Prayer 12: Jonah’s Prayers

Don: The story of Jonah is not really about Jonah, or about the Ninevites, or about the great fish that swallowed him. It is about god and god’s grace. Jonah’s first prayer, which occurs in the second chapter, teaches us as much about what is not good prayer as about what is good prayer.

Jonah’s [first] Prayer

Then Jonah prayed to the Lord his God from the stomach of the fish,
and he said,
“I called out of my distress to the Lord,
And He answered me.
I cried for help from the depth of Sheol;
You heard my voice.
“For You had cast me into the deep,
Into the heart of the seas,
And the current engulfed me.
All Your breakers and billows passed over me.
“So I said, ‘I have been expelled from Your sight.
Nevertheless I will look again toward Your holy temple.’
“Water encompassed me to the point of death.
The great deep engulfed me,
Weeds were wrapped around my head.
“I descended to the roots of the mountains.
The earth with its bars was around me forever,
But You have brought up my life from the pit, O Lord my God.
“While I was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord,
And my prayer came to You,
Into Your holy temple.
“Those who regard vain idols
Forsake their faithfulness,
But I will sacrifice to You
With the voice of thanksgiving.
That which I have vowed I will pay.
Salvation is from the Lord.”

Then the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah up onto the dry land.

In the case of Job’s prayer, which we studied last week, we noted that god’s grace undermined the cause-consequences conception of prayer, as well as the notion that god is in the business of answering prayers. This is evident also in Jonah’s prayer.

Jonah’s assignment from god was to go to Nineveh and persuade the inhabitants of that city to change their wicked ways and follow the true god. Jonah did not want to take the assignment, so he started heading “down” (the metaphor is significant) to try to escape it. He goes down to the port of Jaffa on the eastern Mediterranean, then down into the hold of a ship bound for Tarsius on the west end of the Mediterranean—practically the end of the world in those days, and falls asleep.

After the ship gets under way, a great storm arises. Jonah would have slept through it but he was woken by the gentile crew who decide that he caused the storm, when he confesses to them that he was running away from his Hebrew god. He offers to sacrifice himself so that the ship could be saved, and the crew reluctantly take him up on it and throw him overboard. And down he goes to the depths of the sea, like the sins of which Micah spoke, which were disposed of in the ocean so god would no longer have to look upon them.

It worked. The storm abated. Jonah must have expected to die, but by the grace of god he lived when a great fish swallowed him whole. He prays inside the belly of the fish, where he knows he must die and is already in the place of the dead, the repository of sin, a place where even god’s all-seeing eye is absent. His prayer includes no fewer than 14 allusions to Psalms.

To me the most significant verse in the prayer is perhaps verse 7:

“While I was fainting away,
I remembered the Lord,
And my prayer came to You,
Into Your holy temple.

It is perplexing and seems to be an example of how not to pray. Rather than confessing, Jonah seems to be saying that he did the right thing by remembering the Lord, implying therefore that it was his action, his prayer, that saved him. It undermines the truth that it was grace that saved him.

In the very next verse, where he is alluding to the gentile crew aboard the ship, who prayed to false gods to save them from the storm, Jonah again is trying to show how pious he is:

“Those who regard vain idols
Forsake their faithfulness,
But I will sacrifice to You
With the voice of thanksgiving.
That which I have vowed I will pay.

Again, this seems to me to undermine the grace that actually saved him. A strong theme of this prayer is that it was Jonah himself, in getting god to save him by acting piously, who was the hero here. It amounts to self-worship. He also seems to be saying that god’s grace would be wasted on idolaters such as the gentile sailors and the Ninevites. He is hinting that he still does not want to go to Ninehveh; the Ninevites might be converted, he thinks, but would soon revert to their old ways. It would be a waste of his time and of god’s grace.

There are 24 first-person pronouns in the prayer—almost a quarter of it! Yet there is not a word of confession, of repentance; merely a long description of events and of how pious Jonah became.

After this prayer, Jonah is vomited—a word signifying violence, ugliness, and distaste—by the fish (perhaps made to feel nauseous by it) onto the shore. He then goes to Nineveh and gets them to repent. God thereupon does what Jonah feared: He shows them mercy and grace, rather than destroying them. Jonah is terribly upset by this. Jonah 4:1:

But it greatly displeased Jonah and he became angry.

And then (Jonah 2-3) comes the second prayer of Jonah:

He prayed to the Lord and said, “Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that You are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity. Therefore now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for death is better to me than life.”

He is telling god that god is wrong—so wrong, that Jonah would rather die than suffer god’s grace and love for himself and others.

We have noted in our discussions about prayer that god often answers a prayer with a question. He does so now (Jonah 4:4):

The Lord said, “Do you have good reason to be angry?”

Here’s the remainder of the chapter (Jonah 5-11). Note that it too ends with a question from god:

Then Jonah went out from the city and sat east of it. There he made a shelter for himself and sat under it in the shade until he could see what would happen in the city. So the Lord God appointed a plant and it grew up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to deliver him from his discomfort. And Jonah was extremely happy about the plant. But God appointed a worm when dawn came the next day and it attacked the plant and it withered. When the sun came up God appointed a scorching east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint and begged with all his soul to die, saying, “Death is better to me than life.”

Then God said to Jonah, “Do you have good reason to be angry about the plant?” And he said, “I have good reason to be angry, even to death.” Then the Lord said, “You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?”

What does Jonah have to teach us about prayer?

Harry: The story highlights god’s grace. Jonah’s prayers try to rob god of his grace, and god is disgusted. The Ninevites worshiped a god that was half-fish, half-man. So they listened to Jonah—who emerged from the belly of a fish—because he seemed like a messenger from their own god. God would not have cared how the Ninevites came to believe in him, he only cared that they did. His mercy shines through this scripture.

Jay: Jonah helps answer the question of why god doesn’t give us the answers we want, and it shows that god will do the gracious thing, no matter what. Jonah seems to know this—it is why he is so angry—so either Jonah is enlightened or he is ignorant. I am not sure which!

Harry: It would be like god asking a modern fundamental Christian to save a group of atheist homosexual scientists. The fundamentalist doesn’t want grace and mercy for them—he wants retribution!

Jay: There is an allusion at the end of chapter 4 that the Ninevites really don’t get it, but they have shown remorse. It’s not about actually changing their ways, it’s about being forgiven, about receiving grace. To god, that was what was important. Whether they change their ways is not important.

Kiran: The gentile sailors tried hard to save Jonah before throwing him in the sea. They were setting a Christian example for Jonah,

Robin: This reminds me of Job, who also did not treat the might of god seriously.

Harry: Nineveh was extremely violent. God wants to stop the violence. Not just among the Ninevites but among all Mankind.

Don: When we pray, we often overlook the crucial fact that god is the god of all mankind; that he hears prayers sent to him from a variety of people and religions and so on. Jonah prays for relief from a certain death, and it is given to him in a way to make him understand god’s grace, which he of all people should understand after the fish incident, yet he doesn’t get it! It is puzzling that Jonah gets nothing out of his extraordinary experience.

Harry: Suppose that Jonah had understood it. He could have done so much more. He could have stopped wars. But because he would not let go of his self-centered views, this did not happen.

Kiran: Jonah hoarded the grace god gave him, rather than pass it on to others.

David: One is forced to read so much into this story that I question its validity. It is replete with bad messages: That god is a thug (Believe in me or I will punish you!”; that he is a magician (initiates and calms storms on demand); that a prophet of god would come within a million miles of thinking he could hide or escape from god! None of this makes any sense, so any lessons it may appear to contain about prayer are, to me, dubious in the extreme. And if this book is so off base, what about the rest of the Old Testament? There is some scripture where god’s light shines through; scripture that does not require feats of intellectual contortion to be made sense of. To me, if scripture does not touch my heart, it is not valid scripture, and I am sorry but Jonah does not touch my heart.

Harry: The story was written for a Jewish god, but god’s genius is that this story (and other Old Testament stories and even the scriptures of other religions) works for—applies to—everybody. God’s mercy and grace is, to me, visible in this story.

Don: I like this story in part because I can identify so often with Jonah, making the same mistakes he did. I feel a great personal involvement in this story. It speaks to my heart about how I ought to behave, but often do not, and gives me great comfort that even when I fail, god’s grace will still be there for me.

Robin: It shows that there are people who are easily led to belief in god, but they are not as many as those of us who have to get our belief the hard way, who make it difficult through our arrogance and false piety. As missionaries, our role is simply to pass on this message: hat god is love and mercy.

Michael: Jonah’s prayer was effective: He prayed for life, and he got it!

Harry: What was the purpose of the story? If it wasn’t about Jonah, then what? It was about a group of people, the Ninevites, who were persuaded to stop their wicked ways. But we see that historically god does not stop pain and suffering and violence. There’s only one way to do that, and that is that through you and me!

David: The problem for me is that the story does not leave the worldly solution to the people to work out. He threatens them to stop it or else! That is so un-Chrstian! So lacking in grace! Where is the grace in being vomited up by a magic fish apparently on the orders of a vengeful god. And where is the free will we are supposed to have?

Michael: God was trying to change Jonah’s view.

David: Scripture I find valid is scripture which teaches that the way to change is to acknowledge the inner light, to listen to god’s voice inside one’s heart.

Harry: I don’t think the threat Jonah made to Nineveh was the message god intended. I think he made the threats to goad the Ninevites, but he failed. They listened to god, instead.

Robin: At the beginning of the book, god tells Jonah to cry out against Nineveh’s wickedness. He does not say he is going to destroy it. In chapter 3, he tells Jonah to go to Nineveh and preach the message god gave him. But Jonah did not deliver that message!

Don: We’ll continue to work on this together.

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