Excerpt from Upcoming Book on Jonah and Katrina

Here's an excerpt from my upcoming book called Who Knows? Jonah, Katrina and Other Tales of Hope.

The Old Switcheroo

And yet, this is a comedy.

 “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” This is one of the shortest and most effective sermons in the history of preaching. But who wrote this little sermon? In the other biblical prophets, we hear many of the precise words the LORD wants the prophet to speak. Here, we are not so sure. Is this little sermon Jonah’s personal and original composition?

The message is a simple declaration of doom. It contains no description of remedial action. It offers no hope of reprieve. The verb is in the passive voice and specifies no actor. It may sound like much of the bureaucrat-speak that fills our modern political discourse. “Mistakes were made,” or “Shots were fired.” The message is designed to fail.  And it has precisely the opposite effect that Jonah intended.

Jonah seems to be unaware of the LORD’s whimsical qualities. The word for “overthrown” can refer to destruction and demise. It more often refers to change or alteration or even transformation! This verb, writes Philip Cary, which is also applied to Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis, “can also—unfortunately for Jonah—mean conversion and being turned into something new.”[1]

Cary lingers on this ambiguity in his commentary. Who is fooling whom at this point? Does Jonah already know the LORD’s intention to spare Nineveh? He later protests that he did know about this in advance. So, Cary suggests, it may be that Jonah manipulates the LORD’s message to have the most lethal implications and the least chance of success. Or is it that the LORD gives this bit of prophetic double entendre to the unsuspecting prophet who then feels used and cheated later?

Or do we witness both things at once, as Cary suggests. “There is room to wonder whether, in the very content of the message,” Cary writes, “Jonah was trying to pull a fast one on the LORD—and whether what actually happened was that the LORD pulled a fast one on Jonah.”[2] The “old switcheroo” is a staple of comedy in all times and places. Is that what we witness in God’s word through Jonah to Nineveh? I think it is precisely what we experience here.

This goes a long way in explaining Jonah’s furious indignation in chapter four. The LORD has fooled him and left him in embarrassed rage. Is the LORD intentionally cruel to the cranky curmudgeon? I don’t think so. Instead, I would suggest that this comeuppance is the last best hope for Jonah’s heart. Perhaps the LORD has drawn the prophet into what Marcia Reynolds calls “The Discomfort Zone.”

Reynolds reminds us the brain science that demonstrates how much of our lives we spend on “autopilot,” that is, engaged in automatic and unreflective mental processes. We think we are in charge of our thinking most of the time. In fact, most of the time we are walking through the well-worn ruts that make up the majority of our life scripts. We leave those ruts only with a tremendous expenditure of energy and no small amount of whining and complaining.

“To help people think differently,” she writes, “you have to disturb the automatic processing.”[3] By this she means that we have to put people in unfamiliar places and positions. This will never make anyone particularly happy. The Discomfort Zone is that place where our life maps are called into question, where we experience disorientation, where we have to re-evaluate our settled assumptions and beliefs. “This is best done,” she continues, ‘by challenging the beliefs that created the frames, and surfacing the underlying fears, needs, and desires that are keeping the constructs in place.”[4]

Barbara Green amplifies this point in an article in the theological journal, Word and World.

Jonah is closer to a parable than to an event that happened; it reads better in the wisdom genre than as history. It is a narrative of experience offered within the story to a character and then from the whole story to readers. Its genre provides narrative experiences constructed and offered so as to jolt us out of old certainties and into fresh appraisals of problems.[5]

“To jolt us out of old certainties and into fresh appraisals of problems”—can you think of a better way to describe what is happening to Jonah in our little comedy? I cannot. From the moment of the LORD’s first call, nothing has been nailed down for Jonah. His cherished worldview has been called radically into question. Worse yet, the questioning happens through comedy. The audience is being disarmed as they laugh along with the writer. We are never more vulnerable to suggestions of change than when we are having a good laugh together.

Nineveh isn’t the only community in danger of being “overthrown.”

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[1] Philip Cary, Jonah, Kindle Location, 2776.

[2] Philip Cary, Jonah, Kindle Location, 2353.

[3] Marcia Reynolds, The Discomfort Zone: How Leaders Turn Difficult Conversations into Breakthroughs, page 3.

[4] Marcia Reynolds, The Discomfort Zone, page 3.

[5] Barbara Green, “Beyond messages: how meaning emerges from our reading of Jonah,” in Word & World 27 no 2 Spr 2007, p 149-156.