Jonah is a Parable filled with comedy, symbol, irony, exaggeration, satire, allegory and theater.

Jonah is a Parable filled with comedy, symbol, irony, exaggeration, satire, allegory and theater.

Why did this story survive? Why did people find this story important and worth telling and preserving? What does it tell us about how they understand who they are and who God is? For the people who first heard this story, how would they have heard it?

1 The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: 2 Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me. 3 But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. Jonah 1:1-3 (NIV)

He was called to turn his allegiance from the boundary that had given a sense of safety and certainty to the uncontainable God who is God over all boundaries. He was to turn his attention from the boundary that had kept the enemy out to the image of God in the enemy on the other side of it. - David Blower

Egypt -> Sinai -> Jerusalem -> (kingdom split) -> Assyria/Babylon -> Jerusalem

931 BC Monarchy of Solomon: 12 tribes split over issues of excessive taxation Northern Kingdom Israel: 10 tribes formed an Independent Kingdom 721BC 10 northern tribes are taken into captivity by Assyria 586 BC Southern Kingdom Tribe was conquered, temple destroyed, Babylon exiled.

Assyria was the first proper empire in history (2300BC-600BC - nearly 2,000 years)

They were the first empire to attempt globalization, the first to embark on the concerted project of making the known world Assyria. They were the first to make Assyrian citizens of peoples who were not Assyrian and who lived in the faraway lands they had conquered. They were the first to try to impose one language upon the many peoples across their conquered dominion, so that native languages were

lost and the Aramaic tongue of the Assyrians prevailed; so that six hundred years after the fall of the Assyrian empire we find that Jesus is still speaking the language of that empire. They were the first to form a standing army. Their fetish for violence and their imperial spirit expressed itself in their way of decimating not only peoples, but also peoplehood, by deporting the surviving peoples of conquered lands

and scattering them across the empire until the various languages, religions, stories and cultures of vanquished peoples were gradually dissipated and lost in the imperial mush; until the world was Assyria. - David Blower

Invading is what happens when you raise an army and march into another country and take it over using force, power, and violence. Deporting is what happens when you capture the inhabitants of a country and forcibly remove them from their homes, jobs, towns, and land and then take them far away. Laying siege is what happens

when you surround a city with your army and sever the city from its food and water sources so that people surrender.

1 Woe to the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims! 3 Charging cavalry, flashing swords and glittering spears! Many casualties, piles of dead, bodies without number, people stumbling over the corpses 5 I am against you, declares the Lord Almighty. I will lift your skirts over your face. I will show the nations your nakedness and the kingdoms your shame. Nahum 3:1,3,5 (NIV)

Jonah was not called to criticize the enemy from a distance. Nor was he called to muster force or resistance, as he had been in his previous job. Rather he was called to go to the terrible other in search of the image of God.

Jonah is the only prophet in the Hebrew Bible to have ever turned a calling down.

Jonah doesn t want to go and preach to the Ninevites because, like a member of any group, he does not like his God caring about these people!

The fact that some scribe decided to write down this story of God s compassion for a people who had, by time of composition, long since conquered Israel and subjected them to all its routine horrors is remarkable. The fact that the book was not rejected, banned, and burned by sensible people for its sympathy toward evil seems to

me inexplicable. The fact that it was then selected to be canonized in the Jewish Bible is, finally, miraculous.

Are you aware of your Nineveh? Are you aware of your Tarshish? What is the Divine voice promoting you to do? Where is the Divine voice prompting you to go? Instead of thinking, How could Jonah be like that?, let s ask ourselves, How are we like Jonah? Can we find the image of God in our enemy?