I was the second child of a typical family in the mid-50s and mid-60s. It was a time when having six children in a family wasn't considered unusual. Both my parents were educators in the public school system. So telling stories was second nature to them.

If you follow the cartoon strip Calvin and Hobbes©, you already know that the main bedtime storyteller was Calvin's dad. My father was like that; one of my most cherished memories was his storytelling. He had this green-colored hardbound book titled Bedtime Bible Stories. One of my favorites was a story about a man thrown overboard a ship and then got swallowed by a giant fish. We kids must have listened wide-eyed; he showed us the page with a line drawing of a man standing near a humungous open-mouthed fish.

You have already guessed it: Jonah.

The Book of Jonah is one of the shortest books in the Bible. Each of its four chapters can be summarized in a single paragraph with at most, four sentences.

  • Chapter 1:
    • Jonah is ordered by God to preach repentance to the sinful people of Nineveh, but he decides to flee in the opposite direction.
    • God hurls a storm at the ship where Jonah is, and Jonah offers to be thrown overboard to stop the storm.
    • The sailors throw him overboard.
  • Chapter 2:
    • God sends a fish to swallow Jonah whole but not eat him.
    • He offers a prayer of thanksgiving to God.
    • After three days and nights, the fish spits out Jonah on dry land.
  • Chapter 3:
    • Jonah is ordered a second time by God to preach repentance to the sinful people of Nineveh.
    • Jonah starts to preach repentance, anticipating taking three days to preach to the whole city.
    • But after one day of his preaching, the whole of Nineveh repents, with its king leading the way by wearing sackcloth and sitting on ashes.
    • Even Nineveh's animals go on fast as a sign of repentance, leading God cancelling his planned destruction of the city.
  • Chapter 4:
    • Jonah is disappointed that the Ninevites repented, so he sulks and asks God to kill him since he prefers to die rather than live because he foresaw that God would decide to be merciful to the Ninevites.
    • God causes a gourd plant to protect Jonah from the sun and then later sends a worm to cause the plant to wither and expose Jonah to the sun's overbearing heat.
    • Jonah asks God to kill him because he prefers to die rather than suffer discomfort because of his lost shade. God confronts him over his greater concern for a plant that he did not plant than for more than the 120,000 persons and their animals who could have been punished if they had not heard his preaching of repentance.

The crowd that our Lord was facing knew the story of Jonah. It must have really upset them when they were told that they would see only the sign of Jonah.

The sign of Jonah for the Ninevites was not Chapter 2, in which Jonah was swallowed by a big fish and spat out alive after three days and three nights. It is unlikely that Jonah told them the story. The sign was Chapter 3. The Ninevites repented because of Jonah's preaching. Jonah was a Jew; the Ninevites, Assyrians. If you were a Ninevite, would you have listened to a member of your rival nation preaching the destruction of your proud city?

The crowd gathering before Jesus would have remembered that Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire. It was a painful reminder because the Assyrian Empire ended the Northern Kingdom of Israel and leveled Jerusalem around 700 years earlier.

In effect, they were being told, to their faces, that, unlike the Ninevites who listened to preaching rather than look for a miracle or spectacular deed, they were unwilling to listen to somebody preaching a God of mercy and compassion.

It must have annoyed them more because they were then reminded that the queen of the south, the Queen of Sheba, clearly a Gentile, went out of her way to listen to the wisdom of Solomon. There was now somebody preaching to them who was greater than Solomon because his words were imbued with power; they were words of healing.

However, we should not be too quick to judge the crowd for acting the way it did.

We probably act the same way.

Don't we look for 'signs' to do the right thing?

That bit of hesitation that kicks in when we're about to do something that, by gut feel, we suspect to be inconsiderate? We can ignore them till they no longer happen, because being insensitive has, by stages, hardened into a habit.

But aren't those bits of hesitation calls to repentance?

When we allow the harsh language of social media to be the currency we trade in too, and we're reminded to put on the brakes, and we don't, aren't we like the crowd too.

When we choose to be petty, when we allow hard-heartedness to enter our hearts so that we miss the bigger picture of God's compassion but focus on punishment and vindictiveness, we will miss what the crowd missed too.

The crowd should have recalled a portion of Chapter 2 of the Book of Jonah. Jonah's Prayer:

When I became faint, I remembered the LORD; My prayer came to you in your holy temple. Those who worship worthless idols abandon their hope for mercy. But I, with thankful voice, will sacrifice to you; What I have vowed I will pay: deliverance is from the LORD.

Jonah 2, 8 – 10

We should, too.

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