Who is Jonah? What was he for?

I read Jonah the other day. All of it. In about 10 minutes. So should you. Come back when you're done. Or read it here.

There is a traditional understanding that comes along with this book that gets on my nerves a bit. The main reason is there is so much focus on the 'large fish' that we lose the main thrust of the message laid out. You can tell what it's building to with the way the book climaxes then has an abrupt finish with a lot of questions left unanswered. Some are rhetorical, but some (the ones we're asking) linger for a while until we forget about what we were doing and go back to the washing up.

Why shouldn't we look at the big fish?

When I read the Bible, and most prominently the Gospels, the temptation is to jump in towards the end, read about Jesus suffering, dying, and rising, and then sit back and think about what just happened. I've been doing a series of Gospel overviews with my church at the moment and the impression I get is that the death and resurrection of Christ is incredibly important to the book, but the build up and implications of the events of Easter are what surround it in a profound way that would make it a mistake to overlook them.

We have a danger, also, of reading Jesus into the book of Jonah too soon. What I mean by that is, rather than allowing the book of Jonah to help us understand Jesus (especially when Jesus talks directly about 'The Sign of Jonah'), we see the big fish and spitting out of Jonah onto dry land, and assume that Jesus was talking about that and that that is what the story of Jonah is for: To see Jonah being swallowed and spat out.

This is not what the book is about. We know this because Jonah wasn't called to be swallowed by a fish and then spat out again. And before I get a lot of angry replies to all the masses who follow this blog with a great zeal, I want to say that just because Jonah wasn't called to be swallowed by a fish, doesn't mean Jesus wasn't called to die and rise again, we just need to read the story of Jonah in it's own right before we jump to conclusions about the author's intent.

Jonah's calling was to go tell the Ninevites that they were on the verge of destruction. Ninevah wasn't a particularly friendly place, and, more importantly, it was a pagan city, not a Jewish settlement. Jonah was reluctant to tell this pagan populous that God was going to destroy them for two reasons. (a) They were not Jewish, and if he told them it would lead to (b) the chance that they would repent of their sin if they heard the message of judgment.

Edit: This was going to be a short summary, but it's turned into a bit of a longer exegesis. I hope I'm keeping you in suitable suspense.

Next time... The Build up.