Summary of A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment by Fr. Paul Murray, OP

Introduction

“One clear indication of the importance of the book of Jonah is the fact that Jonah is the only ancient prophet with whom Jesus identifies himself in a dramatic way in the New Testament, and to whom he refers explicitly by name [see Matt. 12:38–42; Matt. 16:1–4; and Luke 11:29–32]. As soon, however, as we turn to read the book itself, with the thought of the book’s importance in our minds, we find ourselves at once somewhat bewildered. For the so-called “book” turns out to be only two pages long [48 verses]; and Jonah, the prophet, a prophet of only one short sentence. Even more surprising, Jonah is—sad to say—no hero. In fact, if anything, he’s a sort of anti-hero. Normally we think of prophets as men of character. But in this case, all that we can say of Jonah is that, in the Irish sense of the word, he’s a character!” (6).

Fr. Paul Murray says that the book of Jonah is “the most profoundly Christian of all the books in the Hebrew Bible and the book from which we have the most to learn at the beginning of this new millennium” (6). To show this, he structures his wonderful book around 3 lessons.

1: Obedience to the Word: The Lesson of the Wild Storm

“Arise, go to Nineveh” (1:2 RSV-CE).

“These are words addressed uniquely to Jonah, requiring obedience. But over the centuries, Jewish and Christian commentators, preachers, and poets have, on occasion, extended the meaning of the text to include all of us in some sense, for all of us—if not now, sooner or later—are called to go and face some “Nineveh” of our own. There is a claim on us—on our time, on our love, on our courage—that we would rather avoid” (12).

“But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down, and was fast asleep” (Jon. 1:3-5).

“The understandable but desperate strategy of sinking down, as far as possible, into the stupor of sleep is, of course, simply a way of refusing to hear the voice of God, refusing to obey. I think it is no accident of grammar that our English word “disobedience” comes from the Latin obaudire (to listen), and so dis-obedience means, literally, “not to listen” (15). Fr. Paul Murray shows how there is both a psychological and spiritual tendency – referred to as “the Jonah-and-the-Whale complex” or “the Jonah syndrome”- in which we flee from God and take refuge in a safe, self-controlled environment.

“Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down, and was fast asleep. The captain came and said to him, ‘What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish’” (Jon. 1:5–6).

Fr. Paul Murray relates this text to our reluctance to evangelize today. “For, like Jonah, we have been given a task to complete and a message to preach to the world—but are we preaching it? Are we not, perhaps, living in a kind of bubble ourselves?” (16).

Here are some good questions to reflect on: Have we set sail in the opposite direction from God’s will? Have we spent our time, money, and energy on the wrong things? Are we asleep on the sides of the ship while the world is tossed in unprecedented bewilderment? Are we asleep while the world is afraid? We are silent while the world asks questions?

When, finally, Jonah emerges on deck, he finds himself forced to admit that he is the cause of all the trouble and that he should, therefore, be thrown overboard at once. “I know it is because of me,” he says to the sailors, “that this great storm has come upon you” (Jon. 1:12).

In spite of Jonah’s despair, the sailors, according to the book of Jonah, try their best to control the storm. They make a last, desperate effort to get Jonah and themselves safely back to land. But the sea becomes ever more turbulent. The reality of Jonah’s disobedience has to be faced, and the consequences accepted. The sailors take up Jonah in their arms and throw him into the deep.

2: In the Belly of Paradox: The Lesson of the Great Whale

“For 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” (Matt. 12:40 RSV-CE). In this passage, Jesus compares himself to Jonah, and he refers explicitly to a “whale.” The book of Jonah itself, however, speaks only of “a large fish”: “The Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (Jon. 1:17). It is a short statement, laconic almost to a fault, but it has captured the imagination of countless generations of believers, both Jewish and Christian.

Interestingly, the image of Jonah can be seen as one of the most popular – if not the most popular – images in the catacombs in Rome. “Louis Réau, in his work Iconographie de l’Art Chrétien, goes so far as to suggest that the image of Jonah arriving safely on shore after being ejected by the whale is “the essential image” for the early Christians. And why? Because it is an image that reveals, with great vividness, the hope of a sure resurrection and the promise of life eternal to the many Christian men and women undergoing persecution at the time” (23-4).

Before God commands the fish to spew his captive out onto the shore, Jonah, we are told, from inside the belly of the great fish, prays “to the Lord his God” (Jon. 2:2). The prayer or psalm is an impressive canticle of praise. But it is also deeply moving in the way it reveals the terror and distress of the stricken prophet: “The waters closed in over me; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped around my head at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever” (Jon. 2:5–6)

Jonah shows that “the moment of actual failure and breakdown—the experience of bewilderment in our lives—can be the moment of breakthrough, the experience of bewilderment in our lives—can be the moment of breakthrough, the moment when God’s grace finally shakes down all our defenses. And then, to our amazement, from out of the belly of failure, from out of the death of false dreams and false ideals and even from the jaws of a living hell, we can begin to experience the grace of resurrection” (30).

3: Compassion without Limit: The Lesson of the Wondrous Plant

After three days in the belly of the whale, Jonah is belched out onto dry land. But the story does not end there. “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you” (Jon. 3:1–2).

In all the whirligig of events that follow (an extraordinary drama in which our hero fails once more to emerge in an impressive light) there is one incident, one stunning image of beauty and repose, that is worth noting: the incident of the plant. Jonah, in a mood of depression and self-pity, has sought out a refuge from the heat of the day. According to the biblical text, “The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush” (Jon. 4:6).

The image of Jonah the prophet, stretched out, blissful under his plant, has often been represented in Christian art. For as powerfully and convincingly as any other image, it has offered or has seemed to offer to believers, a glimpse of the true ease of self that would be theirs in the kingdom of God. In Jonah’s case, however, the moment of bliss is short-lived. At dawn the next day, by God’s command, Jonah’s wondrous plant is attacked by a worm and withers. Jonah is furious. But God says to Jonah: “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And Jonah answered: “Yes, angry enough to die” (Jon. 4:9).

“Jonah’s rage against God, when he realizes that his plant is ruined, has been depicted, on occasion, by Jewish artists over the centuries. But Christian painters and sculptors have, for some reason, shown a marked reluctance to paint or sculpt the anger of the prophet. There is, however, one striking exception. On the great wall of the Sistine Chapel, Jonah is represented as a young man in a state of sudden and uncontainable fury. He is shown seated alongside his withered plant, and he is by far the largest figure in the chapel. In fact, so dynamic and so enormous is the painted image of the prophet that it can be said to dominate The Last Judgment fresco of Michelangelo.”

“As we begin to understand the message of the book of Jonah, one thing becomes clear: the prophet’s disobedience and despair were merely symptoms of a deeper problem: Jonah, in fact, was a religious bigot. He was a man of strong will but of narrow intelligence, a staunchly religious man, who simply could not bear the idea that Yahweh might want to extend his kindness to people who were not members of his own religion, and especially if those people were living in great sin as were the people of Nineveh. So when Jonah received the command from Yahweh to preach “against the city,” he realized, right from the beginning, that God’s threat of punishment was not serious; or, rather, it was serious, but only in the sense of being the expression of a merciful will or desire to call all people to repent and seek forgiveness.”

“For what Jonah guessed from the start—and the idea irritated him deeply—was that Yahweh would probably choose, in the end, not to punish any of the people of Nineveh. And in that event, he, Jonah, the chosen prophet of doom, after all his preaching, would appear like a false prophet or a complete fool. So Jonah ran away from God, not because he was afraid of God nor because he objected to being a prophet as such, but because of a religious obsession, a mistaken belief about the exclusivity of his own faith, a prejudice, a “crude exegesis” to which he clung tenaciously. The message of the book of Jonah is that God, the living God, is the God of all people and a God of compassion.”

The book of Jonah ends with a question. It is a question put to Jonah by God in response to the prophet’s bitter complaint about the withering of his plant: “Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (Jon. 4:10–11).

“The question, finding no answer from Jonah, has—if I’m not mistaken—a strange and sudden impact on those of us who, up to now, have been following the story. For, in the absence of any further word from God, or from his prophet, and with, in fact, the immediate and complete disappearance of Jonah from the scene, it is as if the question put to Jonah about prejudice and compassion is now, all of a sudden, and with a quite remarkable force and authority, directed at ourselves, the readers. We are no longer simply spectators of the Jonah story, but active participants. Each one of us must now respond to the challenge of God’s Word, and to the direct call for forgiveness. Here, on the open page in front of us—in the utter silence after the question—we are being offered the surprising freedom and opportunity to write out for ourselves, as it were, the final paragraph of the book of Jonah” (39).

“In the book of Jonah itself, by choosing to employ different types of humor, Jonah’s author not only “delights his readers,” as Hans Walter Wolff has observed, “but also makes it easier for them to perceive God’s loving laughter over narrow-minded piety.” Clearly, therefore, the humor in the work is no ornament. In fact, one can say, it forms part of the book’s core revelation. For what is at issue in Jonah, from start to finish, is the transcendent mystery of God’s freedom and God’s love. And after reading through the book of Jonah a number of times, one begins to sense that, at the heart of that freedom and that love, there is an unimaginable joy.”

“Of course, our own minds and hearts are more like Jonah’s than we care to admit. And that is why, like Jonah, we need, in the spiritual life, to be shocked and shaken out of certain fixed ways of thinking and feeling. We need to begin to recognize God in places where we would never, perhaps, have suspected his presence before, and not only in the big city, or in the places of our enemies, but also in the many seemingly banal and bizarre circumstances of our lives. But, to learn this lesson—really to learn it—we need, like Jonah, to undergo the grace and mystery of bewilderment. Of course, we need many other graces as well—for example, the grace to sit still, the grace to meditate, and the grace and the energy to work for peace and to fight for justice. But sometimes, it is only in the midst of the “tempest,” in the heart of a storm of circumstances that we can’t control, that we come finally to realize something of the wonderful mystery of God, and realize also how far beyond anything we can imagine or hope for are his plans both for ourselves and for the entire world. People who have never been bewildered in life, or in the spiritual life, are not likely to be in close or living contact with transcendent love.”

“This truth is something that Jean-Pierre de Caussade understood very well. There is a short prayer in his most famous work, Abandonment to Divine Providence, which has always impressed me. It is a prayer that asks God somehow to initiate us into the strange, necessary knowledge of bewilderment — a prayer that is in complete harmony, therefore, with the wisdom of the book of Jonah. I can think of no better way of ending a meditation entitled A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment than by drawing attention now to this short prayer: “O Divine Love, conceal yourself, leap over our suffering, make us obedient! Arouse us and confuse us. Shatter all our illusions and plans so that we lose our way and see neither path nor light until we have found you” (De Caussade, Sacrament of the Present Moment, 35).”