A Case of Cetacean Indigestion or Even Whales Can Only Stomach So Much!
I always thought whales needed more room to maneuver and kept to the big oceans of the world – and so there couldn’t be any in the somewhat landlocked Mediterranean Sea. But the Internet tells me whales do swim amid the coasts of North Africa and Greece, Italy and Spain. But then again, the original Hebrew of the biblical Jonah story simply calls the sea creature that swallowed Jonah “a big fish”. So why argue about it?
Except it’s Jonah’s encounter with this “big fish” that absorbs all our attention – so that we miss out on the real point of the story, namely that God, contrary to Jonah’s wishes, is a God of universal mercy, not of morbid retribution. I mean, all the preliminaries to the final chapter have to do with the stern God of embittered and battered Judea choosing Jonah to warn the persecutors of the Jews (the citizens of Nineveh) of impending doom if they do not repent. And Jonah, harboring prejudices against Nineveh, backs off; he’d rather leave the Ninevites to their fate. So he books passage on a ship headed to the opposite end of the Mediterranean Sea, to Spain. Then comes the storm! Jonah senses his disobedience is the cause of it, the sailors toss him overboard, a great fish swallows him up – and so there he now sits somewhere within the rib cage of the fish amid the refuse of the big fish’s usual diet.
All of this graphic display holds our attention and certainly that of children. Catechists use all sorts of visual aids, coloring books, craft exercises with glue and paper . . . even enactments of the drama, so preoccupying are the upfront details of the story. Some catechists may even bring in excerpts for Herman Melville’s Moby Dick or Carlo Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio to widen the scope of the tale. And then there is Louis Armstrong’s gloss upon the text in which Jonah’s release by the whale is due to his giving the whale indigestion: Now Jonah must’ve been a bad man; he must of been a sinner / . . . ‘Cause when the whale got him down, he didn’t like his dinner / . . . he swum around the ocean, sick as he could be / . . . And after three days, whoops, he had to set him free / Lord, Lord, wasn’t that a fish, mmm?
Yet how does the final chapter go? Jonah does go to Nineveh – an enormous city – and summons it to repentance for its past sins. But his preaching is more effective than he wished; he hoped they would resist God’s summons and be blown away. Nineveh undergoes the unlikeliest of changes, a total change of heart. Yet rather than rejoice, Jonah sulks. He wants the kind of God that rewards Jonah’s friends and punishes people he doesn’t like – sinners. He whines: I knew it! I knew that you were a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, repenting of punishment! So take my life. I’d rather be dead than live to see my own vindictiveness stifled. To which God says in so many words: Jonah, you are so small-minded, obsessed with your petty prejudices – and should I not be concerned over the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot know their right hand from their left, not to mention all the innocent animals?
Already, before even the event of Bethlehem, the Spirit of the compassionate Christ (whom disgruntled Pharisees will never understand) begins to emerge out of the Hebrew Bible.