Our Knots, God’s Mercy: Ask the Beasts (Jonah 1:17 — 2:10)

Our Knots, God’s Mercy: Ask the Beasts

 First UMC of Pocatello

March 16, 2025

The Second Sunday of Lent

***

            Three days, three nights, I carried that man inside me.

            Three days, three nights, doing as I had been bidden, meandering through waters of the Mediterranean, waiting for him to come to his senses and speak.

            I found him near the mucky bottom – sunk, writhing, tangled in weeds. His strength was nearly spent. I opened my mouth and swallowed him whole, felt him spasm in one last terror as he sloshed into the utter blackness of my belly.

            There had been a great storm, a great disturbance up above. As the sky darkened, so did the waters, and I circled underneath to see if anything of interest or appetite from the upper world would sink down to me. That happens in storms.

My instinct was rewarded. Soon there were crates, barrels, great jugs drifting down. Human things, confirming the presence of a ship up above. I imagined them – the humans – battling the wind and the waves, struggling with their ropes, their canvas, their wooden oars. It was a great storm. I would not be alone in these deep waters for long.

            But all at once, there was a change – a change in the light, a sudden stillness in the water. Strange. I supposed the storm was over, and began to lose interest. It was then that the word came to me: Find the man. Do not let him perish. So I did.

I am a whale -- distant relative of humankind, native of the sea. I sing. I mourn. I remember. I was told to hold onto Jonah until he sang, mourned, remembered.

And I wonder: Are you surprised that I know the voice of the Lord?

***

            In such a way we can imagine the story that this “great fish,” as it’s named the Hebrew, might tell about its encounter with God’s runaway prophet Jonah. And are we surprised? – surprised to imagine that a non-human animal might be deeply in touch with the purposes of God?

In the story of Jonah, God’s connection with all creation is clear. In chapter 1, God hurls a storm upon the sea. In chapter 2, the great fish hears and obeys God’s voice: “Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out onto the dry land” (Jonah 2:10). When Jonah finally does go to Nineveh in chapter 3 and preaches in the city, the Ninevites repent, and their king commands everyone in the city, including the animals, to fast from eating and drinking, to wear sackcloth, and to “cry out mightily to God” (3:8). The animals participate in rituals of repentance. In chapter four, while Jonah sits outside the city moping about the mercy God has shown the Ninevites, God appoints a bush to grow and shade Jonah, then a worm to kill the bush, and finally a harsh wind and a glaring sun to make Jonah faint.

The very last word in the book of Jonah is “animals.” God asks his fickle prophet, “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also many animals” (4:11)? In considering the fate of this enemy city, God has thought about the wellbeing of all its creatures, human and nonhuman alike. It is as Psalm 36:6 says: “You save humans and animals alike, O Lord.”

Water and wind. Great fish and tiny worms. Shade plants and sackcloth-wearing livestock. Throughout the story of Jonah, God works through, on behalf of, and in response to all things. God loves and is on speaking terms with all the world.

In the Old Testament book of Job, there is a moment when Job says this: “But ask the animals, and they will teach you; the birds of the air, and they will tell you; ask the plants of the earth, and they will teach you; and the fish of the sea will declare to you” (12:7-8). In the midst of his great suffering and his failure to understand God’s purpose for it, Job had lifted up his eyes and looked outward – to animals, birds, plants, and fish. He looked to them for wisdom, and encouraged his friends to do the same. We are invited to engage with the great web of life from a posture of curiosity, even one of conscious, grateful dependence.

Jonah, of course, did not move through the world with this curious posture. The ancient Israelites were not a sea-faring people; they were deeply unsettled by open waters. Language of waves, watery depths, mire, and muck fills their poetry as metaphors for sickness, suffering, and death. More important than that, though, is that Jonah’s mind was already made up about who he was and what God’s purposes were all about. Israelites good, Ninevites bad. And God ought to dole out the blessings and punishments accordingly. Jonah had shrunk his understanding of God down to Jonah-size, believing God’s concern to be as laser-focused and exclusive as his own.

So while it makes for a great story, it is also an expression of profound wisdom that Jonah is brought at last to prayer and surrender only after living inside of another creature for three days and three nights. Three days and three nights of being enclosed in another body. Slick, warm insides. Hum of organs. Gurgling sea water. Living, breathing darkness. The world, it turned out, was not reducible to Jonah’s little world, Jonah’s black-and-white way. This is God’s grand world. And Jonah owed his life to this terrible creature that had come to his rescue.

The Hebrew word for the “belly” of the fish can also be translated as the “womb” of the fish. When we recognize that we owe our little lives to capital-L Life, we are reoriented toward wonder, humility, gratitude, and stewardship. 

You and I exist inside of the story of the earth. Our destiny is unfolding within its destiny. The natural world was not created to be a backdrop for human affairs. The natural world is not outside the scope of God’s saving concern. We flourish or perish as a part of it. “The whole creation,” Paul says in Romans 8, “has been groaning” for health and wholeness.

            Jonah had hit rock bottom. He had made a real mess of things. He had run from God and endangered other people with the consequences. He was afraid, angry, and self-righteous. He wanted to die. And then? Then the great fish came and caught him up in a bigger, better story.

Beauty can be a balm to the soul. The beauty of a bear, of a herd of elk, of winter fields full of swans. The beauty of hills tinged with the colors of wildflowers. The beauty of yesterday’s sky, half-filled by the gray fury of hail and half-filled by crisp spring sunlight. The beauty of the stars, of creatures going about their own ancient, instinctual business. The beauty even of the grotesque innards of a great fish.  But the opposite is also true. When the natural world is diminished, our capacity for wholeness is diminished. Today’s climate crisis is a spiritual crisis as much as an ethical and humanitarian crisis.

            I learned this week that there are whales that live in or frequently visit the Mediterranean Sea. It is possible that the “great fish” in Jonah was based on ancient sightings of whale sharks, fin whales, or even sperm whales. I have a book called Wild Hope: Stories for Lent from the Vanishing that includes short chapters about endangered species, and in connection with Jonah I read this week about a species called the Atlantic right whale.

The right whales are now “the world’s smallest population of great whale, …[but] they were so near and numerous in the 1600s that the Pilgrims claimed they could walk across Cape Cod Bay on the backs of [them].”

The right whales were hunted at first for the oil that their blubber produced when boiled, and later for their baleen – the whalebone in their mouths that filters plankton out of great gulps of seawater. Baleen fetched a high price because it was used for hoop skirts and other nineteenth-century fashion items. Right whales got their name because they floated to the surface when they were killed, causing whaler refer to them as the right kind of whale to hunt.

            In the late 1930s, the International Whaling Convention offered complete protection to right whales, but by then they were already nearly extinct. This still persist today but there are only a few hundred of them left. They often die after getting tangled in fishing line attached to crab and lobster traps on the sea bottom, or through collisions with shipping vessels. And that’s just one species of our deep-sea siblings; the conditions of others are just as fraught and fragile.

In his book Wildlife in America, Peter Matthiessen wrote, “The marine fishes—those confined entirely in range and habitat to salt water—are rarely or never threatened with extermination by other than natural causes, since man has as yet been unable to damage the chemistry of the sea.” And even the patron saint of modern American conversation, Rachel Carson, wrote The Sea Around Us that “[man] has returned to his mother sea only on her own terms. He cannot control or change the ocean as, in his brief tenancy of earth, he has subdued and plundered the continents.”

            Carson and Matthiessen were giants of American conversation and natural history. They were contemporaries who changed the way a whole generation thought about its relationship to the earth. Even so, seventy years later we know that on this point they were wrong. Humans have begun to change the very chemistry of the sea through higher salinity and the global circulation of microplastics.

We have flipped the script. We have brought the rest of nature inside our selfish story, inside our peril, when we should be the ones carried along in its womb, learning its wisdom, finding our voice of prayer through our immersion in it, just as Jonah did.

I bet Jonah, who was at the complete mercy of the great fish, would never have imagined it would one day be possible for the great fishes and mammals of the sea to be at our mercy. The reaches of creation that were once thought to be beyond our touch are now known to be vulnerable.

The great fish heard the word of God. But if we lose that great fish, we lose access to that divine word. It’s that simple. For every species and landscape lost, we diminish our vision of God and therefore of ourselves.

The natural world is of sacred worth and it deserves our care. We put God’s love into action when we enjoy, protect, and learn from the nonhuman lives and ecosystems around us. Jonah shows us a God who is already in touch with all creatures great and small, a God who will meet us as we attend and behold, preserve and protect.

Plant a garden. Spend time outside. Climb the mountains, go be near water. Pay attention to what’s around you. Use your voice, your money, and your time to safeguard what we can no longer take for granted. And remember that you are a part of this great and mysterious web of life. Should you ever hit rock bottom, immerse yourself in the womb of the earth, and it will help you find your voice for prayer once again.

In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.