Three Lessons from Jonah

1. The refusal to do mission brings calamity upon us and our neighbours. The church cannot expect to live in a comfortable relationship with God whilst ignoring his agenda for mission. Jonah quite deliberately turned his back on the Lord’s call and headed west. But the Lord’s heart for both Jonah and mission is such that he cannot allow Jonah to just go his way. And so he goes after him, bringing a storm upon the ship, endangering not only Jonah’s life but those of the sailors too.

If we refuse to follow God’s agenda for mission, we will know his discipline and our neighbours may well be caught in the crossfire as the church struggles to come to terms with what God is doing. Is some of the distress that we see around us not simply a wake-up call to the church to greater urgency in mission but also the by-product of our failure to do so? It’s a sobering thought.

2. The LORD God will do whatever is necessary to engage his people in mission. One of the most sobering aspects of this scene is the way the sailors and the captain show more spiritual awareness than Jonah. He is happy to sleep through the storm and has to be goaded into prayer. And when he finally owns his sin and tells them to throw him overboard, they initially refuse and only do so at last with the greatest reluctance.

The Lord shames his prophet through the compassion and spiritual awareness of pagans and then saves him from death by a giant fish. How unusual his ways can be! But such is his commitment to mission that he will do whatever is necessary to awaken his people, shaming us by the compassion of others, getting our attention by unusual circumstances. Do we hear his voice or are we asleep in the light?

3. It is possible to do mission successfully yet without genuine compassion. Is Jonah a hero by the end of the book, the repentant runaway who now preaches with passion and compassion? I think not. Yes, he goes to Nineveh, obeying the word of the Lord, but his heart isn’t in it. That is more than obvious from his reaction to the way the Ninevites respond to the message. Here is a servant who is angry with his Master; here is a messenger who finds the message repugnant. And his reaction to the death of the vine shows that he is self-centred to the point of wilful obstinacy.

We are perhaps more like Jonah than we care to concede. His story shows how perverse our hearts can be and how gracious our God is. Despite his people’s disdain and reluctance, he will ensure his mission succeeds, with or without our hearts’ consent. The only loser in this story is Jonah himself. He is the villain of the piece. To know that the LORD is “a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” and not to rejoice in it, and even to oppose it, is the sign of a very sick heart.

The telling history of Jonah closes, as Jesus’ parable of the lost son does, with a question that searches both Jonah and the hearer. Does Jonah have a right to be angry? Will he go on excluding himself from a true enjoyment of the amazing grace of God? The Ninevites turned, the younger brother turned, people today are turning. Does that delight our hearts? Do we preach and yet refuse to party? Is our commitment to mission more than skin deep? Is our obedience grudging or grateful?