Yonah resists being God’s messenger. There is something about the message that Yonah can’t handle, and he tells us what it is at the end of the story:
“O Lord! Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that You are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, renouncing punishment (4.2).”
What Yonah resists is God’s compassion and love, His tendency to love people, even the evil Ninevites, so much that He changes His mind about destroying them. Yonah knows that this attribute is the essence of God, and Yonah wants no part of this love.
So Yonah runs away. He gets on a ship to a faraway country, hides out in the bowels of the ship and goes to sleep. He has other ways of escaping, too, like the suicidal urge that comes up throughout the tale: He is down in the ship, not caring about a storm that could kill him, and then he happily advises the sailors to toss him to the raging sea. And later, in conversation with God, he explicitly says twice that he would rather die than live. He would rather die than live with the knowledge of God’s love. Dying is the ultimate escape, the ultimate protection against feeling something we really don’t want to feel.
And for some reason, Yonah does not want to feel God’s compassion in the world.
But whatever you resist inside you -- it becomes stronger, more extreme, destructive. The message of God’s love -- through Yonah’s resistance to it -- turns into an angry storm on the sea, demanding to be listened to. We want to sleep, but life keeps waking us up. There is something here we need to see.
What is so poignant here is that Yonah is running away from the message of God’s care even as God is caring for him. The story is ostensibly about God’s compassion for Nineveh, but it turns out to also be about how God cares for this single person, sticking with him at each turn, always there to catch him in his missteps and help him grow. The ship that Yonah hires to escape from God turns out to be full of kind and God-fearing sailors who are at first loath to throw Yonah to the Sea. And then, out on the Sea, God provides a fish to save him, and later, in the heat, He provides first, a gourd for shade, and then, because God sees that Yonah needs a different kind of experience, He provides a worm to attack the plant. Sometimes the care God gives Yonah seems -- as in life -- like suffering, but it is all loving care, all provided for Yonah’s sake, with incredible patience and steadfastness. There is a sense here that God simply does not give up on people, not on the people of Nineveh, and not on Yonah, who resists him, and not on each one of us.
Can you feel the strength of this kind of care? Staying with you through all your ups and downs, patiently waiting for you to wake up to the fact that you are cared for and to stop resisting.
Yonah, in his antics of resistance, reminds me of a young tantruming child, flailing about, going this way and that, needing, above all, to be held in a firm loving embrace, to know that there is something holding him, even if he tries to run away and hit and scream. The love will still be there.
Why does Yonah resist this message of love? Why does he fight so hard against the idea that God’s essence is to be compassionate and caring?
It is subtle and counterintuitive, but I think we all have a tendency at times to resist love, both human and divine, to want it but to fight against it or hide from it at the same time. In some ways, I think the real thing we run away from, the thing that we are most asleep about and need to be awakened to, is not God’s judgment but God’s love.
Like Yonah, we are scared of God’s love. We want it -- we want it probably more than anything in the world -- but, precisely because we want it so much, we are also terrified of it, also constantly fighting it and running away from it, not able to stand still to receive it.
We are scared of it partly because we are scared of feeling the pain of not having had it for so long, the hole inside us that is so large and gaping. We are scared of it because it makes us feel vulnerable, open and exposed. We are scared of its intensity, that it will overwhelm us. We are also used to living in a harsh world of human judgment and criticism -- at least there we know how things work; we are scared of the unfamiliarity and seeming unpredictability of divine compassion.
So we run away. We travel. We get busy. We go to sleep. We wish for death. Anything but feel the love -- and the intensity of the pain we associate with it.
We desire this love, but we run away from it.
And yet, like Yonah, this divine compassion is actually our essence. We were born into the world to deliver this message. ( It may, at first glance, appear to be a harsh message, like Yonah’s about destruction, but that is not its essence.) We were born to be vessels of divine love. We may resist this task, but God will steer us again and again towards it. It is our essence, just like the name Yonah. Yonah is the dove that Noah sent out after the flood; it returned first with an olive branch, and, upon being sent out again, did not return at all, a sign that the world was once again habitable and whole. So the name Yonah symbolizes the knowledge of God’s ultimate kindness. Suffering will happen in the world, but not forever. The world will always return to kindness.
This is the knowledge that we carry somewhere inside us. Yonah knew it, too. The problem is not so much knowing it, but allowing it, not resisting it, relaxing into it, and carrying it into the world. We are all unwilling prophets of divine love.
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