What Storms and Fish Reveal (Jonah 2)

             In Jonah 1:3 we read that Jonah “paid the fare” to get on a boat that was headed to Tarshish.  Now the implication made here is that Jonah was not just paying for his own fare. That phrase “paid the fare” suggests he paid for the whole ship. We would say that Jonah chartered the ship. The implication is that Jonah is a dude who has to get somewhere fast. He walks up asks “How much is this ship?” Okay, well here is the cash.

Some would suggest that the journey to Tarshish from Joppa would take about a year by ship. So Jonah is a person who can afford to travel for the next year. Jonah can “pay the fare” and charter the whole boat and can travel for a year to the farthest possible place.

Jonah is an empowered man.

Jonah is a man of wealth.

Jonah is a man who can afford options.

God says he wants me to go to Nineveh? I don’t think so when I can afford to go the other direction for a year. This is a man of standing and wealth. I don’t have to do that because I have options. I don’t have to go this direction because I can afford an opposite direction. I don’t have to wait for a ship. I don’t have to wait for a spot on that ship. I don’t have to wait for the ship to leave. I can afford to have this boat go now. So the picture we are given at the start of Jonah chapter 1 is of a person who has options. Jonah is empowered and can go where he wants to go when he wants to go.

By the end of the Chapter 1 Jonah is stuck in a fish.  Jonah wanted to be thrown over so he could just die but that did not work. Jonah is in a state of not dead but not living. He is stuck in this fish place. An in between life and death place. This is somebody who has means and power who no longer has their resources to rely on. Storms and fish reveal and expose who Jonah really is. What the sailors do in storm is they start throwing cargo over.

Cargo is valuable.

Cargo is wealth.

You load the boat with things that you can exchange for money. But in the middle of the storm all of the stuff that meant something, that was worth something becomes heavy and threatens to bring the ship down. So the sailors are taking the things that used to be worth something that are now worth nothing and throwing them overboard.

            What the storm does is change what things are worth. Valuable things become worthless. What a storm does, what a fish does, is that it reveals who you are. Jonah can’t rely on wealth. Jonah can’t rely on power. Jonah can’t buy himself out of this one. He can’t cleverly think his way out of this one. It is just Jonah and nothing else. That is what storms do. We go through a storm and we find out what kind of a person we are. We find out what kind of a person we have become. We find out some essence of who we are at our core.

There is this story about Jesus and his disciples and they in a boat and a storm comes up (Matthew 8:23-27). The waves start to break over the boat. The boat is filling with water. Jesus we are told is sleeping. The disciples go wake and wake Jesus up. Jesus rebukes the wind and waves. The storm goes away. Then Jesus asks his disciples “Why are you so afraid?” The storm reveals an anxiety, a lack of faith, a lack of peace. The storm reveals all sorts of things about the disciples and Jesus points this out. Look at what this storm has dragged to the surface? Aren’t you guys farther along than that? Did you really worry? Did you really think that we would all just drown and I would just stay asleep? The storms of life have a way of revealing what really matters.

While Jonah is in the fish he says a prayer.  It is a very eloquent and long prayer. There are generally speaking two kinds of prayer. There are prayers of thanksgiving. When you have a meal you say grace as a way to pause and acknowledge from where the food came from. A prayer that expresses gratefulness. That is one kind of prayer. There is another kind of prayer. The other kind of prayer is basically – help! Dear God I have recently been ingested by a large marine mammal.

In the Bible the Book of Psalms is a collection of prayers. Those prayers can be placed into  two main categories. Prayers of thanksgiving and prayers of help or lament. There are 150 Psalms and one third of them are lament. When you compare Jonah’s prayer with the Book of Psalms you figure out that Jonah knew the Psalms. Just about each line from Jonah’s prayer is a line from one of the Psalms.

Jonah 2	Psalms
Jonah 2:3b	Psalms 18:7; 120:1
Jonah 2:4b	Psalms 18:6; 30:4
Jonah 2:5	Psalms 42:8
Jonah 2:6	Psalms 31:23; 5:8
Jonah 2:7	Psalms 18:8; 69:2f
Jonah 2:8	Psalms 18:17; 30:4; 103:4
Jonah 2:9	Psalms 142:4; 143:4; 18:7; 5:8
Jonah 2:10	Psalms 88:3; 31:7; 26:7; 50:14,23; 42:5; 116:7

When you look at the Psalms that Jonah is quoting in his prayer you discover that they are quotes from thanksgiving prayers. You would expect prayers of help. Instead Jonah prays a prayer of thanksgiving. Our assumption is that Jonah needs to be rescued from the fish. Yet what is going on here is much more interesting. You could put it like this:  We want to be rescued from the storms and fish when it is storms and fish that rescue us. Our thinking is that once you are in the fish and storm you will cry out for help. Instead, Jonah offers up thanksgiving.

The story begins with a guy who has wealth and options. This man can manage his own life. This man has means at his disposal. By the time you get to the fish you find someone who has been rescued from himself. Jonah gets rescued from his pettiness, selfishness, hardheartedness and a worldview in which everything revolves around him. Thank you God for rescuing me from me.

We want to be rescued from fish and storms but sometimes it is the fish and storms that rescue us. We resist the storm. We don’t want anything to do with the fish. And yet how many people do you and I know that went through a storm of life and either while in the middle of it or after the storm had passed said that the storm saved them. They might say that the storm shifted their priorities. The storm clarified and refocused them on what was most important. Sometimes storms save us. Maybe you find yourself in a storm swallowed by a fish. Desperately trying to get out of it. Perhaps the lesson is not how quickly God makes the storm pass or seeking out all the answers to the “why” kinds of questions.  Maybe the storm you are in is not out to destroy you but rescue you. . . from you.