Pentecost 2
24 May 2026
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
W. Gregory Pope
JONAH AND THE BIG FISH
Jonah 1.1-3. Psalm 139.7-10, 23-24
The story of Jonah is one of the most well-known stories in the world, brought to life beautifully by our children a few days ago. Pictures from their performance on the cover of your bulletin. As well known as the story of Jonah is, there is probably not a biblical story where we more often miss the point. There are those of us who in the name of defending the Bible focus on proving the possibility of a whale swallowing a man then spitting him back out on the shore, and all the while avoid the point of the story because it is uncomfortable. So let me say at the outset, especially to those of you of a more skeptical mind: Don’t miss the divinely inspired truth of this story by getting caught up in the strange details of the story. You don’t have to accept a biblical story literally in order to receive the truth the story is trying to teach. If it helps you hear the significant truth God is revealing through Jonah, listen to the story as you would a parable of Jesus. It is a powerful, inspiring, and often disruptive whale of a tale where you just mind find yourself.
This divine drama begins with God’s call to a man named Jonah. Jonah is what we might call an anti-prophet, or the UN-Prophet. He was a man with a negative disposition. He didn’t like people very much. So how did this contentious prophet wind up helping God save a foreign nation that he, Jonah, hated?
It begins with the word of God to Jonah: Arise, go to Nineveh and cry out against it. Tell them their wickedness has come before me, and judgment is on the way unless they repent.
Jonah was dumbfounded. Nineveh? The very name brought fear and revulsion to the ancient Hebrew heart. Capital of the dreaded world power, Assyria, who had destroyed Jerusalem and the temple, Nineveh personified in the Hebrew mind all that was evil: opposition to Yahweh, a military threat to Israel, a reputation for violence, cruelty, and ruthless power. Jonah could not believe that God wanted him to go preach there. It would be like an American prophet right after 9/11 being told to share God’s love with Al-queda instead of bombing Afghanistan. Ninevah deserved no mission of mercy. They would most likely not repent – and if they did it would only be a ruse. “Me, preach your Word there?” said Jonah, “Talk about casting pearls before swine. No way Yahweh!”
Like Jonah, we often find our prejudices rising up from deep within us, especially when there’s talk of showing mercy to certain people. Our prejudices attach our fears and disgust onto certain people groups, religions, nations and races. Our prejudices are often learned in families, reinforced by culture, and tragically blessed from pulpits. In wartime and during election seasons people are demonized and dehumanized, and we excuse it in the name of politics and national security. It seems as if we need a despised enemy to unite us and blame for our problems. Anything to keep us from looking at our own sin.
So what did Jonah do when asked to go preach to a nation he loathed? Well, a prophet is
supposed to “stand before the presence of the Lord” and speak God’s truth to the world. Jonah decides to “flee the presence of the Lord” and keep his mouth shut. God said, “Go east.” Jonah went west to a faraway place where he could disappear and forget. Somewhere like the Carribean or Margaritaville. Jonah bought a ticket and headed toward Tarshish – whose name sounds like how you talk after a few margaritas.
Evie Ruff, who recently played Jonah in our children’s musical practiced hard at learning to say Tarshish while missing her two front teeth! And she did it well!
Jonah took off for Tarshish, a land far away. But you know, our Tarshish need not be far away. It can be a couch in our living room, a few numbing drinks, a TV and a remote control. We can “flee the presence of the Lord” in many different ways.
So Jonah buys a ticket and boards a ship heading west. A storm arises. The other sailors on board are frightened for their lives. Meanwhile Jonah is sound asleep in the belly of the ship. The sailors wake him up and ask him to pray to his god. They had already prayed to their god. And when the prayers don’t work, they resort to magic. They cast lots to see who’s at fault for the storm. When things go wrong, find a scapegoat! The lot fell to hapless Jonah.
“Who are you?” they ask.
“I’m a Hebrew,” Jonah replies. “I worship Yahweh who made the land and sea. This is all my fault. Throw me overboard.”
The sailors eventually oblige, and toss him over the side of the ship. Suddenly the sea calms, and the sailors convert to Yahweh on the spot! Jonah – an evangelist despite himself. Act Two comes to an end with Jonah on his way to the bottom of the sea.
Act Three begins inside the whale’s belly. Actually, the text doesn’t say “whale”. It says dag gadol, a great fish, species undetermined.
This is the part of the story that’s been subjected to great scrutiny by conservatives and liberals alike. In his novel Moby Dick, Melville satirized the debate mercilessly. One explanation he proposed: Jonah found a hollow tooth inside the whale and hid there. (Just think, if the whale had practiced good dental hygiene, Jonah would have perished!) Another attempted explanation: Jonah hid in the decaying carcass of a dead whale for three days. (Now there’s an appetizing thought just before lunch.) A third explanation: Jonah was picked up by a ship named “The Whale.” And while some try to prove a non-miraculous explanation, others say: “If you don’t believe it the way it says it happened, you’re calling God a liar.” Well, who knows if God is as literally minded as we sometimes tend to be?
The point of the story is not the chemical composition of the digestive juices in the belly of the whale. The point is the drama going on inside Jonah, and the drama inside God, as God tries to save both Jonah and Nineveh. Jonah who hated it that God could love Nineveh, would rather die than live in such a world where countries like Nineveh were shown mercy. And God who loves both Jonah and Nineveh, would not let Jonah so easily consign himself to the deeps and to death.
So we see God’s redemption at work. God sends a great fish to catch Jonah’s descent and haul him back to life. Oh, the odd mercy of God who finds a way to save even those who deny him and flee his presence.
I often wonder about Jonah in the belly of the great fish. Did he recall the words of Psalm 139: Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, Thou art there! If I make my bed in the depths of Sheol, Thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there Thy hand shall lead me and Thy right hand shall hold me. Right into the belly of a whale!
The fish was not God’s punishment, but God’s instrument of salvation; the sea monster – an angel of the deep. Sometimes God is there in the dark, in the belly of one kind of whale or another, and what looks like damnation leads the way to salvation, and monsters turn out to be angels.
Act Four comes three days later as the fish spits Jonah onto shore, which just goes to show, “You can’t keep a good man down.” But Jonah wasn’t yet a good man. What’s often missed in the story is how little change there is in this newly regurgitated prophet. The fish has changed Jonah’s destination but not his disposition, his geography but not his theology. Like civil rights laws changed what was legal, but did not change the prejudiced human heart.
Jonah went to Nineveh to preach God’s message, not happily, but grudgingly, not hoping Nineveh would repent and be saved, but hoping they wouldn’t. Jonah’s message to the Ninevites is captured in five Hebrew words translated: Forty. Days. More. Nineveh’s. Toast.
Can’t you just picture Danny DeVito cast in the role of Jonah, waltzing through town delivering his message of judgment, barely able to disguise his glee at the prospect of coming destruction?
Jonah preaches his hellfire and brimstone sermon, and doesn’t wait for an altar call, not even one verse of “Just As I Am.” He lays the word on them, clears out of town, sits on a nearby hill, and waits for God’s fireworks to begin.
And what happens? The unforeseeable happens. Repentance happens. Much to Jonah’s dismay. All over the city of Nineveh, we see the miracle of “turning” – from the king to the cattle. Everyone – human and animal – puts on sackcloth and ashes.
And then that remarkable verse: When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God repented of the evil which he said he would do. God does not destroy them. God repents because they repent. God changes His mind because they change their hearts. It boggles our imaginations. God is not the Unmoved Mover of the philosophers, forever unchanging. The future is open, not fixed, not predetermined. What we do makes a difference – to God and in the world around us. God is not a God of the inevitable but the unforeseeable. And if God has something to do with it, it will be unforeseeably good.
But Jonah, like many religious people, is not happy when enemies repent and God shows mercy to them. So Jonah throws a fit: “I knew you would do it, You Softie. I’ve read the verse a hundred times: Yahweh is a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving our transgressions.”
Jonah is interested in God’s justice and mercy: God’s mercy for himself; God’s justice for others. He could have written the Psalm: I hate God’s enemies with a perfect hatred. And he would have added: “Why can’t God do as much?”
Anne Lamott quotes a priest friend who says, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
So Jonah sees God’s mercy to Nineveh and asks God to end his life. Jonah wants to write the end of his own story. But God has mercy in mind for Jonah too. God wants us to release the end of our story to the mercy of God, to give the end of everybody’s story to God. We are called to release all verdicts and all outcomes into better hands than ours. Maybe that’s what forgiveness finally is: letting go of all verdicts and outcomes, trusting all of it to God.
In the final scene of this remarkable story there is one more unforeseeable turn. Jonah sits there asking to die, and God “appoints” a green leafy shade plant to grow up and protect Jonah from the blistering Middle Eastern sun. For Jonah it was meant to be a sign of God’s grace. But
as the dawn came, Jonah just wants to die. So God who “appointed” the plant to grow, now “appointed” a worm to chew it, and in the muscular language of the King James Version, “it smote the gourd so that it withered.”
And Jonah exploded, cross-eyed with rage.
God asked him: “Do you do well to be angry?” (In other words: “Is your anger truly justified?
Jonah answered, “Do I do well?! I indeed do well. I’m so angry I could die.”
Then God asks one more question, the last words of the book: Jonah, you pity a little plant you did not make or tend or grow which perished in the night. Can I not feel pity for a city of one hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hands from their left, not to mention the animals?!
It’s the only book in the Bible that ends in a question. But the whole book asks us questions: When are you like Jonah? What is your Nineveh? Who is on your list of people that do not deserve God’s love? Where is your Tarshish? Can God not have mercy on his children wherever they are, whoever they are? Can God not have mercy even on you?
The hard and simple message of Jonah’s story is this: God wants to show mercy on your worst enemy, and God wants you to go and tell them the good news. How we respond may just save our souls and might just help heal our world.