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Years ago, in the course of a bitter dispute within the Missouri Synod of the Lutheran Church, someone on the conservative side of the dispute was asked, “Do you really believe that Jonah was swallowed by a whale?”  To which the reverend gentleman replied, “I am prepared to believe that Jonah swallowed the whale, if that is what is in holy writ.” 
            Jonah in the whale appears with Noah in the ark in a satirical song from Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess:”  “It ain’t necessarily so.  The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible—it ain’t necessarily so.” 
            But the Jonah story is not simply a test of Biblical literalism or an occasion for light-hearted satire.  It may be compared with other stories from the ancient world that narrate a return to the darkness of the womb, followed by a re-emergence into the light of consciousness. 
            Before the discoveries of modern astronomy, the setting of the sun in the west was believed to be a night journey in which the dying sun passed under the earth, reappearing at dawn with new life and light. 
            The Jonah story appears in the New Testament as a sign of Jesus’ resurrection:
                        As Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale,
                        so will the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart
                        of the earth (Matthew 12:40).
In other words, the Jonah story prefigures the Paschal experience of passing through death to new life. 
            This experience is not limited to the separation of soul and body; it includes the defeat of our human ego, as we submit our intellect and will to the higher power in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28).
            The other day I passed a church on Bloor Street which trumpeted the advice: “Don’t leave your intellect at the door!”  Of course, religious experience does not mean accepting meaningless nonsense, as the response of the Missouri Synod Lutheran gentleman suggests.  But religion does entail a recognition of the limits of human intelligence and a willingness to venture into the darkness where God is (cf. Exodus 20:21). 
            The divine call is both fearful and fascinating.  It means leaving behind the props and safeguards of the secure existence to which we have grown accustomed.  Paul went through this experience when his encounter with the risen Christ on the Damascus Road led him to abandon the confidence in the flesh based on his impeccable credentials as a Hebrew of the Hebrews, from the tribe of Benjamin, and a follower of the strict sect of the Pharisees (Philippians 3:4-5), and to become a follower of the one whose disciples he had previously persecuted (v. 6).
            Paul’s experience of coming to know Christ and the power of his resurrection (Philippians 3:10) parallels the story of Jonah’s re-emergence to new life after three days and three nights in the belly of the whale.  But this was only the beginning.  Paul goes on to say,
                        Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,
                        I press onward to the goal (vv. 13-14).
May the example of Paul—and Jonah—inspire us to do likewise.             

October 22, 2006

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