Jonah 3: 1-10; Mark 1: 14-20
The story of Jonah is a joke. But biblical scholars have only recently gotten the joke. At last we have permission to laugh at the outlandish manner in which God dispatches a giant fish to save Jonah from drowning. When the fish swallows Jonah and three days later regurgitates him onto dry land, we can smile at the comedic plot. When the word plays in the original Hebrew are explained, we can appreciate the humor all the more.[i]
This fable begins when God calls an understandably reluctant Jonah to travel to the city of Nineveh and urge the people to forsake their violent ways. Afraid of or apathetic toward the citizens of a foreign land, Jonah instead books passage on a ship heading in the opposite direction. A storm at sea threatens to capsize the vessel, so Jonah assumes God is punishing him for his disobedience. But the storm stirs up some concern for others at last in Jonah’s heart, so he tells the sailors to toss him overboard if they want to save themselves. They do and watch as a fish seems to devour Jonah. It turns out, however, that God had sent the fish to harbor Jonah in its belly until the runaway prophet can be deposited on land, slimy and smelly but safe.
That’s the most familiar part of the Jonah story. Today’s reading picks up the plot as God gives Jonah and the citizens of Nineveh a second chance to do the right thing. Having learned his lesson, Jonah travels to Nineveh, where he convinces the King to order ALL creatures, human and animal, to fast and wear sack cloth, signs of contrition. Picture that: every dog and donkey, every mouse and sheep refusing food and costumed in sack cloth, so sorry are they for their sins. Nineveh is spared God’s wrath—thanks, in part, to repentant rodents and shamed sheep. This is delightful material for an animated cartoon.
But is it Holy Writ? Once we appreciate the story’s humor, are we stuck with fanciful silliness—or can we go on to appreciate themes of God’s persistent mercy (even though it competes with the idea of a wrathful deity)? Can we still recognize God’s call to cross geographical and cultural boundaries to care about those we’ve labeled the enemy? Maybe laughter itself is a way to break down our own defenses, let down our guard at the walls of prejudices, and see in Jonah a pre-Jesus figure carrying God’s love across borders of human construction.
I assure you, though my plot summary may seem irreverent, my intention is not to ridicule the Bible but to rescue it. I’ll begin by naming three ways the book of Jonah and the totality of the Bible are generally read.
1) You can read a story about Jonah and the whale and conclude the Bible chronicles preposterous events that only the superstitious and gullible can believe. Therefore, you discard the Bible.
2) You can read a story about Jonah and the whale and conclude that God dictated the Bible verbatim to humans so that every word is literally and factually and quite seriously true. Which means the world is often irrational, and impossible events do happen through God’s magic, er, miracles. Therefore, you discard the use of rational thought in important areas of your life.
3) You can read a story about Jonah and the whale and conclude that the Bible contains many forms of literature written by fallible human beings with diverse perspectives reflecting evolving theologies from various times and places. Therefore, you discard naive expectations that the Bible dropped from Heaven in its present form, and you no longer read it as if it’s a road map or science textbook or history of the world or a newspaper.
But if you choose option 3 and refuse to use the Bible as a simplistic roadmap, can scripture remain revelatory for you? Can you use the Bible to get your ethical bearings and open you to the Spirit’s guidance? Can archaic words and world views mean anything for your life?
Of course, Literalists (option 2) learn whom to vote for in the presidential election by reading the Bible. Literalists lift out a Bible verse here and there and conclude that Alabama House Bill 56 is “Christian.” I’m not so confident of their exegetical methods.
I hope the Rev. Rusty Johnson won’t mind if I use his recent editorial in the Press-Register to illustrate the difference between taking the Bible literally and taking the Bible seriously. You may recall that 2 weeks ago the pastor of Lighthouse of Hope Holiness Church criticized many clergy in our state for trying to make the legal issue of immigration into a moral one[ii] (“Morality vs. Immigration,” 8 January 2012, Mobile Press-Register). I respectfully insist immigration IS a moral issue.
He and I differ partly because we have different understandings about the plight of immigrants and our moral responsibilities to people in need, to specific laws, and to the predominant culture. For instance, I assume that desperate parents who illegally cross a border to feed their children are more like refugees than criminals. Many who need jobs available in the U.S. cannot spend many years and much money on the remote chance of eventually cutting through the inscrutable red tape and randomness that is the current process for legal entry for some into our country. In all times and places, people have illegally crossed borders to save their lives, have nonviolently transgressed unjust laws.
Further, it is a myth that these undocumented workers are “taking” jobs and treasure from our state’s economy. Nor is our way of life threatened by these neighbors who contribute not only to the economy but also to a richer culture.
I also question the logic of Rev. Johnson’s editorial. For instance, he creates a slippery slope fallacy by suggesting that failure to deport illegal immigrants would require us to likewise “grant amnesty and pardon to all criminals in our prison system.”
However, Rev. Johnson and I should probably leave legal and political arguments to others. He and I differ mainly and most interestingly because we as Christian ministers make different assumptions about the Bible and use very different strategies to interpret it.
I think much of the Bible describes human behavior; Rev Johnson seems to assume the Bible always prescribes human behavior. I think the Bible records evolving understandings of God; Rev. Johnson implies there is one consistent biblical portrait of God. I love the layers of metaphorical language; Rev. Johnson reads scripture literally—or at least with selective literalism. I try to remember that my culture differs significantly from that of the biblical writers and try to discover what the biblical writers’ circumstances, literary conventions, and purposes might have been; Rev. Johnson seems to begin with assumptions he brings from his own culture that he then imposes upon his reading of the ancient biblical text.
The average church-going Alabamian probably reads the Bible as Rev. Johnson does. But there are other Christians who take the Bible too seriously to read it literally. It is because people of faith can read the Bible in different ways that we sometimes reach very different conclusions about social issues—like immigration (or homosexuality or economic policy, etc.)
I’m going to use Rev. Johnson’s editorial to document just one major difference between our approaches to scripture. While Rev. Johnson searches for isolated “prooftexts,” I read for overarching themes. He introduces his prooftexting by saying “God issued . . . strict immigration laws. . . . Permit me to cite specific passages from the Bible that support this assertion.” Let’s see if he does that.
First, Rev. Johnson had to skip over verses like Leviticus 19: 33-34, which seems the biblical passage most applicable to the topic of immigration. It reads:
“When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
He skips over that command in order to cherry pick Deuteronomy 7: 1-4, which seems unrelated to the issue of immigrations. Never quoting the words of the passage in his article, he assures his readers it teaches us to have tough immigration laws. Tough indeed. These verses endorse genocide. And Rev. Johnson completely misunderstands the context. The children of Israel were the “immigrants” who moved into a foreign land. No, even that interpretation is not accurate. The children of Israel were—according to the biblical story, though not according to recent archaeological findings—invaders who slaughtered the previous inhabitants of Canaan. Rev. Johnson has the roles reversed. Listen to the passage he references to support strict immigration law. Who is immigrating/invading in this scenario?
“When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you— 2 and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, 4 for they will turn your children away from following me to serve other gods, and the LORD’s anger will burn against you and will quickly destroy you.”
I am horrified to think this isolated text would ever be invoked to direct any action.
I find it telling that another scripture Rev. Johnson uses to support his “tough on crime” stance in support of Alabama’s new immigration law—also, in my opinion, wrenched from context—is another violent verse. It’s the only time Rev. Johnson mentions Jesus. And that happens to be the only time the Bible describes Jesus using anything approaching physical force—to run the money changers from the Temple. Had we time, I would interpret that passage to show that Jesus is protecting the peasants--who were NOT Roman citizens--from an exploitative economic system. I would interrogate the connection between this passage and the immigration issue. But for now I simply acknowledge that it’s possible to isolate and twist biblical examples of human violence and divine wrath to justify meanness. Our choices of verses can reveal more about ourselves than about God.
Rather than isolating verses, I would hope we can notice the contexts of verses and look for overarching themes when we read the Bible and connect it to today's issues. One troubling but recurring biblical theme is, unfortunately, tribalism. But stronger still are biblical themes of God’s mercy and compassion, God’s extravagant welcome, Jesus’s radical hospitality, and St. Paul’s inclusion of the Gentiles. The Bible critiques itself in places. But we won’t appreciate these internal corrections if we cherry pick the verses to support a conclusion we’ve already reached.
The Bible’s primary theme of God’s compassion and its roots in ancient Near East values of hospitality lead me to condemn Alabama’s current immigration law. The Bible does not provide a blue print for immigration law, but I believe—though you are capable of drawing your own conclusions—that HB56 runs counter to Jesus’s radical example of crossing borders of culture, region and religion in order to bless, to heal, and to help “the least of these.” I believe it’s important we not simply read the Bible, but that we allow the Bible to read us.
“Heed my words,” God told Jonah, and you’ll be used to save people from their violent ways. “Follow me," Jesus told the first disciples, “and you’ll be used to catch people in a saving Gospel net that brings them back to the land of human beings.” “Hear these saving words,” the Bible calls to us, “because they offer truth and not simply facts.
The Bible itself is, I believe, a liminal place of depth and mystery that just won’t fit our neat categories or conform to the boundaries in which we want to enclose it. The Bible is an inbetween land where I find myself moving from fact into deeper truth, where I catch glimpses of the Sacred I can’t quite hold and name. I enter the Bible as a stranger in foreign territory—but I meet myself along the way. In this unbounded world I lose my bearings, my surety, my firm footing, but I leave its pages saying, in the words of our first hymn “Awe. . . Woe. . . Save. . . Grace. . . Thanks. . . Love. . . Joy. . . Home.” And yes, even in this inbetween realm I can say “Home.” Oh, I sometimes read the Bible in ways that keep me on the surface of its waters. But just when I think I am merely digesting information—the Bible swallows me whole, and down I go, submerged in deeper and messier realities that are truths of a different dimension.
Thanks be to God.
[i] For a discussion of the puns in the original Hebrew and additional analysis of Jonah as comedy, see Whedbee, J. William. “Jonah and the Joke” in
The Bible and the Comic Vision. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002.
[ii] Johnson, Rusty. “Morality vs. Immigration: It is Not Un-Christian to Deport Illegal Trespassers” Mobile
Press-Register (8 January 2012) 14A.
