An Excerpt from "Who Knows? Jonah, Katrina and Other Tales of Hope"

Here's an excerpt from my next book, Who Knows? Jonah, Katrina and Other Tales of Hope. In this passage I think about Jonah's raging death wish in the wake of his prophetic disappointment.

Pausing to Protest

As in all good melodramas, our little comedy delivers an ultimatum. “And now, O LORD,” the prophet pronounces, “I beg you to take my life from me…” In this moment, the comedy jumps the tracks. We are on the verge of tragedy. “For it is better for me to be dead,” Jonah concludes, “than alive.” Moments before, the audience had been chuckling at the overblown monologue of the prophet. Now the laughter fades to shocked silence. Whispers pass through the crowd. “Did he just say what I thought he said? Better to be dead than alive? Did he really just pray that to the LORD? What is happening?”

The written text of the Book of Jonah honors this silence. Limburg describes the setumah, the required pause in the reading of the text. The break in the reading is indicated by a Hebrew letter equivalent to an “s” between verses three and four. This pause has been in the manuscripts of the Book of Jonah since before the time of Jesus. Limburg includes that pause in his division of the textual segments. I include it as well in the scene division of this script.

This is the first of two such demands from the prophet. We will examine the scriptural conversation assumed in this demand when it comes around again in a few verses.  But first, let’s examine the demand itself. Let’s take a reflective pause at this moment of high drama and examine what the statement does to Jonah and to us.

Some translations take verse one and suggest that the rescue of Nineveh “grieved” Jonah. That rendering of ra’ah falls into the range of possible translations for this word. So verse one could be read something like, “And it grieved Jonah with a deep grief…” I find that to be an attractive translation. Jonah’s burning rage cannot come from a mere intellectual, theological disappointment. Jonah has suffered a loss—a death of something dear. Only that sort of experience can serve as the basis for a rage that rumbles up from the deep recesses of one’s heart.

If Jonah’s burning rage is rooted in grief, what precisely has the prophet lost? Grief is many things. But at its heart, grief is a protest against losing someone or something that forms a part of one’s present identity and future hopes. We can hear these protests from the bereaved in the midst of their cries and tears. “This just not right!” they say. “She was too young!” they declare. “I can’t figure out the point of this,” they murmur. And in the depths of loss comes the real question: “How can I go on?”

I believe this is the question behind Jonah’s blistering petition. “O LORD, how can I go on?” How can I go on in a world where Nineveh wins and God’s people lose? How can I go on in a world where wildly wicked people hear seven words and get a second chance? How can I go on in a world where all the hopes and dreams of my people are but dust and ashes while the rest of Creation rolls blithely along? How can I go on living when my love, my life, hope and my dreams are dead? In such a world it is better for me to die than to live.

Anyone who has suffered a traumatic loss knows this conversation intimately. The bereaved rarely share these thoughts with others so openly these days. To suggest that I might have thoughts of taking my own life is to secure a fast ticket into a psychological unit for a short-term evaluation. So the bereaved keep their counsel and protest largely in silence. But the silence does not mean that the question has not been raised.

We can and must see Jonah as a comic caricature. At this moment of reflection, however—during this setumah—we must also accord the prophet our deadly serious attention. What is the nature of Jonah’s grievous protest?

His identity as a prophet and a person requires radical revision. Jonah had been the one to deliver the bad news, to be the agent of judgment. He was a person of substance, one to be reckoned with. Now he is a ridiculous figure whose message has spread more by rumor than by proclamation. Who will Jonah be in the future? What will he do with himself? Jonah had one conception of his identity, but that conception is now obsolete. A replacement for that dead notion has not yet appeared. The empty space produces excruciating pain.

Jonah’s vision of the future is a casualty of God’s grace. He had hoped that the hated enemies would be destroyed and that he could live in a world no longer burdened by their presence. He had a sense of the order and process of history. He had a clear conviction about the nature and execution of Divine Justice. He had a well-developed sense of where things were headed and how he was to be part of that plan. Now that worldview has collapsed. The system is opaque to him. What’s the plan? What’s the purpose? Where are we headed?

Grief is a radical protest against the loss of the other, loss of self, loss of purpose and loss of hope. Translate this now into the life of the post-exilic community. They have paid their debt. They have done their time. They have restored purity and order to the Jewish community. They have walled themselves off from the possibility of ethnic and religious contamination. And still, their losses have not been reversed. How can they go on? What if they cannot—will not?

If the bereaved will not, at some point, embrace an alternative future, then the next step is often violence. It may be violence directed against another. We will examine that in the next section of this chapter. More often, the violence is turned inward, by the bereaved toward the bereaved. I cannot storm the gates of death and liberate my loved one, even though human mythology is filled with stories of such efforts. I cannot even think about my rage toward the one who has died and left me. That is more than I can bear to consider. I have no one left to punish after I have blamed doctors or law enforcement or the government or pastors or family members.

The only one left to punish, for many of the bereaved, is me.  So, the grieving ones experience some measure of dysthymia. I don’t use the word “depression,” because that is best reserved for medical conditions that are not really chosen and can to some degree be managed by therapy and medication. I am talking about the darkness that we may embrace, at least for a while, as we work through our protest against the wrongness of our loss. That is the time when the bereaved often consider self-violence as the only remaining avenue to fully express the pain of the loss.

Jonah may be whining to the LORD for dramatic effect. Or Jonah may represent the deep existential protest of the post-exilic community. Some may be wondering if they have any reason to continue to live.

So we pause with them—neither to commiserate nor to judge—but rather to listen and reflect. Perhaps this is our moment—in the language of our Jewish sisters and brothers—to sit shiva with Jonah before getting on with our lives.