Materials
The Old Testament
Minor Prophets #3
A Prayer From The Depths
Jonah 2
by R. Todd Bouldin
Sometimes you discover
that your life has been heading in the wrong direction. When that
happens, the usually fleeting and mysterious will of God is no longer
a mystery. What you should do is turn around and go home to the place
of God’s purpose for you. But for that, you will need some help,
and a lot of grace.
Prayer
Jonah had been called by God on a mission to Nineveh.
But Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. That is where his enemies
lived. His greatest fear was that God would be merciful to people
he thought deserved God’s judgment. So he booked passage on
a ship sailing in the opposite direction towards Tarshish because
he was so determined to avoid his calling, and really God too. But
God is even more determined than Jonah, and than us. While the ship
was sailing to Tarshish, “The Lord hurled a great storm on
the sea.” (Jonah 1:4). It eventually became clear that the
ship would break apart if the sailors did not throw Jonah into the
sea. As he was sinking, going down, The Lord sent a large fish that
swallowed Jonah who stayed in the belly of the fish three days and
nights.
Down through the ages our biblical scholars and Sunday school teachers
have demonstrated a variety of approaches to interpreting the fish
story. Some Sunday School teachers present the fish as a form of God’s
punishment, when that isn’t the case at all. The fish is a form
of the grace of God to save Jonah from himself. Those who need to
explain away this miracle claim that Jonah dreamed these events, or
that Jonah was picked up by another ship called “The Big Fish”,
or that Jonah swam to an inn called “The Big Fish” and
stayed three nights. By contrast, those who feel the need to defend
this story come up with all kinds of “whale tales” of
sailors who survived being swallowed whole by whales. Ironically,
both of those approaches deny the power of God. You can get caught
up in that argument if you want, but it is the wrong argument.
The real argument is the one that God has with us. There comes
a time in your life when you know what you have to do. If you don’t
do it, you don’t expect God to leave you alone. Expect God to
do whatever it takes to turn you around and get you to the right place.
What might seem like a punishment turns out to be a saving grace.
The belly of the fish is an enduring metaphor of God’s turn
around place. Scripture calls it repentance. To repent
doesn’t mean that you wear sackcloth and ashes. It just means
to turn around. The New Testament uses the Greek word metanoia
for repentance. Before this word took on religious significance, it
had an ordinary meaning. If you were heading out of your house and
turned around to get something, that was a metanoia experience.
That is what it meant then, and what it meant today. Somehow we came
to understand this word as having some kind of sorrowful or dreadful
connotation that inspires reluctance and fear. But that isn’t
what the word meant in biblical times. It just meant to realize the
futility of going one way, and to turn around and go the other way.
God isn’t as interested in your shame – in fact, He died
to take away your shame – as in your direction. He just wants
you to repent, to turn around, to start moving in the right direction.
But that is difficult because we have a lot invested in the wrong
direction. If we are going to turn around, we are going to need
some divine grace and help.
The first thing that God does to help you is that He stops your
movement completely. When we are running in the wrong direction,
we often are doing it with furiously and with great determination.
Then God steps in, and you can’t move any longer in the wrong
direction. But you also can’t move in the right direction. You
just have to sit in the belly of the fish. You feel stuck in those
moments.
There are few things more frustrating than being stuck in a place
you do not want to be. It makes us feel powerless and strips us of
our illusion that we are in control of our lives. As long as we are
moving, we feel like we might get to the right place on our own. But
that isn’t true. It was our illusion of control that sent us
sailing off in the wrong direction.
So out of His mercy, which sometimes feels like being stuck, God just
makes us stop and confines us in the belly of a fish to ponder and
to pray. Maybe your confinement is an illness or a long stay in the
hospital. Or a job you hate but can’t afford to quit. Maybe
it involves a long journey through unemployment or a long period of
bereavement as you grieve what was lost. It does not matter how hard
you try. You cannot hurry your way out of the fish’s belly.
You are not controlling it; it is controlling you. So you just have
to submit, sit and pray.
This is not to say that every time something bad happens to you that
it is God calling you to repent. Not all things have God’s fingerprint
on them. However, if you know, like Jonah did, that God is calling
you to make some changes in your life, then there is nothing like
being stuck in a crisis to get your attention and prepare you to turn
around towards Home.
The basic paradigm of life is that we go up and then go down.
We watch as political leaders, corporate executives and Hollywood
celebrities ascend the ladder of success only to then fall. We progress
through the various stages of education, then get an entry level job,
then better jobs, then we coast down into retirement. We fall in love,
begin a relationship, it thrives, and then eventually the relationship
ends by death if not before then. So there always is some dread of
life that looms over even the good times because we feel that we will
only ascend to the top in order to begin our descent downward. It’s
just a matter of time.
The biblical paradigm for life is just the opposite. The
Bible claims that we go down in order to come up. We lose what
we are holding to receive something new. We confess failure and sin
to be lifted up to life and a new beginning. We die only to live.
This is why Jesus said later, “Just as Jonah was three days
and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days
and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.”
(Matthew 12:40). Again, we die to live. We lose to receive. We are
buried in baptismal waters so that we might be raised to new life.
(Romans 6:4) We go down so that we can come up.
While you are stuck in the belly of your fish, it might appear that
you are doing nothing. But that isn’t true. You are making critically
important choices. You are choosing whether you are going to waste
this experience or use it to turn your life around – to choose
to listen and learn from it rather than blame or play the victim.
Will you just be stuck in a place you do not want to be, or will you
come up to a new life?
How do we rise out of a place of confinement? Not by running, or just
more activity. That will never get you out of the belly of the fish.
When you are stuck in the belly of a fish, the only thing you can
do is to turn it into a prayer room. “I called to The
Lord out of my distress, and He answered me; out of the belly of Sheol
I cried, and You heard my voice.” (Jonah 2:2) As Jonah
continues through this prayer from the depths it first seems like
he is simply praying about his own situation, “You cast me into
the deep . . . all Your waves and billows passed over me . . . the
waters closed in over me . . . the deep surrounded me . . . yet You
brought up my life from the pit.” (Jonah2:3)
That sure sounds like the prayer of man who was thrown overboard.
But on closer observation, we see that those lines are not Jonah’s
at all. They are prayers from the Psalms, and in the moment of crisis,
those words of worship that he had learned in worship and on Sabbath
came back to him. He knew how the biblical story goes. He understood
“down to go up”. And because He knew the Word of God,
he could rehearse those ancient words and they became living and powerful
to him in the present. That is how Scripture functions for us too,
and that is why it is important that we bathe ourselves in the Word
of God. In the moments when we feel stuck or confused, we can repeat
the ancient words, “Yet You brought up my life from the pit,
O Lord, my God.”
That is how the great turn around in life happens. It happens not
because we decide to stop moving in the wrong direction. It happens
because God turns us around. And the turn around is not horizontal
– it isn’t just a matter of changing locations, relationships,
or jobs. The turnaround is vertical. We go down and lose a life
to come up to a new life.
Jonah knows this is not what is waiting for him when his confinement
in the fish is over. So he concludes his prayer with thanksgiving
– while he is still in the depths of the fish’s belly.
“But I with the voice of thanksgiving will give sacrifice
to You.” (Jonah 2:9) I will sacrifice the life I tried to
save by running to Tarshish. I will give up my own plans that took
me in the wrong direction. “Deliverance belongs to The Lord.”
He will lift me up. And the great fish spewed Jonah out upon the ground.
Sometimes when a person is stuck in a hard place where they do not
want to be, they ask, “How long, O Lord, until we sing a new
song?” We do not know the answer. Most of the time we are stuck
for a lot longer than three days. But one of the signals that the
time waiting is coming to an end comes when we begin to pray prayers
of thanksgiving even from the belly of the fish. When you can say
prayers from the depths, then you are free. It is time to go Home.
You will never get to this place unless you know how the drama of
God unfolds. We are brought down to be lifted up to a new life. Salvation
won’t be found in Tarshish. Nor will it be found in the plans
you have for your life. “Salvation belongs to The Lord.”
(Jonah 2:9)
June 26, 2005
» Back to top
|
Bulletin
Class Materials
Resources
Sermons
Spiritual Life
 |
