Something Greater Than Jonah

“A violent squall came up and waves were breaking over the boat, so that it was already filling up.  Jesus was in the stern, asleep on a cushion.” (Mk 4:37-38)

When I approached the gospel reading for today, I must confess that my first thought was: again?  Again, the storm at sea and the incongruity of Jesus taking a nap on a cushion?  Again, the fear and desperation of the disciples who wake him, saying: do you not care?  Again, the rebuke, the stillness, and the accusing question: why were you afraid?  Again, the question of faith: who is this?  We heard it from Dom Mauro-Giuseppe in his circular letter for a time of pandemic; we heard it from Pope Francis in his address for the extraordinary Urbi et Orbi blessing in the early days of lockdown.  We have heard it again and again as the go-to image for a world in crisis.  It seems to be the story most turned to in any kind of personal difficulty.  Has it become a cliché?  Just a source of shallow consolation?  Life is stormy; God is sleepy; we want him to prove his power; he does so, while telling us we should have had enough faith not to need it.  Then comes the next storm.  Repeat.  Or so the story sounds to the ear too weary to listen.  I was rescued from this train of thought by a word from Dom Bernardo Oliveira, in a letter he wrote to the Order about lectio divina:
“The fool falls into the temptation of saying: I already know this text!  The wise man knows that it is one thing to know the chemical formula of water and another to savor it by a spring on a summer’s day.” (Bernardo Oliveira, Circular Letter, 1993)
Yes, we know the story.  But today we are invited to taste it anew.

The way in for me this time was the sleeping figure on the cushion.  My mind was drawn to another sleeper on a storm-tossed ship: Jonah.  Jonah is someone I feel great affection for, perhaps because he is such an anti-hero, and yet the writers of the Gospels pay him the enormous compliment of making him a figure of Christ.  Remember when the people asked for a sign?  Jesus refused to add anything to the “sign of Jonah” already given, except: “See, something greater than Jonah is here!” (Mt 12:41).  The sign of Jonah.  What is it exactly?  Is it the three days and nights in the belly of the fish pointing to the death and resurrection of Christ?  Or the proclamation of repentance to a foreign people, pointing to God’s offer of salvation to all?  Or is it both, and everything else to be found in this short but delightfully eccentric book of the bible?

Back to the sleeping Jonah in the ship.  Why is he there?  Because he has a problem with God’s mercy.  Perhaps he saw the forgiveness that would be extended to foreigners and refused to play any part in it.  Perhaps he was ashamed to take on his lips words of judgment that contained mercy within them when he himself was so ripe for judgment because lacking in mercy.  Fleeing is futile though because the God of mercy is inescapable.  Everything speaks of him.  The wind and the sea speak of his urgent encouragement to repentance.  The creaking and groaning ship speaks of human willfulness at the point of capitulating under pressure of grace.  Jonah is hiding from all this.  Ensconced in the hold, he closes his eyes and stops his ears.  He sleeps – a deliberate effort at insensibility, a welcoming of oblivion.  “I will wake up either dead or in Tarshish,” he tells himself.  He has no thought for the desperate struggle of the sailors, for the suffering and great danger he is exposing them to by his resistance to grace.

Jonah’s lack of integrity cannot go unnoticed.  “Who are you and what have you done, you who have endangered our lives by your flight from the God of land and sea?  What shall we do?”  All of a sudden, Jonah finds himself thrust into the role of prophet, asked to diagnose and treat his own malady for the salvation of others.  He knows what to do.  He must give himself up to the fury of wind and waves, not out of some infantile tantrum that would destroy all rather than submit, but because it has become clear that he cannot take the ship and its passengers down with him.  As they throw Jonah into the sea, these worshipers of pagan gods cry out “Do not hold this against us!”  Their answer comes immediately with the quieting of the waters.  They worship the Lord of land and sea.  And Jonah?  His self-abandonment has left him in the hands of a suddenly gentle God.  This is the sign of Jonah, no less than what comes later.  His greatest act was to allow himself to be thrown overboard, even to ask for this as the only way to save the others.  And this is so even though we know that his will is not converted nor his heart pure.  In spite of himself, he was a prophet and the means of salvation for many.

I think Jesus loved Jonah too.  I think he loved him as the perfect image of human nature, wounded and wrong-headed, capable of being turned around, of moments of clarity and goodness, but forever falling back into old patterns.  This person, whether resisting, refusing, sleeping, waking, crying out, following, falling, complaining is continually under the mercy of God, whether this mercy takes the form of a storm at sea or a great big fish or a castor bean plant.  This is the sign of Jonah: the human person loved by God.  Loved enough to be pursued relentlessly.  Loved enough that God would take on himself this human nature.  The Jesus who steps into the boat and falls asleep puts himself into Jonah’s shoes, and into ours.

From the belly of the fish, Jonah prays:
“Out of my distress, I cried to the Lord, and he answered me.  From the very depths of Hell, I cried, and he heard my voice.” (Jon 2:2)
The liturgy places these words on the lips of Christ on Holy Saturday.  Jonah is not worthy of the Christological interpretation this implies.  This is the cry of the One who learned obedience from what he suffered, the Suffering Servant, the Faithful and True.  How could Christ take upon his clean lips the words spoken by this man of unclean lips?  Does Christ thereby sanctify this cry retroactively – for all who went before, as well as proactively – for all who come after?  There is something greater than Jonah here.  Could it be that Jonah encountered one like a Son of God, walking in the belly of the fish, and like those three children in the furnace, sang a song whose words were given him from above?  We take these words onto our lips as well.  What if my song of lament, petition and thanksgiving could be taken onto the lips of Christ and so made clean?  What if my ill-fated sea voyages away from the will of God could be redirected by the insistence of his mercy?  What if my stubborn sleep in the hold could be turned into a willingness to be cast out on behalf of the other, and so still the storm?  What if my begrudging cooperation with this merciful will could be transformed into the salvation of a multitude?  What if my sullen refusals of life could be worn down by the persistence of a God who won’t let go?

There is something greater than Jonah here.
There is something greater than each one of us here, in the humble fabric of our daily lives and struggles.  Like Jonah, we are unworthy bearers of the heavy, lurching image of the Savior.  To bear the name of Christian sometimes seems an embarrassment.  We may run from it as Jonah did from being a prophet.  But Christ is not ashamed to be called our brother.  He steps into the boat and lays his head upon the cushion.