Hilton Head Island, SC – September 8, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Jonah 1:17-2:10
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “I called to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and thou didst hear my voice.” – Jonah 2:2 (RSV)
Being a biblical scholar has its rewards. You can make all kinds of claims which may or may not be accurate, but which no ordinary person is likely ever to try to refute.
Last week I reported that scholars say the prophecy of Jonah was written by someone in the 3rd century BCE, at the time when the Syrian Seleucids were the rulers of Judah. They insist this four-chapter book was not composed by the 7th century BCE prophet named Jonah who is mentioned in part of one verse in II Kings (14:25). This week I will tell you that the scholars also say the poem in the second chapter of Jonah may have been written by someone else at another unspecified time. They further speculate it has nothing to do with Jonah being in the belly of -- as it says in Jonah 1:17 – “a great fish.” However, everybody who is anybody knows it was a whale. A “great fish” indeed! Jonah is in fact a whale of a tale, and the only part most people remember about Jonah is that he was swallowed by a whale.
So did it really happen that way, or didn’t it? To answer, I turn to a wily character named Sportin’ Life in George and Ira Gershwin’s classic folk opera, Porgy and Bess. Sportin’ Life begins his song with the ever-memorable lyric, “It ain’t necessarily so, It ain’t necessarily so/ De things dat yo’ liable to read in de Bible/ It ain’t necessarily so.”
One of the biblical stories about whose veracity Sportin’ Life has doubts is Jonah and the whale. “Oh Jonah he lived in de whale/ Oh Jonah he lived in de whale/ For he made his home in dat fish’s abdomen/ It ain’t necessarily so.”
I agree with Sportin’ Life. It’s OK to believe Jonah was swallowed by either a great fish or a whale, but it is not necessary to believe it in order to understand the point of this story. And it is just that: a story. This whole little prophecy was never meant to be taken literally, although many Christians think it must be taken literally, as must every other word in the Bible, if it is to have any validity at all. They also believe the world was created in just six days, and Moses made the waters of the Red Sea part, and Jesus talked to the devil in the Judean Desert. It’s OK to believe that, but from the standpoint of the Rev. Dr. Sportin’ Life, Ph.d., Philosophical Dabbler, and others, such as I, for instance, you are not required to accept as factual those stories, because they ain’t necessarily so.
Through the years I have read articles of serious people trying to argue seriously that Jonah could actually have been swallowed by a whale, and that he could have survived for three days and three nights in the great mammal’s (not fish’s) innards. To this I say: Oh, for heaven’s sake! The story line of the prophecy of Jonah was never meant to be taken literally! In Jack and the Beanstalk, was there a giant, or a beanstalk, or a boy named Jack? Little kids hearing the story know that it’s a story! And 3rd century Jews, hearing the story of Jonah, recognized instantly that it was a story, not a factual account of a man who lived for 72 hours inside a large sea beast. Only gullible and slow-on-the-uptake 19th, 20th, or 21st century Christians would ever try to delude themselves that the events told about in these four short chapters actually happened. De things dat yo’ liable to read in de Bible, it ain’t necessarily so --- nor was it ever intended to be “so.”
Jonah 2, verses 2-9, are a lament which somebody wrote sometime about something, but almost certainly it wasn’t about a hapless traveler ending up in a whale’s alimentary tract. Instead, this short poem is about how all of us botch things up, and then assume God will punish us for it. Then we start to wonder how we’ll ever get out of the messes that we ourselves create. When we figuratively are in the belly of the beast, it seems like we are goners for sure. But we’re not, because God is God, and He rescues us, even when it was we who badly botched things.
“I called to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and thou didst hear my voice” (2:2). The ancient Jews didn’t believe in hell, at least as we understand hell. But they did believe in a place, or more correctly a state of being, which they called Sheol. In English Sheol translates as “the Pit.” It was like the ancient Greek notion of Hades. Nobody was punished in either Sheol or Hades, exactly; people just went there either before or after death to experience a kind of shadowy existence apart from God. Being separated from God is hell enough, without being cast into a fiery pit for eternity.
And why did Jonah end up in Sheol, or in a whale? He did so because he refused to do what God wanted of him. God wanted him to go to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrians, and tell the people that God was angry with them. But Jonah wouldn’t do it. He didn’t approve of Gntiles, particularly Assyrian Gentiles. So, according to the story, not history but his story, Jonah ended up in the sea and he got ingested by a passing cetacean, perhaps a giant porpoise or a right whale from the coast of South Carolina which got very lost and ended up in the Eastern Mediterranean. It’s just a story, folks; a story. Don’t get bogged down in the details.
We all do what Jonah did. We deliberately do things we know we shouldn’t do. Then, when we realize we’re going to have to pay the price of our folly, we assume it is God who is punishing us for our misdeeds. “For thou didst cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood was round about me; all thy waves and thy billows passed over me” (2:3).
Have you ever been “in over your head”? Have you ever “gone off the deep end”? When it happened, was it because someone else caused your problem and therefore chucked you in, or was it because you yourself did something foolish or stupid or thoughtless? We feel the worst about bad decisions when we are the ones who make them! Jonah tried to flee from God, and sometimes we do that too. But attempting to flee from the corrections of the Almighty One of Israel does not illustrate an overabundance of sound judgment. Quite the opposite, it is as dumb as dirt. But we all do it anyway, some more often than others, but everyone sometimes.
“Then I said, ‘I am cast out from thy presence; how shall I again look upon thy holy temple?’” (2:4) When we have really pulled a boner, when we have badly hurt someone or done something very foolish, how can we ever look God in the eye again? When everybody knows we made a mess of things, because it was such a public mess, if that’s what it was, how can we ever face the world again, let alone God? When such a horrible thing has happened, have you ever wished the earth would open and swallow you up? Is there anyone here who hasn’t felt that way?
“The waters closed in over me, the deep was round about me; weeds were wrapped about me at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet thou didst bring up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God” (2:5-6) As bad as it gets, and crushing and demeaning and terrible as it is, God rescues us! We don’t remain in the belly of the beast (our disgust over ourselves or depression over our circumstances) forever!
“When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord; and my prayer came to thee, into thy holy temple” (2:7). When things seem to be their worst, and we are painfully confronted by the folly of our own deeds, if we cry out to God, He hears us, and answers us, and consoles us, and restores us.
What a magnificent expression of hope and faith is this little gem of a biblical book that’s so easy to overlook! Is there anyone living who cannot identify with poor old Jonah, who made such a bad mistake, and paid the price for it, and yet perceived the grace of God in the very heart of his foolish behavior? There is no one who can escape the perpetual grace of God; not anyone; none! No matter what we may have done which may have assaulted our moral sensibilities or our consciences for all these years, God will come after us. And He will do that especially when we think that the depths into which we plunged were the result of His wrath, rather than our own misbegotten decisions. A guilty conscience is a terrible burden to bear; perhaps it is the worst weight of all. But Jonah (or whoever wrote the prophecy of Jonah and this powerful and glorious lament) found out that in the greatest depths of his depression, God came to get him and to rescue him from the foolhardy --- and impossible --- decision he had made of trying to flee from God.
Moby Dick is one of the greatest, most challenging, and most enigmatic novels ever written. It was Herman Melville’s masterpiece, and it certainly is one of the finest pieces of extended fiction in American literature. If you remember the novel, or the movie, you may recall the Anglican priest Father Mapple preaching to the sailors before they are about to go out to sea in their dangerous pursuit of whales. As his text Father Mapple chooses the book of Jonah. And this is what he says about it: “Shipmates, this book, containing only four chapters – four yarns – is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul Jonah’s deep sealine sound! What a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What a noble thing is this canticle in the fish’s belly!”
In the midst of writing this sermon, Father Mapple’s sermon began to trickle back across my memory. So I went to find my copy of Moby Dick - - - and it was not there! Not anywhere! In preparation for our move I disposed of a few hundred books, and did I cast out Melville’s masterpiece by mistake? Not until now was I truly convinced of the magnificence of the Internet, and Google, and those voracious, omniscient search engines. I typed in “The Sermon in Moby Dick,” and instantly, in less than a second, there it was! How did it know exactly what I wanted? And how did it know it so quickly? Never again shall I question the validity of cybernetic searches; they are one of the truly great leaps forward for the human race.
Father Mapple was right, but I had almost forgotten the essence of what he said. In fact, were it not for Google, I would not have known what he said, because my copy of Moby Dick is only heaven knows where. For the men about to go out with Captain Ahab on the Pequod in search of the great white whale, hearing the story of Jonah could not have been more appropriate.
“But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to thee; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” (2:9) When we are really up against it, and we know it, and we know there is no way for us to get out of the jam into which we have cast ourselves, there is only one means of escape. Deliverance belongs to the Lord. It is God who will extricate us, God who will free us, God who will grant us the liberation we so desire, but also we fear it will never be forthcoming.
Jonah is a fictional account, a literary life created out of whole cloth by an unknown but very perceptive author. He wanted to convey to us three things: how we all make big mistakes, how one of those mistakes is to think ill of peoples and cultures quite different from us and our own culture, and how God will forgive us for those deficiencies, if we will but allow Him to do so. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. God can lead everyone to start over after we have made a mess of things, but even He can’t force us to do it. Only we are capable of taking the step that propels us beyond our “Slough of Despond,” as John Bunyan described it in Pilgrim’s Progress.
Gilead is Marilyn Robinson’s excellent novel about a small town in Iowa called Gilead. It is particularly about a minister, and his father, who also was a minister, and about the adult children of the minister. The two ministers, father and son, did not see eye to eye with one another theologically, and there were strong disagreements between them over something the older man had done during the tense times of Bleeding Kansas prior to the Civil War. The narrator in the story is the younger minister’s daughter, who comes home to Gilead to care for her father when he is in ill health, which led ultimately to his death.
The daughter observes, “I was predisposed to believe that my grandfather had done something pretty terrible and my father was concealing the evidence and I was in on the secret too – implicated without knowing what I was implicated in. Well, that’s the human condition, I suppose…. It has been my experience that guilt can burst through the smallest breach and cover the landscape, and abide in it in pools and dankness, just as native as water” (Gilead, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pps. 81-82).
We can feel drowned or smothered by guilt over something we or others did, and we may feel imprisoned in the morasses which we create for ourselves because of that guilt. But God will not allow us to wallow in the depths for too long. He will come to rescue us. “But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to thee; what I have vowed I will pay. Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” (Jonah 2:9)
Never forget it. To realize that God wants to rescue us is the necessary key to being rescued.