Christ points to Himself and says, “ I will give you no sign but the Sign of Jonah”. What did He mean?
Like the other seminal histories of the Old Testament, the story of Jonah is archetypical: it is repeated like a musical refrain and then woven into the climax- which is Christ. Jonah’s story, though, has some elements in it that are difficult to understand. Why does Jonah fear to go to Nineveh, more than he fears God, and yet called a prophet, a wise man? What true wise man would fear men more than God? Does this not make him a fool rather than wise? Second, why does Jonah preach and then wish to see the destruction of the city? Why does he sit in sulks outside the repentant city and even reject the tender advances of God? Most interpretations of the Christo-sign of Jonah are that He was to be in the belly of a whale, or of death for three days and then appear again to bring people to repentance, but perhaps there is more to it, more which has to do with our Elder Brothers and the coming of the Lord.
On the highest holy day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, the Book of Jonah is read in synagogues all over the world. Why?
The Jewish emphasis on the Book of Jonah has to do with Returning- a people of sin simply returning to God and receiving mercy. Before Jonah came to Nineveh, the Ninevites(Assyrians) had destroyed the kingdom of Israel and led the ten tribes into slavery. To an Israelite prophet like Jonah, Nineveh’s sin was bound up inextricably with the destruction it had wreaked upon the Children of God. One could surmise that Jonah’s reluctance to go to Nineveh is this undercurrent of suspicion that his was an errand of mercy, like the servant who announces to the father that the prodigal son is coming up the road. Perhaps Jonah knew of God’s love and its seeming folly; like the elder brother in the story of the prodigal son, he wanted to know why these Ninevites would even be deserving of his preaching and attempt at encouraging repentance, when the Ninevites had laid waste the possessions of the Father, namely the kingdom of the ten tribes of Israel?
So, perhaps Jonah sailed away partly because of fear of the Ninevites and partly because this mission made him angry and confused: how could God even allow them a chance at repentance and conversion? In this act of rebellion, Jonah was acting as just Jonah; for in as much as a prophet is acting as the mouth of God, he is acting as a sort of vehicle of God and stands for Him in a mysterious way. One can think of Moses holding up his arm to ensure victory for the Israelites- it was God’s power in the arm of His prophet. Therefore, when Jonah was not obeying God, he was not allowing God to use him as a mouth to preach to the Ninevites, he had retreated back into himself. When Jonah sees the tempest and the frightened sailors and turns, he again becomes God’s willing tool. He lays his life down for the sailors, because he understands enough of God’s power and wrath to know that none will escape. At the moment he allows himself to be thrown to the waves, he is carried by grace to Ninevah. Jonah as prophet of the Lord, becomes fervent once more, in the service of the Lord, in preaching the coming of the Lord. In what mode did he preach? Was it wrath or love? Did Jonah even understand what God was saying through his mouth? If he did, the results at least seemed unexpected to Jonah as Jonah. The people Returned. They repented, returned to God in their hearts, forsaking what they knew to be evil. And God spared them. That was all.
Jonah, no longer as prophet, but as Jonah, retreated into the desert, not flushed with joy at God’s victory of love, but flushed with anger and confusion. He sat in the burning sun, joining in its fiery fury. He could not understand why, why, hadn’t God punished the destroyers of Israel? Why, with no conversion to the Law, no understanding of the Lord’s proscriptions for sacrifice, were they forgiven? Where was God?
In one of the most beautiful moments in all of the Old Testament, a leafy green plant grows up beside Jonah, shading him from the burning sun, a divine and gentle acknowledgement of the anger and confusion of the creature, a supremely Fatherly act, an entreaty to trust without understanding.
On Yom Kippur, the highest holy day of the Jewish year, they read about Returning, a reminder of the simplicity of God’s mercy, and perhaps the mystery of His ways with the wayward. Perhaps there is also a suggestion of a warning about the pride of the Israelites, a reminder of a humbled nation, humbled all the further because its enemies are forgiven without the necessity of conversion to the Hebrew faith. One Jewish scholar writes,
“This conception of return has been and is at the very heart of Judaism, and it is for this very sake of this idea that Jonah is always read on the highest holy day of the year. But the theology of Paul in the New Testament is founded on the implicit denial of this doctrine, and so are the Roman Catholic and the Greek Orthodox churches, Lutheranism and Calvinism. Paul’s elaborate argument concerning the impossibility of salvation under the Torah (the Law) and for the necessity of Christ’s redemptive death presuppose that God cannot simply forgive anyone who returns. If the doctrine of return is true, Paul’s theology collapses and “Christ died in vain”….Man stands in a direct relationship to God and requires no mediator.
The writer makes a false dichotomy: that of salvation, of Return, opposed to the necessity of any kind of conversion or sacrifice. For Paul confirms the book of Jonah, the real lesson that God can and does Himself becomes the Law, fulfills it in order to become a bridge for the Gentiles, that it is conversion to a Being, not a written law. The law only provides a way to love and know God.
What Jonah did not understand was that, as Abraham said to Isaac, “The Lord will provide the lamb for the sacrifice.” What Jonah could not understand was that God Himself would take on the punishment for the Ninevites, for all, and so justice would indeed be fulfilled. Rather than, “Man stands in a direct relationship with God and requires no mediator”, the Church says, “ Man stands helplessly sinful before God and requires Him as mediator.”
One can see the incompleteness of Jewish thought since the turning away from Christ, in that the very Book of Jonah places them in a seemingly impossible quandary: in the story of the Ninevites, it seems to human understanding, either mercy must be set aside or justice must be truncated. Jonah was no fool, he was a wise man beloved by God, but he could not, as Jonah, solve the Riddle of the Return of the Ninevites, the forgiveness without explicit conversion to God’s Law as expressed to Moses. This may be the sign of Jonah that Our Lord spoke of: the Riddle which only God in His own person could solve. For Christ is Mercy and Justice in one person, for He is God. The hearers of the Book of Jonah will not understand Jonah until they understand who Christ is. He is The Mediator, as He was the mediator in the person of Jonah and so Jonah was a Messainic pre-figure. Jonah is all the more important to the Jew’s eventual true understanding because he was a mediator for the Gentiles, in the Ninevites.
An interesting footnote is the visit of Pope John Paul II to the synagogue of Rome, and his calling the Jewish “Our Elder Brothers in the Faith”. Perhaps unbeknownst to the Holy Father, the leaders of the synagogue were perturbed by this acclamation, because in both the Old and New Testaments, the elder brother is usually the rightful heir who is often portrayed as resentful of the usurpation by the younger: Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, Ishmael and Isaac, the elder brother of the parable of the prodigal son. Jonah, too, can be seen as a kind of elder brother, resentful of the forgiven Ninevites, whom he helped to repent. Knowingly or not, perhaps Pope John Paul II was speaking a prophetic word, acting as a Jonah himself to the Jews, in reminding them by being Jonah, as Christ spoke of “Being the sign of Jonah”- he reminded them that the Law does not save them, that only God can fulfill the conditions for a just and merciful Return. Only God can provide the proper Lamb: and He has. One thinks of the Pope, in the white of the sacrificial Lamb, walking toward the synagogue, with his hands outstretched in that characteristic way of symbolled love; and one thinks of the Good Shepherd, the Sign of Jonah, searching for every lamb, Jew and Gentile.
