Your Private Ninevah: A Reflection on the Book of Jonah

Today’s Old Testament reading comes from the book of Jonah. And since it’s such a short book and doesn’t come up often in the lectionary, I thought today would be a great time to give it some thought. As I read through the story again, what struck me was what this story tells us about vocation — not just the positive side, but the negative side too. When we talk about vocation, at least casually, we tend to merge it with our life’s passion: “I was just called to do this.” But, it turned out that Jonah’s vocation was the last thing he wanted to do, serving the last people he wanted to serve. And I think there are at least times in most of our lives when we might too be called in this way, maybe not to prophesy to our enemies, but nonetheless called to our very own private Ninevah, whatever that may be.

In wide strokes the story of Jonah goes like this: Jonah is a prophet of Israel’s God who is called to go to Nineveh, the capital city of their enemies the Assyrians, and tell them that God will destroy their city unless they repent. Jonah refuses to go, because he wants the Ninevites dead and doesn’t want God to give them the chance. So, he sails off to the far Western end of the Mediterranean Sea — that is, in the complete opposite direction from Nineveh — to escape, but God won’t let him off the hook. He is thrown into the sea during a storm and God sends a mysterious sea creature to swallow him up. But this is not Jonah’s end, for the creature was not sent as Jonah’s punishment, but as his salvation. On the third day, it spits Jonah up on to shore and the prophet agrees to carry out God’s mission. Of course, the Ninevites take Jonah’s message to heart and repent and God relents from destroying their city. But just when we think the story has had a happy ending, it ends with Jonah sulking about God’s mercy.

The last time this text came around in the lectionary, I mentioned that the story tells us two helpful things about vocation:

1. Vocation is persistent: if we are truly called to do something, it won’t be a passing whim or something we can easily ‘escape’; and 2) Vocation is directed at others and ourselves: God didn’t choose Jonah to deliver the message of grace to Nineveh because he was the best person for the job, but because Jonah needed to hear that message of grace to Nineveh as much as they did.

I’ve also previously written about about how we must acknowledge that the ways we are able to live out our vocations are often constrained by the messy realities of our lives, whether circumstantial or systemic. I think all this is right, but none of this quite touches on Jonah’s dilemma: that God was calling him to the last thing he wanted to do.

I think the key to understanding what’s happening here is to examine why it is Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh. It wasn’t because he had conflicting obligations at home. It wasn’t because he was opposed to long-distance travel — after all, he set sail for the opposite end of the known world. At the end of the day, Jonah didn’t want to accept God’s call to go to Nineveh because he wanted the Ninevites to die. He did not want God to show mercy to people he could no longer see as human but only as his enemies. To put it bluntly: Jonah was not opposed to pursuing his vocation; Jonah was opposed to God being God.

While thankfully few of us will ever have an experience of vocation quite as dramatic as Jonah’s, his is a lesson we would do well to take to heart. What we are called to do, whether in big life ways, or in the ‘vocation of right now’, won’t always (or maybe even often) be easy or ‘fun’. If we find ourselves feeling resistant to what we know God is calling us to do, we have to ask ourselves why — openly, honestly, and unflinchingly.

Whenever I think about this story, I can’t help but think of an experience I had when I was in my early twenties. I was involved in a young adults ministry that had groups all over North America. When we put on our first event, a group from New Jersey came to see what it was about. They then also invited us to go down to help them put on their first event. But their group was proudly LGBTQ+ friendly, and I was not yet at a place in my life where I wanted anything to do with that. And, because that obviously touched on my own life, I was doubly concerned about going, for at the time I understood resisting my homosexuality to be an essential part of my Christian vocation. When I voiced my disinclination towards going, a friend looked at me, disappointed, and called me ‘Jonah’ for not wanting to serve people and alongside people I didn’t ‘agree with’. I haven’t thought much about that decision not to go over the years (and my lack of any bad feelings about not going even now makes me think it was not a genuine calling), but I do remember that accusation. And it’s made me think a lot harder in the decades since about ministry opportunities presented to me. My resistance then was far more about my need for self-protection than dislike of them, but that’s hardly any better. And who knows what might have happened, for good or bad, had I gone. Maybe I would have, from behind my self-protective walls, made an ass of myself and said something unnecessary and unkind. Or maybe, something would have happened to make those walls crumble a decade before they did (though those walls were so high and so thick in those days, I doubt it!). I have no way of knowing, and that decade contained some of the most beautiful and important moments of my life, so I can’t say I regret it. That’s not the point. The point is, that kind of spiritual self-protection is not a healthy place from which to operate. I may not have been Jonah, but who I was in that moment wasn’t any better.

Life is always going to throw curveballs at us. And that includes the life of faith. What faithfulness looks like — what it means for us to ‘show up’ for God and for others — is often going to challenge us. And that includes going places, doing things, and serving people we’d prefer not to. But when we’re in that position, we should ask ourselves why we’re feeling that resistance and what God might be trying to teach us through the opportunity before us.

May we all have ears to hear. May we never run away like Jonah. May we never sulk because God is more loving than we are like Jonah. And may we never hide behind walls of self-protection like me all those years ago. May we instead have the heart of Isaiah, who in response to a challenging vocation said, “Here I am; send me.”