Us versus them (and how not to get swallowed by a giant fish)

A long time ago the ancient Jewish people told a story about a prophet who didn’t want to obey God and so got swallowed by a giant fish. It’s a fantastical story about a guy named Jonah, but it’s not meant to be read as literal. When you read it literally you end up doing weird Christian things like trying to explain how a guy could live in a fish for three days. And you get obsessed with demonstrating the reasons why you think it could have technically happened exactly this way, all so that you can defend the bible and simultaneously miss the point of the story.

Because the story of Jonah is a satirical prophetic parable. It’s supposed to be funny. And confrontational. And challenging. The story is about a prophet from the nation of Israel, and about a city called Nineveh, which is not in Israel. Nineveh was the capital city in the ancient nation of Assyria. Israel and Assyria are not friends. They are enemies. The Assyrians are Evil. Violent. Enemies. The Israelite prophet Nahum called Nineveh a “city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims.”

So they’re not on great terms.

And this prophet Jonah is called to go and preach in Nineveh because of how terrible it is. Now if you’re the original Jewish audience, you know how this story is supposed to go. Jonah will obey, because he’s a prophet of the one true God. He will go, pronounce judgement, and they’ll ignore it because they’re evil. And then they’ll be judged. That’s how the story is supposed to go. But Jonah doesn’t obey; by the third verse he has already run away (this is obviously not something the prophets are supposed to do). And he runs to a place called Tarshish and hitches a ride on a boat. But God causes a storm to rise up and everyone gets terrified. They all pray to their gods. Not Jonah though, he doesn’t pray. He says, throw me overboard and you’ll be fine.

So they do. And they ‘cry out to the Lord’ letting him know that they have obeyed him. The pagan foreigners are the obedient and prayerful ones. The prophet of God is the hopeless one. Jonah gets swallowed by a big fish and survives in there for a few days. While he’s there he has a prayer time and promises that he’ll do the right thing. So the fish vomits him up on to the dry land. So now Jonah does obey God and goes to the city of Nineveh. Good one Jonah. We have now all learnt an important lesson about obeying God because otherwise God will swallow you with a fish.

Except that’s not the end of the story. The story isn’t done.

Jonah turns up and gives the worst prophetic word in the history of Israel. It is 8 words long. And he doesn’t even give the opportunity to change. He just turns up and says “everything is gonna burn.” And he doesn’t come before the king; he’s only on the outskirts of the city when he gives his pronouncement. There’s no Moses like showdown before Pharaoh, he just walks into the outer suburbs and drops his 8 word proclamation of doom. He doesn’t give it poetic flair. He doesn’t even say it’s a message from God. 

The worst prophet ever.

But the whole city repents. They all get in the appropriate repenting clothes – sackcloth and ashes. But for the first time ever, they also put all the animals in sackcloth and ashes too. Hilarious.

And God forgives them.

So Jonah gives the worst prophecy ever recorded, against the worst of Israel’s enemies – who they hate – and he is the most successful out of any prophet in the entire Hebrew texts.

And still the upside down story doesn’t stop. 

It turns out that the reason Jonah didn’t want to go in the first place was not because he struggled with obedience, but because he didn’t want his enemies to be forgiven. So when he does go, and they repent and God inevitably forgives them, he asks God to take away his life. He goes out and sits down somewhere outside the city in the hot sun and wants to die.

THE END.

So firstly, this is a funny story. It’s supposed to be funny, that’s the whole point. But secondly, it’s supposed to slap the audience in the face while they’re laughing. Because the whole point, other than being funny, is that it exposes their attitudes to the Assyrians. They are like Jonah. They don’t want their mortal enemies to be forgiven. The story was challenging their judgement of people who they thought they could legitimately judge.

In many respects, perhaps not all that much has changed. We live in this time where things seem to be getting increasingly polarised, and you know this if you’ve ever spent some time watching the news, following Trump and Brexit and politics, or just reading the comments thread on a news article and seeing people respond to one another on social media.

Things can escalate very quickly.

Everybody is called names. Labelled. Put in a box. You said that so you fit here and you’re obviously this kind of person. And this spirals outwards. Our fear of difference can lead us to make profound and troubling judgements about others.

It’s their fault we’re in this mess.

And this has really important implications for us as people, and as a society. Instead of listening and developing greater understanding for one another, we’re growing more and more distant from those who disagree with us. And in the story of Jonah, we are asked profound questions about ourselves.

How do we respond to those who are different from us, to those we disagree with? How do we act towards those who are on the other side of whatever conflict we find ourselves in? Are we like Jonah, and the first audience to this story? Do we need to be reminded of grace and compassion, not just towards “us” – which is important - but also toward those who are nothing like us? That our judgements about others are not always a true reflection of what’s going on? Because what we see playing out on the big stage of public conversations about political and economic realities, is really only an amplification on what goes on internally in us all the time about people we encounter in our day-to-day lives. 

But perhaps in a world where people seem to be less and less kind toward one another, we could be offered a different imagination; a different vision of the world. I don’t think this is about avoiding difficult issues and just holding hands and saying all sides are the same. Sometimes we have to name things. We have to name racism and bigotry and violence and narcissism and all of these things for the profoundly destructive forces that they are.

But we must also recognise that underneath those forces are people, people who have lost their way, who need transformation and liberation. Those people who are the most violent and destructive are often those people who have lost touch with what it really means to be human. And if we strip the ‘other’ of their humanness too, then we fall into the same sick system. A system that we ultimately turn back on ourselves.

Because when we are too quick to see the world in terms of those bad people ‘out there’, and the good people ‘in here’, we simultaneously demonise the other while cultivating a creeping worry that we’re really not as good as that which we claim to be. We start to subconsciously hate the parts of ourselves that don’t live up to the good we want to be, and then we project that hatred out onto others. Or we spend our time suspiciously evaluating everyone on our side to make sure they maintain the purity of our group, our views and our rightness. We can become fundamentalists no matter where we sit on the spectrum of views.

I know that there are evil, corrupt and broken things happening in the world. I know that there are victims and there is oppression. But when we stand and say ‘this world must be different’ we must also stand and say ‘I must be different’. Starting here helps me to not pretend; and it protects me from my own narcissistic tendencies. It is the start of my own liberation and transformation. In this way, the transformation of the world is somehow connected to the transformation of my own soul.