And he prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster.” (Jonah 4:2 ESV)

Jonah’s motivation for fleeing from the presence of the LORD seems rather lacking.  He merely states what seems to be a generic platitude about God’s mercy as an excuse for directly disobeying the command of his god and employer.  Indeed, what he says is a refrain that echoes throughout the Pentateuch and the poets, often used in reassurance or in worship as opposed to a reason to run away from God. Yet, in his blatant misuse of such a seemingly simplistic theological point, Jonah demonstrates that even though he knew in his head that God was gracious and merciful, the reality of what he knew–the heart- and hand-component of knowledge–was clearly lacking.  The entire story of Jonah seems to revolve around Jonah’s disconnect with the mercy of God.  In the great storm of chapter one, it is the sailors who have compassion on Jonah and refuse to throw him over until there is absolutely no choice but to do so.  Meanwhile, Jonah demonstrates his “mercy” by resigning himself (and the sailors as well) to death in taking a nap during the storm.  In chapter three, it is the wicked and evil city of Nineveh that covers itself in sackcloth in hopes that “God may turn and relent and turn from his fierce anger” (3:9).  Jonah, however, shows no mercy and spends his time waiting for God to punish Nineveh.  Indeed, chapter four ends with a literal parable of God’s mercy and his attempt to reason with Jonah about it.

But why does Jonah not “get it”?  At the end of the book, the man who says while running away from God that “he fears the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (1:9) and who says a prayer extolling God’s salvation while in the belly of the fish, is sitting in the hot sun outside Nineveh, waiting to see if God would fulfill his prophecy and destroy the city.  And in this act, we may begin to discern Jonah’s motivations and the reason for the unusual events in the book: he is unable to understand one portion of God’s self-revelation to himself because he is too enraptured with another.  Perhaps he recalls God’s legislation of the death penalty for the false prophet in the book of Deuteronomy:

But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.’ And if you say in your heart, ‘How may we know the word that the LORD has not spoken?’—when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him.  (Deuteronomy 18:20-22 ESV)

It may very well be that Jonah’s fear that his identity as a true prophet of God–a very similar Jonah, son of Amittai is mentioned as a prophet in the book of 2 Kings–will be compromised that causes him to preempt the event and relinquish his prophet-hood in defeat and anger.  He–like we all too often do–seems to have forgotten that, just as it is God’s mercy that saved him from death in the sea, it is God’s mercy that made him a prophet in the first place.  But unlike Jonah–and unlike us as well–there was a better Jonah who in willing obedience abdicated his true identity as the very Son of God to become the ultimate “false prophet”, the Messiah who did not accomplish any of the things that his people expected him to accomplish, but gave up all on our behalf.  It was he who was so firm in his appreciation of God’s grace and mercy that he could confidently respond to his mockers:

“An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”  (Matthew 12:39-40 ESV)

Let us then who are in Christ, then, not shrink or flee, for “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:17-18 ESV).

He is risen.