Jonah and the City That Listened

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There is a man sitting on the floor of a ship, in the dark, in the very bottom of the boat, fast asleep.

Above him, the sea is trying to take the ship apart. The mast is groaning. The sailors are shouting at each other, and at the sky, and at the gods of six or seven different countries, and one of them has just thrown the cargo over the side. And the man in the bottom of the boat has pulled his cloak over his head and is snoring.

And then a hand shakes him by the shoulder, and a very tired, very wet captain says, "How can you be sleeping?"

But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Hello, and welcome to Saints by Candlelight, stories of saints, angels and patriarchs from the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, told for bedtime. These episodes are written by an AI and read by a synthetic voice, and they try very hard to be faithful. Tonight's story is the book of Jonah, which Catholic and Orthodox Christians read as Scripture, and which is only four short chapters long, so we have room to tell it slowly. A few of the small conversations, and most of the weather, are our own invention, told in the spirit of the original, and nothing we add changes what happens or what it means. So get comfortable. Dim the lights. And let's begin.

First, who is Jonah?

He is a prophet, which means a person whom God sent with a message. And he is rather an odd one, because most of the prophets in the Bible are remembered for being brave, or eloquent, or for saying things that nobody wanted to hear and saying them anyway. Jonah is remembered for running away. In a way, that makes him the most relatable prophet in the whole book. Most of us, at one time or another, have been asked to do something we did not want to do, and have looked at the map and found a direction that was somewhere else.

There is a very short mention of him in another part of Scripture, in the second book of Kings. It says that a prophet called Jonah, the son of Amittai, spoke in the days of King Jeroboam of Israel, and that what he said came true. So we know a little. He was an Israelite. He was a working prophet, with a good record. And he lived at a time when Israel was doing fairly well, and was, if we are honest, rather pleased with itself.

Now, the book that bears his name is a different kind of book from most of the prophets. Most of the prophets give you their sermons, page after page. The book of Jonah gives you one sermon, and it is eight words long in the original. The rest of the book is a story, with a ship and a storm and a fish and a plant, and a conversation at the end that has been puzzling and delighting readers for more than two thousand years.

We will tell it as it is told. We will not argue about how to read it, because the Church has always read it with reverence and with a smile, and it has room for both. We will only say what it says.

It begins like this. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, and the word was: "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for its wickedness has come up before me."

Nineveh. I have to tell you about Nineveh.

Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, and Assyria was, for the people of Israel, the great terror of the age. It was a huge, rich, well-organised empire to the north and east, with a very good army and a reputation for using it. When Assyrian soldiers turned up in a country, people did not say, "How lovely, visitors." They said, "Pack." So if you were a prophet of Israel, and God said, "Go to Nineveh and tell them they are in trouble," you might well think there were three possible outcomes. They would ignore you. They would laugh at you. Or they would take offence, and then you would not be a prophet any more, but a rather short anecdote.

And there is a fourth possibility, which is the one Jonah is really afraid of, though he does not say so until the very end of the book. And that is that they might listen.

We will come back to that.

For now, what Jonah does is this. The book says, simply: "But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord."

Tarshish was a far-off place, at the western edge of the world as they knew it, probably somewhere on the coast of Spain. Nineveh was to the east. Jonah headed west. If you wanted to run from Nineveh as far as it was possible to run, you could hardly have chosen better. He went down to the port of Joppa, which is the place we now call Jaffa, and found a ship going to Tarshish. He paid his fare. He went on board.

I want you to picture him on the quay, for a moment. He has a small bag. He has the look of a man who has made up his mind and is trying not to think about it. The harbour is busy and noisy and smells of tar and fish and warm rope. Gulls are arguing. Somebody is hauling a barrel. And Jonah, who has just turned down a direct request from the Creator of heaven and earth, is haggling over the price of a ticket.

The book has a gentle sense of humour about this. It says that he went down to Joppa, and went down into the ship, and, a few lines later, went down into the hold. Down, and down, and down. If you were counting, you could say that the whole first chapter is a man trying to get as far from God as he can, and finding that every step moves him downward.

Now, the ship goes out to sea. And the book says, with a calm that I find very funny: "But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea, so that the ship threatened to break up."

Notice the order of things. Jonah has run away. God has not chased him with an army or a lightning bolt. God has simply sent a wind. It is the gentlest of the possible pursuits. It is the kind of thing a shepherd does, when a sheep wanders off, and the shepherd goes after it, not with a stick, but with a whistle.

The sailors were frightened, and they were sailors, so they were not easily frightened. They knew storms. They knew this was a bad one. And what they did next tells you something about them. Every man cried out to his own god. The ship had a crew from several different places, and they had several different gods between them, and everyone prayed at once. It must have sounded like the world's loudest and least organised church. And then, being practical people, they began throwing the cargo into the sea, to make the ship lighter.

And meanwhile, where was Jonah?

He was below, in the innermost part of the ship, lying down, fast asleep.

I am going to say a kind word for Jonah here. He was not asleep because he was calm. A man who is calm sits up and asks what is happening. I think he was asleep because he was exhausted. He had been carrying a heavy thing around inside him for days, and he had finally put it down, and the body does that, when it has had enough. Anybody who has ever been very worried and then fallen asleep in the middle of the afternoon will understand.

The captain finds him. And the captain says, in the book, something very simple: "What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish."

I like the captain. He is not a believer in the God of Israel. He has never heard of Jonah. He is a man with a ship, and a crew, and a storm, and he will take help wherever he can find it. And you will see, by the end of this chapter, that the captain and his crew are going to turn out to be rather better at this than the prophet.

The sailors decide to cast lots, to find out whose fault the storm is. This was a common thing to do, in those days. And the lot falls on Jonah.

Now they turn on him with a rush of questions. The book gives them all in one breath: "Tell us on whose account this evil has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?"

I think it is a very good set of questions. If I had just been in a storm and the lot had fallen on a passenger, I would want to know all of that too.

And Jonah answers, in one sentence, the most honest thing he says in the whole book. He says: "I am a Hebrew, and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land."

Hold that sentence a moment. It is a good sentence. He is saying that he worships the God who made the sea. And he is sitting on a ship, on the sea, which that God made, trying to run away from that God. The sailors hear it too. The book says they were exceedingly afraid. They say, "What is this that you have done?" And what they mean is, "Do you not see how far this is from sensible?"

Then they ask him, "What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?"

And Jonah says: "Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great tempest has come upon you."

Now, we should stop and look at what Jonah has done. For the first time in the story, he is telling the truth, and he is willing to pay for it. A moment ago he was a man in the hold of a ship. Now he is offering his own life to save a crew of strangers. Whatever else we say about Jonah, this is a brave thing to say. And you will notice that it comes before he has been rescued, before the fish, before anything has been sorted out. It comes in the dark, with the water coming in, from a man who has not yet done any of the things he was asked to do.

The sailors, and this is the part I love most, do not do it.

The book says: "Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more tempestuous against them."

They try. They are strangers. They owe him nothing. He has, strictly speaking, brought a storm on them. And their first instinct is to row for the shore with all of them still aboard. These are men who have never heard a word of Scripture, and they will not throw a man into the sea if they can possibly help it.

Only when they cannot do anything else do they pray. And listen to what they pray. They cry out to the Lord, to the God of Jonah, and they say: "We beg you, O Lord, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not on us innocent blood, for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you."

Then they pick Jonah up, and they put him in the sea.

And the sea stops.

The book says it simply: "And the sea ceased from its raging." The wind drops. The waves lie down. The ship, which a moment ago was a toy in the hands of a giant, is just a ship again, floating on a quiet sea at the end of a long day.

And the sailors, who have been so terrified of the storm, are now, the book says, "exceedingly afraid" of the Lord. They offered a sacrifice to him, and made vows. In four verses, a ship's crew of pagans has become worshippers of the God of Israel. It is the first conversion in the book. And Jonah, who was supposed to be the one doing the converting, was at that moment sinking quietly into the water, and had no idea it had happened.

Now we come to the fish.

I should say right away that the book does not say whale. It says "a great fish." In the Hebrew it is dag gadol, which means exactly that, a big fish, and the book does not tell us what kind. The word whale came in later, in translation, and has stuck to the story ever since. I think the old writer would have been quite content to leave it at big.

What the book says is this: "And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights."

I want you to notice the word appointed. The fish is not an accident. It is not a monster that happens to be in the neighbourhood. God sends it, in the same way that God sent the wind, and with the same purpose. The fish is, in a way, the second part of the same rescue. The sea would have taken Jonah, and the fish takes him up, and keeps him, and carries him.

So here is Jonah, in the dark, in the belly of the fish. It is warm, and it is wet, and it smells, I would imagine, extremely strongly of fish. And for the first time in a very long while, nobody is asking anything of him. There are no more ports. There is no more road. There is just a very long stretch of time with no place to run to.

And what does he do? He prays.

Now, I want to tell you something about the prayer in the book. It is a psalm, a song, and it is made of many familiar phrases from the Psalms, the way a person praying in a crisis will often reach for words that others have prayed before. He says, "I called out to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice." He says, "You cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me." He says, "The waters closed in over me, the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head."

It is a lovely, frightened, honest prayer. And right in the middle of it, there is a turn. He says: "When my life was fainting away, I remembered the Lord, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple."

When his life was fainting away, he remembered. I find that very moving. It does not say that he was wise, or clever, or brave. It says that when everything else had failed, he remembered, and turned toward the place where help is.

And the prayer ends with one of the great lines of the Old Testament, in five short words: "Salvation belongs to the Lord."

And then the book says, as plainly as it says everything: "And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land."

I have always been grateful that the book does not dress that up. It does not say that the fish gently set Jonah on the sand. It says what it says. Jonah, damp and rumpled and very quiet, is deposited on a beach in the sunshine, and the fish goes away, and I think the fish, if it had an opinion, would be glad to have its stomach back.

A small thing before we go on. Christians have always seen something in those three days. The Lord himself, in the Gospels, speaks of it. When some people asked him for a sign, he said that no sign would be given to them except the sign of the prophet Jonah. "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth." That is a line from the Gospel according to Matthew, and we say it here in the Lord's own words, and we leave it there. The Church has read Jonah in that light ever since, and the Orthodox Church reads the whole book of Jonah at the Holy Saturday vigil, on the eve of Easter. It is a very deep thing, and tonight is only a bedtime story, so we will let it stay deep, and go on.

And the Lord says, in the same place, that the people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgement and condemn a generation that would not listen, because the Ninevites repented at the preaching of Jonah, "and behold, something greater than Jonah is here." Which brings us, by a very short road, to the city.

The second chapter ended with Jonah on the beach. The third chapter begins with a sentence I find one of the most gracious in the whole Bible. It says: "Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time."

The second time.

Think about that. Jonah had said no. He had run. He had caused a storm and nearly drowned a crew of innocent sailors. And God, who might have found another prophet, or sent a thunderbolt, or just left him lying on the beach, comes to him and asks the same question again. The word is the same word. The errand is the same errand. There is no reproach in it, no lecture, no "I told you so." There is just a second chance, offered as if the first one had never gone wrong.

I think that if you are lying awake tonight thinking about something you ought to have done and did not, this is a good verse to hold on to. The word came a second time. It does come a second time.

So Jonah gets up. And this time, he goes to Nineveh.

And now we have to talk about the size of the place. The book says: "Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, three days' journey in breadth." I think this means that it took three days to walk through it and see everything one had to see, with all its suburbs and gardens and outlying districts. It was, in other words, enormous. And Jonah walks into it, alone, a foreign prophet with no army, no letters, no interpreter that we know of, and a very short sermon.

The book says that he went a day's journey into the city. A day's walk, into the heart of the biggest city he had ever seen, among people who had every reason to be dangerous. And then he stopped, and he cried out.

And here is the sermon. Here is the entire sermon, which in the original is just five Hebrew words, and which we can put into English in eight: "Forty more days, and Nineveh will be overthrown."

That is all. He does not give them a lecture on social justice. He does not outline a plan of reform. He does not even mention God. He announces what is about to happen, and then, presumably, stands there. I have sometimes wondered whether he said it grudgingly, whether it came out of him the way a person might hand over a parcel that they hope will be returned to sender.

And here is the thing that I think the original reader is meant to find astonishing. It works.

The book says: "And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them."

From the greatest to the least. There is no resistance. There is no committee. The news goes through the city, I suppose, the way news goes through a city even now, from the market to the doorways, and the stairways, and the roofs, and nobody argues. They believe it. They put on sackcloth, which was a rough, scratchy cloth worn by people who were mourning or repenting, and which I imagine was more or less the ancient equivalent of putting on your very plainest clothes and sitting on the floor.

And then the news reaches the king.

I want to read what the book says about the king, because it is a lovely little passage. "The word reached the king of Nineveh, and he arose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes."

A king who gets down off his throne. A king who takes off his robe. In the ancient world, a king was nearly a god, and certainly a very important person indeed. And this one hears a sermon from a foreigner, and puts on sackcloth, and sits in the ashes with his people.

And then he issues a decree, which is the most remarkable decree in the whole Bible. He says: "Let neither man nor beast, herd nor flock, taste anything. Let them not feed or drink water, but let man and beast be covered with sackcloth, and let them call out mightily to God."

I will stop there a moment, because you will have heard it. Man and beast. Even the animals. The cattle in the fields, and the donkeys in the lanes, and the sheep on the hills outside the walls. They are all to be dressed in sackcloth. I have a picture in my mind that I have never been able to put away. It is a city full of very unhappy-looking cows, in rough brown cloth, standing in the street, wondering what they have done.

I tell this joyfully, but the point is not a joke. The king is saying, with his whole decree, that everything alive in the city belongs to God, the people and the animals alike, and that all of it is to turn. And then he says: "Let everyone turn from his evil way and from the violence that is in his hands. Who knows? God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we may not perish."

Who knows? It is a very honest thing to say. He does not presume. He does not say, "God will forgive us if we do this." He says, "Perhaps. We do not know. But we should try." That is what repentance looks like, from the inside. It is not a bargain. It is turning around and hoping.

And the book says: "When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it."

The forty days pass. The city stands.

You might think that this is where the story ends. A prophet has delivered a message. A city has repented. The disaster has been called off. Hundreds of thousands of lives have been saved, not to mention a number of cows. It is a triumph. It is the greatest success any prophet has ever had.

And now the fourth chapter begins, and the first sentence is: "But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry."

I hope that you did not expect that. Jonah is angry. The most successful sermon in history has just been preached, and the preacher is furious.

And he prays, and his prayer is the funniest and most honest prayer in the Bible. It goes: "O Lord, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster."

Read that again, slowly, and you will see what the whole book has been about. Jonah did not run away because he was afraid that Nineveh would not listen. He ran away because he was afraid that it would. He knew God. He knew God was kind. He knew that if he went to Nineveh and told the Ninevites the truth, and they turned, God would forgive them, because that is what God is like. And Jonah did not want his enemies forgiven. He wanted them overthrown. And he was so sure of God's goodness that it made him cross.

He then does a thing which is rather alarming and rather sweet. He says: "Therefore now, O Lord, take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live."

And God answers him with one of the gentlest questions in the whole of Scripture: "Do you do well to be angry?"

There is no thunder in it. There is no punishment. It is just a question, asked as one asks a friend who has had a bad day. Do you do well to be angry?

Jonah does not answer. He goes out of the city, and finds a place on the east side, and makes himself a little shelter, a booth, and sits in the shade of it. And he waits to see what will become of the city.

I love this. After everything, he is still hoping that something will go wrong for them.

And now, the book says, the Lord God appointed a plant. We do not know what plant. The Hebrew word is qiqayon, and nobody is entirely sure, though some think it was a gourd, or a castor-oil plant. It does not matter. What matters is that it grew up over Jonah's head in a single night, large and green and cool, and gave him shade, to save him from his discomfort.

And Jonah, the book says, "was exceedingly glad because of the plant."

For the first time in the whole story, Jonah is happy. He is happy about a plant. Not about the city, or the sermon, or the thousands who were saved, but about a plant that has grown over his head and made the afternoon more bearable. And I do not think the book is making fun of him. I think it is being very honest about how people are. We can stay angry for days about a great matter, and then a small kindness comes along, a bit of shade, and for a moment we feel almost human again.

But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm, which attacked the plant, so that it withered. And when the sun rose, God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah's head, so that he was faint. And again he asked to die. "It is better for me to die than to live."

Then God said to Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry for the plant?"

And Jonah, who has not been able to answer the first question, answers this one at once, and with feeling. "Yes," he says. "I do well to be angry, angry enough to die."

And now comes the end of the book. It is the best end that any story in the Bible has, and I am going to read it as it is, and then I am going to say nothing about it at all.

The Lord said: "You pity the plant, for which you did not labour, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?"

And that is where the book stops.

It stops without telling us what Jonah said. It does not say whether he got up from under the withered plant, and went back into the city, and saw the people. It does not say whether the question was enough. The story ends with the question, hanging in the warm air, and then it is quiet.

The old readers took that as meant. The book ends with a question because the question is for us. God is asking Jonah, and he is asking everyone who has ever read the book, whether we are able to be glad about mercy when it falls on people we did not want it to fall on. Whether we can be as pleased about a city of strangers as we are about a plant. And the last thing he says, almost as if he could not help it, is: "and also much cattle." God is saying that he is so tender to his creatures that he thinks of the cows.

I find that very comforting, as it happens. Because it means that the question is asked by someone who has already decided what he would do. He pities Nineveh. He pities the people who do not know their right hand from their left, and the animals, and the plant, and I think, very much, he pities Jonah.

Now, let us slow down, because the story is nearly over.

The Church honours Jonah as a prophet, and keeps his feast in September, in the Catholic and the Orthodox calendars alike. That is all the record gives us. We do not know where he died or where he is buried, and a good many places claim to have his tomb, and we will not choose between them. We only know the book, and the book is enough.

It has been loved in a great many ways. It is read on one of the holiest days of the Jewish year, the Day of Atonement, in the afternoon, when a whole community has been fasting and praying since the morning. The early Christians painted the scene of Jonah and the fish on the walls of the catacombs in Rome, over and over, because they saw in it the promise of rising from the dead. A sleeping man tossed into the sea, and given back on the third day. It was one of their favourite pictures.

And I think there is another reason it has lasted so long, and it is the one I have been trying to tell you all evening. It is a story about a God who is willing to go after a runaway prophet, and a pagan crew, and a city of enemies, and a few thousand animals, with exactly the same patience. It is a story where the one person who does not want mercy to spread is the one who has just been given more of it than anyone.

You do not have to be a prophet to know how that feels.

If you have been running from something, in whatever direction, tonight is a good night to stop. The sea is quiet. The word will come again, a second time, if it needs to. You do not have to decide anything now. You do not have to be braver than you are, or kinder than you can manage by tomorrow morning. You only have to lie down, and let the day end, and let the God who made the sea and the dry land look after the things you could not.

Breathe out slowly. Let your shoulders go soft. If there is anyone you are angry with, put them down for tonight, in the shade of a very large plant. They will be there in the morning. So will the mercy.

Now, notes for the curious, which we do at the end of every episode, so that you know what you have just been told.

Everything in the main story comes from the book of Jonah, which is four short chapters long, and which both the Catholic and Orthodox Churches receive as Scripture. We have followed it closely, and where we quoted, we gave the sense of the standard English translations, in our own wording for the ear. The figure of Jonah son of Amittai is also named in the second book of Kings, as a prophet in the days of Jeroboam the second of Israel. Beyond that we know nothing about his life.

Scholars have long discussed how the book was written and when, and how it should be read, as a history, as a parable, or as something between the two. The Church has received it with great reverence, and Christians have understood it in the light of the Lord's own words about the sign of Jonah, in the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke. We have left the question of its form to the scholars and the Church, and told the story as the book tells it.

What the episode made up is the colour: the harbour at Joppa, the captain and his sailors talking among themselves, Jonah's grumbling, and the cows in the sackcloth, which is only our way of picturing what the king's decree says. We have not added any event or any meaning. What the book says, the book says, and the rest is the narrator.

One last note. The Hebrew word for the creature that swallowed Jonah means simply a big fish, and the whale in the pictures comes from later translation. And the Hebrew word for the plant is not certain. We have left both as the book leaves them.

That's the story of the prophet Jonah for tonight. The Orthodox Church keeps his feast on the twenty-second of September, and the Catholic martyrology on the twenty-first. Thank you for listening to Saints by Candlelight. If you enjoyed it, share it with someone who could use a gentle story at the end of a long day. And may the Lord, who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, go after whatever in you has wandered, bring you home quietly, and give you rest. Goodnight, and God bless.

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