. I’ve been consistently undermined, sidelined, and rendered invisible, blocked and delayed while male colleagues forged ahead, mocked to my face and stabbed behind my back, and told in ways big and small that my gender is more important than my God-given vocation. And for what it’s worth, I’ve never been paid remotely full time for what has often been more than full time work. Now, despite seven years of what people are calling an amazingly creative and fruitful period of ministry, a ministry which reached far beyond the bounds of the church, I am unemployed and it seems there are very few prospects for women like me. So, what do you think?!
When is a good time to say, ‘God, that’s not fair!’
In prayer, always in prayer. We come alongside others in their pain and their suffering, we listen with all our heart, and we raise it all to God in prayer.
Where is the hope in this story?
Many of us are frustrated by the unfairness in the world: mostly, how the world is unfair to us or the ones we love. And so if we identify with this story at all, we tend to identify with Jonah. It’s written to make us do this, and it’s a natural way to approach the text.
But stories can be read from many angles. If we turn the text around, those of us who are not Indigenous would do well to reflect on how we are also like the Assyrians, or Ninevites.
Like them, we are cogs in a vast machine which intentionally invaded other people’s territory, stole the land, and engaged in all the horrors of genocide. This is not old history. The effects are still with us and we all live with intergenerational trauma, our national trauma. Settlers breathe a special fog of guilt, lies and denial, while First Peoples have drastically less access to health, wealth, and justice.
Even so, every year we are all told to celebrate a date marking our national trauma, the date when the First Fleet landed in Sydney Cove and the Union Jack was raised. 26 January, Invasion Day, the first day of the colony we now call Australia. We have celebrated this nation with other dates over the last century, but this is the one we have currently landed on, and it is incredibly hurtful to many.
And despite the narrative arc of our scriptures revealing a god who is fiercely opposed to violence, captivity, oppression and injustice, many Christians seem to have no problem with all this. The recent referendum and the high No vote among people identifying as Christian is only one of many indicators. I’ve heard people say, ‘But we brought the gospel!’ as if that is the only truth of this story.
But Jonah longed for the destruction of the colonizers, and those of us who are not Indigenous would do well to hear this. We would do well to understand that there are those who might long for our own destruction, and who hold the classic view of justice: an eye for an eye, a life for a life, all that. And we would do well to notice that the God we meet in Jonah prefers mercy.
This God chooses to bless even us, that is, even the colonizers, and God does this by sending people who invite us to repentance, that we might enter a different, more life-giving story.
People like tralwoolway man, Rev. Dr Garry Deverell, whom I sometimes think of as a blunt and insightful Jonah. And I, in the position of a Ninevite, that is, as a colonizer, get to hear his brilliant preaching and challenging teaching, and you get to go home and listen to his latest interview on Soul Search (here)!
Garry reminds me that the way of empire, Australian colonial capitalism, is violent and grasping and destructive; and, through social atomisation and climate catastrophe, it’s slowly killing us all. God longs to lead us into life, but our society keeps choosing death.
Thanks to Garry and many other modern-day Jonahs, and through engaging in the slow lifelong work of listening, repenting and being changed, I have discovered a faith that is so much bigger and more interesting and more life-giving than white colonial Christianity.
More, as I do this work and embrace this bigger story, I am brought back to identifying with Jonah myself, including with the strange and difficult demands which are placed on him and those who are faithful. These strange and difficult demands often look foolish and feel impossible: like preaching decolonization to white Christians, perhaps. Or for me, as an inner urban feminist, being sent to the bastion of country conservatism to work among burned, traumatized and ‘post-church’ folk, and to bless colleagues who aren’t actually convinced that women should speak in church.
But in meeting these strange demands, even reluctantly at times, I can attest that I have known great blessing and flourishing and joy. These flow when we engage with the living God, who keeps challenging us and stretching us and reminding us to love, as annoying as this task can be.
So that’s my hope. It might be unfair, but God is interested even in us, and sends cranky people to bless us. And if we choose to listen and are open to change, life will prevail: and we in turn will become a blessing.
Thanks be to the One from whom all blessings flow: Source, Word and Spirit of Life: Amen.
Alison and the whale 