Page 13 - NewsandViews Summer 2024

However, Jonah’s hilltop shelter doesn’t give enough protection against the fierce Middle-Eastern sun.
Only the reader understands that additional god-given shade has been laid on, in the form of a either a
fast-growing gourd in a nearby bush, or its large leaf canopy (depending on the translation). However,
before the next dawn, a worm gnaws at its roots; the gourd (or leaf canopy) shrivels and dies, exposing
Jonah (by inference) to sunstroke.

Cue Jehovah’s killer rhetorical Q&A for Jonah (and the reader): ‘Doest thou well to be angry.’ (KJV)
Jonah says: Kill me! Just take me! But he’s not selfless this time. And so the answer (and moral) which
has escaped Jonah is given: ‘You were more upset when a sheltering bush died overnight, leaving you
exposed, than at the prospect of the death of 120,000 souls. You were willing to sacrifice them, to
preserve your outworn revelation about the nature of your god.’

It is left to the reader to discern whether their thinking, attitudes and behaviours conform to the
revenant Jonah, foreshadowing Christ, or to the ‘unreconstructed’ minor prophet Jonah, throwing a
wobbly at the start and finish of the tale, rather than embrace a revelation of god custom-made for his
day.

Perhaps the stand-off between the Pharisees and Sadducees (collectively their generation’s
‘unreconstructed’ Jonahs) and the self-proclaimed ‘one greater than Jonah’, depicted in Matthew 12,
unlocks the riddle. Confronted by the One foreshadowed by Jonah the revenant, they find themselves
later near another hilltop, anticipating another sacrifice to preserve an expired revelation, serving
inflexible purposes, having become strangers to grace.

Is it possible, if like Jonah we do not continue to pay attention to ‘the still small voice’, instead relying
overmuch on past grace, we can find ourselves the stranger too, not recognising grace provided new
and fresh for each day’s needs, like manna in the desert? Sadly, I suspect so. From the cross, the Christ
prayed for forgiveness for the unreconstructed Jonah’s of his day. That there was one of their camp,
present when Stephen was stoned to death, who availed himself of such forgiveness, gives us all hope.

‘Onto a Vast Plain’ [Extracts]

… You thought you could trust that power

When you plucked the fruit.
Now it becomes a riddle again

And, you again, a stranger. […]

Be modest now, like a thing

Ripened until it is real,
So that he who [made you and] began it all

Can find you when he reaches for you.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems of God [translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macey]; Riverhead Books,
New York, (2005)

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