As many of you will know, this month sees the deadline for the last (and majority) of my second-year essays. As a consequence, lately my mind has been filled with the variety of questions I’ve been trying to answer. Right now I’m just finishing up an assignment to translate a chapter of Jonah and then write about what we can learn from what is going on in the story. There are a number of fascinating things about the story of Jonah, the most significant maybe, is that it is written in a style that no other book in the Bible is written in. It could be described as a satire. Everything is written in ridiculous extremes; the city of Nineveh is described as being larger than even a modern-day city and even the animals are asked to clothe themselves in sackcloth in repentance. It’s almost in the style of a comic book with its over dramatic hyperbole. And none of the characters behave as the reader would expect. The man of God intentionally does the opposite of what God tells him, whilst those who don’t know God and are the ones who behave as the man of God should.
It all leads the reader to as lots of questions as nothing is as you’d expect. Why on earth would Jonah not just trust that God knew better than him? How could a wicked people change their behaviour so quickly for a God they didn’t know? How was Jonah’s terrible speech so effective? We live in a culture obsessed with answers and clarity. So when we come to reading and translating the Bible, we have a tendency to try to remove the mystery, iron out the quirks and answer the questions. But the clever and quite beautiful thing about Jonah (and much of the Bible) is the power of the questions it makes you ask. It’s not that there aren’t answers to be found, although I believe there are some mysteries that were never made to be solved, but it’s what happens along the journey of asking them. By being forced to wrestle with Jonah’s behaviour and motivation, we come to a point where in frustration at Jonah, we realise that we can be just as inconsistent and end up having to ask the same questions of behaviour and motivation of ourselves – often with equally unsatisfactory answers. The world is not simple and straightforward, but complicated and confusing, and I think that this is never more evident than in ourselves. The mysteries of the Bible help us to explore these things.
Michael Jackson once said; “If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself, and make a change”. There is wisdom in this sentiment. Not that we are all that is wrong in the world, but that we are all far from perfect and that our own behaviour is the thing that we have the most power to change. The Bible shares God’s heart to help us become the fullness of who we were meant to be. Not to stop being ourselves, but to be fully ourselves, each with our own unique and beautiful personalities, abilities and desires, which God loves so deeply. When we pursue God’s desire for us, we make the world a better place, and we help inspire those around us to do the same.
Originally written for the June 2023 ABC Newsletter
Comments