Wisdom 28 The Belly of the Great Fish

Wisdom 28 The Belly of the Great Fish

 I had a fraternity brother who had experienced being jarred awake in the middle of the night, tied up in a gunny sack, terrified as he was dragged into a car, driven to a dark dirt road, thrown out on the ground and left there alone. He got out and found his way back to town but never ever got over the experience. Keep this in mind as we continue with Jonah who we find running away from God to Tarshish. Tarshish means ‘far away.’ It seems interesting how people believe that if they can go to another place, change jobs and meet new people, everything will get better. The problem with that is you can’t run away from yourself. You carry you with you wherever your body goes, and you will find that you can’t distance yourself from yourself. Also, the human condition is the same wherever you go. In my early years escaping New York City, hitchhiking here and there, working on farms, cutting timber, slinging hash and doing odd jobs, I wasn’t thinking of where I was headed. I was searching and only surviving.

A Norwegian song, Sjomann, glamorizes the tendency of Norwegians to travel because in them “din lengsel er de fjerne”, your inner longing is for faraway places. One of my Norwegian cousins used to go up on a 120 mile long glacier in the Summer and spend several weeks hiking on cross country skis just to be alone and distance himself for himself. His wife was a daily distance walker. He also spent six weeks canoeing down a river in Northwest Canada with a canoe he had made after he got there. He was a newspaper editor, a very interesting person with an acute mind and a searching heart. What was he searching for? What was in my mother and father’s family that they would seek ‘it’ in a distant America?

 A country song “My Elusive Dreams” talks about a couple traveling from Birmingham to a farm in Nebraska to a gold mine in Alaska,---“we couldn’t find it there, so we moved on.” The ‘it’ is what? Ultimately the ‘it’ is our Heavenly Father who sent His Son to give us that answer. “Din lengsel”, the inner longing, is really a longing for God.

 In many ways we may find that we have been running away without leaving where we have lived all our lives. I’ll leave you to figure that one out.

 But back to Jonah. He found a ship and paid his fare to the ‘far away’ Tarshish. “Then the Lord sent a great wind (1:4)” which threatened the ship. All the sailors cried out to their personal gods. They withdrew into themselves, their fears and superstitions taking over. Of course, none of them worked. They tried throwing over their cargo. Both their internal and external worldly strategies didn’t work. All the while Jonah is sleeping. Fear, self-denial, avoidance, are sleeping pills that don’t work. So, the captain puts the blame on Jonah for sleeping and not seeking the mercy of his God. The sailors cast lots to place blame for their circumstance. The lot falls on Jonah.

 This is when it gets interesting. The sailors question him with the same kind of questions we ask when we meet people, have problems with them and make judgments about them. “Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you (1:8)?” Those last three have to sound familiar; your cultural influence, your ethnic background and your family. It is worldly evaluation. You know, the ‘ah-hah, now we know.’ Jonah tells them bluntly that he is a Hebrew who worships the God who made the sea and the land (1:9). They already knew he was running from God, so he tells them he is at fault for their predicament and to throw him in the sea which they do. This scared them especially when the sea got rougher. They turned to the Lord and begged for deliverance which He did, and the seas calmed (1:10-16).

This is when the Lord gets a great fish to swallow Jonah and he was inside the fish for three days and nights. It is from inside the fish that Jonah utters his great prayer (2:1-9).

 What Jonah’s prayer reflects is deep aloneness that everyone feels but, without God, can do nothing but avoid its pleas, escape its haunting cry and busy ourselves with the world’s distractions from one moment to the next. What makes it such a great prayer is Jonah’s recognition of his great aloneness. In that fish Jonah felt what everyone feels when they don’t know God and avoid Him. It’s that inner isolation, the stuff of desperation, depression and despair. He tells the Lord, “I have been banished from your sight (2:4).” This is reminiscent of Cain’s guilt after murdering his brother Abel, “I will be hidden from your presence, I will be a restless wanderer on the earth (Gen.4:14).” Here running and trying to avoid God has a lonely end. Not only do you feel isolated, but you begin to feel like the world is turning against you as well. You begin to feel people have it in for you. Distrust and suspicion grow. You look for good things to do, like causes and movements to join, even public demonstrations where you can join others who feel the same way but they are as lonely as you and none of them satisfy. This is when irritability, blame, excuses and unhappiness become attitudes that guide your life.

 All this is the belly of the great fish in which sin’s self-centered darkness is all you have. Think again about my fraternity brother dragged into the darkness of the night terrified. In this sense then the world without God, people with no God, society without God, is the belly of the great fish. Our personal aloneness is the belly of the fish. The world of people without God is the dark belly of the fish. Sin, death and the grave are the belly of the fish. The Father sent His Son Jesus into the belly of the fish for our sake to retrieve us so we could be eternally alive, His holy people, a royal priesthood, to be lights, witnesses in the dark belly of the world.

 But Jonah prays his heart before God from within the darkness of the fish’s belly and the fish vomits him on dry land (2:10). More on Jonah to come.

 

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