Jonah Man Jazz

Nineveh City was a city of sin,
The jazzin’ and the jivin’ made a terrible din;
The beat groups playin’ the rock an’ roll:
And the Lord he said: Well bless my soul!
The people wouldn’t listen, danced night and day,
No time to work, no time to pray:
The beat groups playin’ both day and night:
And the Lord he said: Well, this ain’t right!

It’s a pity that when we hear of Jonah, the first thing we think of is the whale. You might argue that that is partly Jesus’ fault: when he refers to Jonah it is to use his stay in the whale as a symbol of Jesus’ own death and resurrection. To be frank, I don’t think Jesus meant us to take this reference quite as seriously or as literally as we seem to have done. It was surely not a serious parallel, as if Jonah had been swallowed “in order to foretell” – or even foreshadow – the Son of Man’s sojourn in the heart of the earth. And it makes me tired when scholars argue at length about the “problem” of the “three days and three nights”. All Jesus meant, I suspect, was that for God nothing is impossible. Jonah, once swallowed by the whale, was a s good as dead – indeed, under normal circumstances would have been dead – and yet emerged miraculously unscathed, through the power of God, to go and fulfil his task. Jonah does not foreshadow Jesus; he is certainly not a type of Jesus except in the very loosest sense. He is a cross between Jeremiah at his most recalcitrant and the elder brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Though I suppose that if Jesus could compare the Father with an unjust judge, he wouldn’t have had any problem with being himself compared with the elder brother. As I’ve suggested before, the phrase used by the father in the parable “You are always with me, and all I have is yours” is highly significant in that regard.

The point about the Book of Jonah – and that’s why it doesn’t matter in the least whether or not it “really happened” as told – of course it didn’t – is repentance. And sin. The sin, I think, not so much of the Ninevites, who did not know their right hand from their left, as of Jonah. If anyone is a sinner in this book, it is its “hero”. The Ninevites, in the Book of Jonah, far from being an example of sin, are an example of conversion, of faith, of obedience to God. When we say “Nineveh”, we should feel not as if we had said a slightly less shocking version of “Sodom and Gomorrah”, but as if we had said “Jerusalem” or “Rome”. When we say “Jerusalem” we do not think of the Jerusalem that persecuted and crucified the Lord, and when we say “Rome” we do not think of the corrupt centre of a corrupt Empire, or of the immorality and corruption which have existed in it since, and not only in its secular part. We think of the Jerusalem which foreshadows the Kingdom of God, and we think of Rome, which was, and to some extent still is, the heart of the Church. Nineveh’s sin, like the sin of Jerusalem and Rome, like all repented sin, has been wiped out by the glory of its conversion. We know that all the righteous who died before the coming of Christ are, all the same, redeemed by his blood. And so Nineveh, like the church which is symbolised by Jerusalem and Rome, has, in her conversion, been sanctified by Christ, who loved her and delivered himself up for her, that he might present her to himself glorious, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. The idea that God was primarily angry with Nineveh – as the king of Nineveh believed – has no basis in the text of the book. Its wickedness “was come up before him”, but he shows clearly at the end of the book that his motive was quite different. I suppose that, had Nineveh not repented, God would have carried out his threat to destroy it, just as he did – finally – to Sodom and Gomorrah, but his desire is that all should be saved; he is not only slow to anger and rich in mercy, he is love itself. And love is what he feels for Nineveh. Incidentally, you will search in vain for any suggestion that he was “angry” with Sodom and Gomorrah, except in the words of Abraham as he sought to persuade God not to destroy the innocent with the guilty.

If God threatens retribution for sin, it is not because he is angry. Or rather, he is angry, in the way one might be angry with a small child who is poking a metal skewer into an electric socket. God threatens when the love he has shown has not had the desired effect in leading his beloved back to him – or back to whatever, in their knowledge of the natural law, they understand of him. Jonah would have rather liked to see Nineveh destroyed – what a demonstration of the power of the God of the Hebrews! He was, he felt, a righteous man – though, as we know, God’s choice does not always, or even usually, fall upon the righteous – and therefore he should be the only one to receive God’s favour. More: he was a Jew, a member of the chosen people, and the Ninevites were Gentiles. I nearly said “goyim”. That is certainly how Jonah regards them. however, unfortunately God does not, and Jonah does not approve of Him. Why exactly did he refuse to go to Nineveh in the first place? Could he have been afraid of the king of Nineveh and how he would respond? He does not seem a very terrifying character. No; I think that from the first Jonah was so disgusted at the thought of God taking any notice of these sinners – other than to send down fire from heaven upon them – that he flounced off to Tharsis in a sulk. It did not occur to him. I suggest, that God would disagree with him or rebuke him, let alone punish him. He was, after all, a privileged person…And despite his superb canticle, and despite his very effective preaching, he did not emulate the Ninevites’ conversion. It did not occur to him that he needed to be converted; even when he had been punished for his disobedience, he believed that all God wanted was that his command should be obeyed. Jonah did not know that – as St Benedict says – if we murmur, not only in words but even in our heart, our work will not be pleasing to God, who sees that our heart is murmuring.

Yes, God was pleased at the obedience without delay of the Ninevites. But he was not pleased with Jonah, although he had been the material cause of that conversion. There are in God’s eyes two capital sins: idolatry, and lack of love. Or perhaps I should say there is one; what is idolatry but lack of love towards the God who made us? And here was Jonah committing both: lack of love towards his brothers the Ninevites, and idolatry in placing himself before God. The Douay version, in its heading to Chapter 4, gives: “Jonas, repining that that his prophecy is not fulfilled”. What mattered to Jonah was the fulfilment of his own prophecy, not the fulfilment of God’s loving mercy. It is perhaps worth noting that it was Jonah’s own fault if his prophecy was not fulfilled; had he preached what, by his own admission, he knew to be true, namely that the city would be destroyed IF its inhabitants did not repent, his prophecy would indeed have been fulfilled.

God’s final attempt to convert Jonah can be interpreted in may ways; but one thing it certainly is is an attempt to teach him about love. God's method is to keep giving, whether we respond or not; it did not seem to penetrate Jonah’s thick skull – or heart – that he in no way deserved this special treatment, or did he have any justification for complaint when God’s free gift was withdrawn. He was not “grieved” for the ivy, but for himself. I doubt whether he would have been capable of grieving for anyone, or anything, else. God’s suggestion that he might be was a final attempt, by irony, to get him to see the true situation. And there follows what is, to me, one of the most precious verses in the Bible, surpassed only by that same God’s cry on Calvary: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”. God says to Jonah: “But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?” Ignorance may not be a defence in human law, but it is with God, who will go to almost any lengths to exonerate his children.

But it is “almost”. A cut-off point does exist, and then as the tree falls, so shall it lie. We do not know what happened to Jonah, and it is none of our business. What is our business is to look to ourselves and apply the lesson. While we shouldn’t be tax-collectors, sinners or idolaters, while we should learn to tell our right hand form our left, it is better to be all these things and repent, than to be the “righteous” person who believes he has no need to repent, and that he has no responsibility for seeing that others repent. Had God destroyed Nineveh, he might well have had the same message for Jonah as he later had for his descendants: “Do you think that they were sinners above all men because they suffered these things? No, I tell you; but unless you do penance, you shall likewise perish.” It is not only in connection with “outsiders” that God says, again in the words of “Jonah Man Jazz”

Take my warning
early in the morning,
as early as you feel inclined:
Shout to the people,
Shout from every steeple,
tell them the judgement bell has chimed;
And I will smite ‘em
Ad infinitum
If they do not turn to Me once more!