The book of Jonah

The book of Jonah in the New American Bible.

A classical misreading of the book

Fr. Robert Barron discuss the book of Jonah in, "Following the Call of Christ: Biblical Stories of Conversion."

In his first talk on Bartimaeus, Barron quotes Origen as saying, "We should reverence every word of the Scripture the same way we reverence every particle of the Sacred Host." As he begins to tell the story of how Jesus healed Bartimaeus, Barron says, "Every detail matters."

Barron forgets his own precepts in his third talk on "Jonah and the Great Fish."

Instead of attending to the words and details that are actually in the book, he distorts the narrative. The things he says are beautiful and true, worthy of prayer and meditation, but they are not in the book of Jonah itself.

Great and Beautiful Truths

"It is an archetype of the spiritual life. We also find in this story the basic steps of spiritual conversion."

"The basic truth of the Bible: we are a called people."

"The biblical heroes are placed in the passive voice--all of them. ... We are a summoned people."

"All of us are called. All of us have a mission."

John Henry Newman: "We've all been made for a definite purpose."

"The central drama of the spiritual life: What do we do with the call? The saint is the one who responds so fully to that call that she makes it the central organizing principle of her life. ... We sinners, to varying degrees, we're the ones who hop on boats to Tarshish. We know what God wants, and we move in the opposite direction."

Baron gets that part of the story straight. God commands Jonah to preach against Nineveh, but Jonah gets on a boat headed to Tarshish, which, in Biblical times, was as far away as Jonah could get from where God wanted him to be.

"The Jonah Temptation: to hop a boat to Timbuktu when God calls."

When we resist our call, storms kick up. Trouble ensues. We've been made for a definite purpose. When we resist it--trouble, storms, difficulty.

Not just for Jonah, but for all whose lives are intertwined with his.

It is at this point that Barron departs from the Biblical narrative, substituting a story of his own invention. See the next section for a diagram of how his story departs from the text.

What does that great symbol mean? Our wills, when they are resistant to God, need to be swallowed up by the divine will.

Jonah is caught, swallowed, enveloped by the divine will, and that is all to the good.

Dante: "In Your will is my peace."

Jonah's story resembles those of Joseph and Moses.

How do we read the times when we feel swallowed up by the whale? The times of darkness, of dryness, of despair. Times we feel we've lost our way, times we feel we're not getting what we want. Our plans are not being fulfilled. "My life's not going where I want it to go!"

We can read them as simply dumb suffering, or we can read them as the discipline of God, as the swallowing up of our wills so as to try us and test us and conform us unto the divine will.

A beautiful detail in this book is that Jonah prays from the belly of the whale. Good. God's everywhere.

There are excellent reasons to think that the Psalm of Thanksgiving does not belong in the book of Jonah. I agree with the moral Barron draws from the story, but I don't think his version of the story is accurate.

God can hear.

So it is sometimes that the darkest periods in our lives, the driest, most difficult periods, might be precisely the vehicle through which God is bringing us back to precisely where He wants us to be.

One of the funniest part of the story: Jonah preaches, and everybody repents. Every single person, from the king to the cattle--the cattle put on sackcloth and ashes. They repent, too!

This is indeed funny, but Barron overstates the case. The King orders that the cattle fast with the people. Extending the fast to animals is ridiculous, but not as ridiculous as the thought that the cattle needed to repent.

"By decree of the king and his nobles, no man or beast, no cattle or sheep, shall taste anything; they shall not eat, nor shall they drink water" (3:7).

When we start cooperating with God's will, miraculous things happen. That's when the grace of God flows through us, when we begin cooperating with His will. But Jonah needed the disicpline of the fish to bring him precisely there.

There is no evidence in the rest of the book that Jonah had become a faithful servant of God. I argue that the meaning of the book depends on Jonah's character remaining basically unchanged throughout. See below where I talk about the moral of the story.

Hans Urs von Balthasar: "In the biblical vision, mission and person are tightly linked." That means you know who you are when you find your mission and you do it.

You become a new person when you take on this mission from God.

When the call comes, listen to it. Don't run to Tarshish. And then you find out who you are.