God calls us to be prophets, or in the more intimate language of the gospels, Jesus calls us to be his disciples. What is our response? What kind of prophet, what sort of disciple do we want to be and more importantly are prepared to become?

The OT reading for Epiphany 3 offers a brief extract from the book of Jonah. On its own the reading is somewhat opaque – jumping into the story almost at the end. In it we learn that Jonah is being addressed by the word of the Lord for the second time with the same request which Jonah continues to argue with God about.

The story of Jonah is well-known. This short book of four chapters is read by Jews every year on the afternoon of Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement. The drama of the morning liturgy with its solemn chant of the Kol Nidre, the prayer of atonement – is past and the expanse of the afternoon opens before the fasting penitents whose hunger and thirst only increase as the day draws on. Reading Jonah reminds them of the fruitlessness of any attempt to evade the examination of unpalatable truths of one’s life through the lens of the last 12 months.

The story of Jonah and the whale is one of the more well-known bible stories among Christians and has risen in our collective memory to the level of a universal folk fable. Wikipedia describes a fable as a literary genre – a succinct fictional story, that features animals, legendary creatures, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature that are given human traits, emotions and intentions to illustrate or lead to a particular moral lesson. Therefore, in the days of my childhood when we were all taught bible stories – the story of Jonah exercised a special power over children’s imaginations. We all understood implicitly that if we were not good, we too might be swallowed up by a whale. The more enquiring among us came to understand the whale as a symbol for all kinds of other rather icky things that might befall the badly behaved.

Technically, the writer of a fable is known as a fabulist. I note that in our modern disenchanted times the term fabulist carries a derogatory implication – for a fabulist is someone who makes things up and therefore is not to be trusted. In today’s world, have we not all become the unwilling but more often unwitting victims of the fabulist’s art?

The story of Jonah is of a man who receives a request from God to speak truth to power – to call the capital of the greatest Empire the world to that date had known to repent. The gist of the story is his attempt to evade the divine request before finally being cornered into complying though a conspiracy of tempestuous elements and a creature from the fishy deep. In his attempt to escape God, Jonah son of Amittai– incidentally whose name means dove-son-of-truth – boards a ship to take him in the opposite direction from the one God wishes him to take.

Of course, there’s no escape from divine writ and Jonah’s ship becomes imperiled by a violent storm. Jonah sleeps through the storm – I mean who does that? – making the sailors even more irate at him for they blame Jonah for the storm and toss him overboard to supplicate the divine wrath. Jonah is rescued – swallowed up by a passing whale. After three days of severe indigestion the whale spews Jonah up on the shore of the land God had originally directed Jonah to travel to.

Pissed-off doesn’t do justice to Jonah’s feelings about being thwarted by divine conspiracy and so begrudgingly he trudges off in the direction of the great city of Nineveh –and finally does as God desires of him – to speak the truth to power and bring about a change through repentance. Jonah’s mood is hardly improved when he discovers that the Ninevites not only hear him, but from the greatest to the least don sackcloth and repent – thus averting God’s lust for destruction. Mission accomplished – so you might expect Jonah to be relieved and pleased. But not a bit of it.

Nineveh is one of those place names that carries huge symbolic significance in Jewish history. The book of Jonah purports to be set in an earlier century when the Assyrian Empire and its great city of Nineveh was at its height. Nineveh’s symbolism lies in later scholars looking back on the events of the 8^th-century when in  721 the Assyrian armies swept down and destroyed the Northern kingdom of Israel – wiping it not only from the map but also from the pages of history.

Rather than its 8^th-century setting, the fable of Jonah belongs in 6^th-century after the return of the Exiles from Babylon. Jonah is a story addressing the exilic community as it struggled to rebuild Jerusalem where apart from the difficulties posed in the physical reconstruction the burning issue concerned intermarriage of Jews with others of more dubious mixed-race heritage.

Knowing this context helps answer the double question: why did God dispatch Jonah, an Israelite prophet – to the non-Israelite Assyrians of Nineveh- and why was Jonah so unhappy with the successful outcome of his preaching?

From the outset, Jonah questions God’s intention to show mercy to non-Israelites. In his actions he shows the extent of his opposition to the project. When finally cornered by God he complies, but with bad grace. Fully expecting the Ninevites to reject his message to repent and prove him right with God, his very success – in his own eyes – calls his credibility as a prophet into question. He seems more concerned with his wounded credibility than that thousands of lives have been saved by God’s mercy because of him. Finally unable to argue with God further he sulks and pouts – telling God if that’s the way God want things then he would rather die than live with what is for him a contradiction – that the Lord God of Israel should extend his mercy to those outside the chosen race. The book ends with God decrying Jonah’s self-centered pettiness.

The issue of intermarriage in the post-exilic community is of burning significance. In the writings of this period, we have the book of Ezra in which Jews who had intermarried with foreigners are commanded to reject their wives and mixed-race children and return to the Lord – while in the book of Jonah God’s intention to include all races within his plan for salvation could not be clearer. However, the central issue at the heart of internal post-exilic discord is less about the dilution of Jewishness – though this is undoubtedly a concern. The main issue is theological and concerns the promise of salvation. Is God’s promise of salvation a universal promise inclusive of all nations or not?

Subsequent Rabbinic interpretation of the book of Jonah has gone back and forth on the theological issue. Some Rabbis argued that Jonah shows God’s clear and unequivocal intention to invite all of humanity into the plan of salvation hitherto declared only to Israel.  Others have argued that God only saved the Ninevites so that Assyria could be the instrument to fulfil God’s plan to punish Israel for its sins by wiping it off the map and out of history. At the end of the day – through its prescribed reading on the Day of Atonement – Jewish practice firmly established the message of Jonah as a rebuke to self-centeredness – personal and racial.

Following Jewish practice – we cannot find meaning or peace without an honest examination of how we, individually and communally, participate in attitudes and actions that seek to limit the extent of God’s mercy, compassion, and generosity to my or our tribe, my or our community, mercy offered only to those like me or us.

The Lectionary in placing a reading from Jonah alongside Mark’s depiction of Jesus calling his first disciples presents us with an uncomfortable challenge. God is not only more generous and loving – more than we might care for God to be -towards others who are different from us. As God expected Jonah to be a divine agent – in the call to discipleship Jesus expects us to be agents, voices, hands, and feet in the work of proclaiming the divine call for universal inclusion. Placing the two readings side-by-side reveals another striking comparison. Jonah thought he could qualify God’s desire for mercy – and when that failed he thought he could evade God’s call. The men who drop everything in response to Jesus’ call had no preconceived notion of what they were letting themselves in for – they simply felt compelled to respond.

God calls us to be prophets, or in the more intimate language of the gospels, Jesus calls us to be his disciples. What is our response – and more crucially – what sort of prophet, what kind of disciple are we prepared to become?

Notes on Nineveh

Philip Jenkins in a 2014 feature appearing in The Christian Century notes the ancient Christian history of the Middle east has become agonizingly relevant. Cities central to that history appear in headlines in the context of fanaticism and mass destruction. The State Department’s maps of the latest atrocities coincide with the most vulnerable landscapes of Eastern Christianity. Jenkins is writing about the fall of Iraq’s second city Mosul to the forces of the ISIS caliphate.

From Apostolic times Mosul remained a great center of Eastern Christianity. The ancient Christian culture of the Middle East thrived – surviving Persian, Arab and Ottoman conquest. During the First World War the Ottomans inflicted an Armenian-style genocide on Christian Mosul – leaving the city subjected to increasing attack and infiltration by the Kurds. The most recent chapter in the history of Mosul concerns its conquest by ISIS and reconquest by the Iraqi army so that today Mosul – ancient Nineveh is a largely Kurdish city with a sizable Arab minority. The once strong Christian community has largely fled – mostly to North America – where the patriarch of the Syrian Orthodox Church now reside in Chicago.