Jonah’s message of comfort

It must have been dark in the belly of the whale. No horizon in sight. No hills. No plains. No rosy-fingered dawn. No marker of a new day. It was a time away, but not the one he was hoping for.

At the opening of the book of Jonah, the prophet had his sights set on the far distance. Tarshish might have been in Sardinia or in Spain. At any rate, it was far from Israel and far from the work to which he’d been called. A voyage by sea was dangerous, but also the quickest way to put a lot of distance between himself and his work

We all know what happened then. The storm. The fear. The mighty fish. And then, reduced horizons.

This isn’t a story we usually tell at Easter, although Jesus did mention the sign of Jonah in connection with his death and resurrection. Three days in darkness and then a return to light and life. But before the familiar folklore and symbolism, I found a surprise in the text.

Now, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai . . . Amittai means “my truth” or “truthful” – which makes Jonah literally the son of truthfulness. And yet his job was to offer comfort. He’s supposed to cry against wickedness so that Nineveh might be saved. Wickedness is supposed to result in consequences, and yet he’s supposed to offer comfort in the righteousness of God. So, the “son of truth” gets angry.

This is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.

He wants God’s justice, not God’s mercy. He wants the people to turn to God because God is good, not because God offers comfort. But this is a false opposition. Truth and comfort are not in contradiction.

In God’s hands

In a recent interview with Ezra Klein, the novelist George Saunders suggested that comfort is truth. Truth jars us out of falseness and what Saunders calls the sheer discomfort of trying to maintain a conflicted mind. He writes of “that holy moment when you turn to yourself and go, ‘Yeah, this isn’t really working.’ What a weight gets lifted!”

The truth of seeing our efforts for what they are can bring the comfort of knowing that we are ultimately in God’s hands. This, too, is grace. Darkness to light. The beach after the belly.

The Bible is peppered with these moments. After Jonah, we have Peter and Mary Magdalene and the woman at the well and Paul on the road. The balance between comfort and truth is different in each of their stories, as it is in each of ours, but in every life the horizons shift as again we are met by truth and comfort, by the living Light, the Truth and the Way.