1.- Signals accompany Jesus. Nicodemus perceives it from far away. That is why he tells him: No one can perform miraculous signs like yours unless God is with him (Jn 3,2). Nevertheless, the Pharisees, who are closed to the signals, ask him a signal in order to test him. With a deep groan, Jesus said: No sign will be given to this generation (Mk 7,12). And also: No sign will be given them except the sign of Jonah (Mt 16,4). But, what is Jonah´s signal? Who is Jonah? Is his message a present one? Is it a fiction? Is it a God´s word experience transmitted in the prophetic and evangelic tradition? Is it a parable in action? Is it a living catechesis?
2.- Jonah´s, that in Hebrew means dove, is an Israeli prophet in the eighth century b.C. He contributes to the reestablishment of the limits of the country (2 K 14, 25). Nevertheless, Jonah is better known by the signal that has his name, a prophetic and evangelic tradition true jewel, that is necessary to recuperate and update. According to the ecclesiastic historian Eusebius of Caesarea (c. IV), “Jonah´s tail itself is a prophesy” (PG 22, 1140D); it is to say, it announces God´s word. The tail is written in third person: Was it orally transmitted first? Were details of it lost in the transmission process?.
3.- Like once Moses was sent to the pharaoh, Jonah receives the mission of going to Nineveh, Assyrian empire capital, to proclaim that their evilness claims to heavens: Go to Nineveh, the great capital and proclaim in it that its wickedness has reached me (Jon 1,2). The mission is surprising, but, above all, it is compromising, risky and dangerous. Jonah might live what psalm 55 says: If I had wings like a dove… In the city I see strafe and violence, crimes and injustice.
4.- Nineveh is in the Bible the enemy city, oppression and cruelty symbol against God´s people; above all, his king, a sovereign, despotic, rapacious, people ruler personage, whose illness appears the day of the payoff like a God´s judgment signal, who does not shut up before anybody (Is 10, 5-15). The city is bloody and booty, crack of whips, rumble of wheels and clatter of hoofs… the harlot is paying for her harlotries, her deadly charms, her sorceries, she traded nations with her prostitutions and caught peoples by her spells (Nh 3, 1-4). The Babylon in the Revelation also has these features, the prostitute who dwells in the seven hills (Rev 17, 1-9). History reports that Assyrian empire invades Israel on the year 721. On its part, Nineveh falls on the year 612 before the pressure of Babylonians, Medes and Scythians.
5.- Well then, Jonah is a prophet that runs away from his mission, he buys the ticket in opposite direction, as far as possible: Jonah decided to flee from Yahweh and go to Tarshish; he went down to Joppa, found a ship bound for Tarshish, paid the fare and boarded the ship (Jon 1,3). Nevertheless, the believer knows that he cannot flee from God: Where else could I go from your Spirit? Where could I flee from your presence? You are there if I ascend the heavens; you are there in I descend to the depths. If I ride on the wings of the dawn and settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand shall guide me and your right hand shall hold me safely (Ps 139)
6.- Jonah walks followed by God´s Spirit: Yahweh stirred up a storm wind on the sea, so there was a sea tempest, which threatened to destroy the ship. The sailors took fright, and each cried out to his own god. To lighten the ship they threw its cargo into the sea. Meanwhile, Jonah had gone into the hold of the ship, where he lay fast asleep (Jon 1, 4-5) The wind is so strong that menaces to destroy a good ship, a high sea ship: like the ships of Tarshish, shattered by a strong wind from the east (Ps 48, 7). And, life paradoxes, the prophet sleeps; nevertheless, the sailors (pagans) work and pray. They lighten the weight of the ship, throw away the ballast, but the true ballast is Jonah.
7.- The skipper approaches Jonah and tells him: What are you doing sleeping there? Stand up and invoke your God! Perhaps he will have pity on us and we will not perish. Then, they say to each other: let us cast lots to find who is guilty of this evil. They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. Then they tell him: Who are you, which is your work, where do you come from? He answers: I am a Hebrew and I worship Yahweh, God of heaven who made the sea and the land (Jon 1,6-9). One question: May God act where the man talks about luck and venture?
8.- The sailors discover that Jonah is fleeing from God. Seized with great fear and ask him: Why have you done this to us? What must we do to calm the sea? He told them: Pick me up and throw me into the sea. It will quiet down; for I know it is because of me that this storm has come. The sailors, however, still did their best to row back to land, but they could not, for the sea had grown much rougher than before. Then they called on Yahweh, saying: Oh Yahweh, do not let us perish for taking this man´s life; do not hold us guilty of shedding innocent blood. They took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm again (Jon 1, 10-15).
9.- Yahweh provided a large fish, which swallowed Jonah. He remained in the belly of the fish for three days and tree nights. From the belly of the fish Jonah prayed to Yahweh, his God. (Jon 2, 1-2). Is it a hyperbole, an exaggeration? Did Jonah fight to reach the coast? Did he get any help? Did he feel himself menaced by a large fish?. In any case, he is in danger of death. In the belly of the fish, Jonah is a symbol of so many situations in which human life is menaced (violence, injustice, illness).
10.- In this critical situation, the prophet prays with words taken out from the psalms: I call to the Lord in my distress, and he answers me (Ps 120,1). Out of the depths I cry to you, Oh Lord hear my voice! (Ps 130,2) I am sunk in the miry depths where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, swept and engulfed by the flood (Ps 69,3), your waves and breakers have gone over me (Ps 42, 8), I said in my fright: I have been cut off from your sight! (Ps 31,23). When shall I go and see the face of God? (Ps 42,3), the waters have come up to my neck, rescue me, lest I sink in the mire (Ps 69, 2.15), you brought me up from the grave (Ps 30,4), I called upon the Lord in my distress, I cried to my God for help, and from his temple he heard my voice (Ps 18,7), you hate those who worship worthless idols (Ps 31,7), I will offer you a thanksgiving sacrifice; I will call on the name of the Lord. I will carry out my vows to the Lord in the presence of his people (Ps 116, 17-18), salvation comes from the Lord (Ps 3,9).
11.- Then Yahweh gave his command to the fish, and it belched out Jonah onto dry land. (Jon 2,11). Rabbinic tradition makes a symbolic interpretation: “The fish that devours Jonah is the tomb”, “if the fish, after retaining Jonah three days and three nights, has expelled him, also the land will expel his dead” (Midras about Jonah). It is written down in the prophets: Your dead will live! their corpses will rise (Is 26,19). It is to say, the land cannot retain the dead, neither will conceal her slain any longer (Is 26,21)
12.- Jonah´s signal is assumed by the evangelic tradition like a resurrection signal: In the same way that Jonah spent three days and three nights in the belly of the big fish, son will the Son of Man spend three days and three nights in the depths of the earth (Mt 12,40). Jesus interprets Jonah´s signal in a symbolic way, referring to his own death. The death is a voracious monster, which –nevertheless- cannot retain him and it throws him onto the coast. God´s plan is the resurrection and the life: He is not a God of the dead, but of the living ones (21,32)
13.- Jonah´s sign is assumed by the evangelic tradition like a judgment sign too. In direct conflict with his generation, Jesus forwards to another tribunal, where the true sense of history is judged: At the judgment, the people of Nineveh (pagans) will rise with this generation and condemn it, because they reformed their lives at the preaching of Jonah, and here there is greater than Jonah. (Mt 12, 41). Jesus is something more. The first Christians will proclaim: he not only has resuscitated, not only is alive; he comes besides, like the Lord, he comes to judge history.
14.- The word of Yahweh came to Jonah a second time: Go to Nineveh, the great city, and announce to them the message I give you (Jon 3, 1-2). Same call and same destiny again. Nineveh was a great city; three days were required to cross it (Jon 3,3). So Jonah walked into the city (it is also a monster that can devour him) for a whole day proclaiming: Forty days more and Nineveh will be destroyed. (Jon 3,4). It is a denouncing word, a call to conversion, a peace message. The people of Nineveh must leave their evil ways and violence (Jon 3,8), they must change his collective conscience, that generates violence and that drives them to catastrophe. The people of Nineveh (pagans) believed in God; it is to say, they share his word, they changed his mentality and the menace pending over the city moved away. (Jon 3, 5.10).
15.- While God watches the city conversion, Jonah goes out to the field and sits under the shade of a shelter, to wait and see what happens (Jon 4,5). He perhaps expects the worst. He does not accept his role of being only a God´s instrument and he is greatly displeased by the success of his mission. He complains about the vine that gets shade to him and then withers; field grass, at last: springs up at dawn, but fades and withers in the evening (Ps 90,6). But he does not understand God´s compassion for the great city, in which there are more than one hundred thousand persons who do not distinguish right from left, and a large amount of animals (Jon 4,7-11).
16.- Jonah is a very appreciated figure between the first Christians. Many of them come from the paganism. In Rome, in Saint Calyx catacombs, about the third century, we can find several scenes of Jonah together with the Christian initiation sacraments: Baptism and Eucharist. Jonah is symbol of God´s call to all men, jewish as well as pagans; his peace message is always necessary, even today. It is a resurrection symbol: the death is a monster that devours, but the land cannot retain the dead, and it does not cover the assassinated either; it sends them back to the coast. It is God´s judgment symbol, that does not shut up and that judges history: Nineveh, Babylon, Rome, New York, London, Madrid.
* Dialogue: How we sense Jonah´s sign today?
- like a symbol of God´s call to all men, jewish as well as pagans
- his peace message is always necessary, even today
- where human life is under menace (violence, injustice, illness)
- in critical situations, we pray like Jonah
- like a resurrection symbol: God is not a God of the dead, but of the alive
- the land cannot retain the dead, and it does not cover the assassinated either
- like a God´s judgment symbol, that does not shut up and that judges history
- the believing pagans rise the day of the payoff against this generation
- this unbeliever generation believes that it is possible to flee from God.