Well here’s a news flash. I never lived in a whale. I grant you that the whale part of my story is sensational, so it’s what you remember about me. All you Americans ever pay attention to is the sensational stuff. But there’s a lot more to my story than that; and even if you’ve read the whole Bible book that bears my name I’m sure you’ve never heard my side of the story. Well, now you’re going to, so listen up.

I was an ordinary man. A good man I like to think, but not an extraordinary one. I was minding my own business one day, not bothering anyone, when all of a sudden Yahweh--you know Yahweh, the Lord, God--breaks in on me and says: "Go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it, for their wickedness has come up before me." Jonah 1:2 Say what?! You’re kidding, right? This is a Bill Cosby routine, right? Problem was, I was pretty sure it really was Yahweh talking to me, and I was so scared by what He said that I wanted nothing to do with it.

You see, the name Nineveh probably means nothing to you now, but it meant a whole lot to me then. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the world’s superpower of my day. They were expanding all over the place, conquering everything, including Israel, one of our two Jewish kingdoms at the time. They were not nice people. They robbed us, pillaged our cities, and raped our women with great glee. The Lord wasn’t kidding about their wickedness. And I was supposed to go there and cry out against them? I don’t think so! In the years since I’ve heard pastors and theologians like your Pastor Tom here say that one way to know if what you think is a call from God is authentic is that an authentic call is probably a call to do something you don’t want to do. That’s easy for him to say, sitting here in his middle-class American security, but way back then I knew that what this annoying Lord of our was telling me to do would certainly get me killed.

Now, from Judah, where I was, Nineveh was to the east, in what you call Iraq. You people seem to have gone there yourselves these days and gotten yourselves into quite a mess, but I won’t say any more about that. I had no intention of going there and getting myself killed. I figured, if God wants me to go east, I’ll fix His wagon. I’ll go west, to Tarshish, in what you now call Spain. So, fool that I was, I hopped on a west-bound ship out of Joppa, headed for Tarshish, and hightailed it outta there.

I say "fool that I was" because it turns out that it’s not so easy to run away from God. That came as quite a shock to me actually. We thought this Yahweh character was the God of Israel and Judah only, that He lived in the Temple in Jerusalem, and that He had no power anywhere else. Wrong! It turns out that our God Yahweh really is the God of the whole universe and certainly the God of the whole Mediterranean Sea. He wasn’t about to let me get away. He blew up this bloody great storm, and that little ship I was on didn’t have a chance. The sailors, gentiles all, prayed to their gods for help, but since those gods don’t exist, that didn’t help. When the storm started I had another Say what moment. Yahweh’s out here too? Rats! I saw that the storm was the result of Yahweh’s anger with me for trying to run away, and I figured I was done for, not for the last time in this story. I told the sailors what was going on and told them to throw me overboard. It’s not that I’m some great martyr or something. It’s just that I figured that the way things were going we were all going to die, me included. Maybe I was a goner, but I saw no reason why all those other men should die too As far as I knew, they’d done nothing wrong. At first they didn’t want to do it, but eventually they realized that they had no choice, so overboard I went.

This is where the part about the whale comes in. I don’t know if it was a whale or a great fish, as your translation calls it. We didn’t know whales aren’t fish! In any event, this huge marine beast of some sort swam by and just swallowed me whole. Say what?! I sure didn’t expect that; and let me tell you, it was nasty! Inside some stinking fish guts? For three days and three nights? Give me a break! I thought yet again that I was done for. I figured this was Yahweh’s way of punishing me for trying to run away from Him. And let me tell you: Fish stomach acid burns!

So imagine my surprise when after three hellish days and nights that fish, or whatever it was, threw up and deposited me high and dry (well, high any way) on some coast somewhere. Fresh air never smelled so sweet! I’d been praying even when I was in the belly of the fish, but now I really gave thanks to Yahweh. I had thought he was taking my life through that fish, but it turned out that the fish was the best thing that ever happened to me. It was God’s way of delivering me from the sea and a certain death by drowning. That’s another lesson. What looks like a curse may turn out to be a blessing in disguise.

I thought: Surely God will let me be now, after all I’d been through at His hand; but it still annoys me how every time I think I’ve got God figured out, I turn out to be wrong. God was a good long way from being done with me. After I’d dried out a bit on that beach, here comes Yahweh again with his accursed "Go to Nineveh, that great city." Go, He said, and "proclaim to it the message that I tell you." Jonah 3:2 I wasn’t any happier to hear this divine call this time than I’d been the first time. Still, I’d learned my lesson. If you try to run away from God. you’re liable to end up on a beach in a pool of whale vomit. I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if I tried to run away from God again. So I went. I went to Nineveh, "that great city", as God kept calling it, although I never figured out what was so great about it.

And when I got there, what God told me to say to the Ninevites was: Three more days and Nineveh will be overthrown! Say what?! I was supposed to tell these heathens that God was going to destroy them? Once more, I thought I was in for it. I figured I’d be lucky if all they did was stone me to death. To them I had to look like some whacko from the hinterlands raving about some God they’d never heard of who for some reason entirely incomprehensible to them was about to destroy them because of their wickedness. If someone wandered into Monroe today raving like that, you’d probably just ignore him and pray that he’d get the mental health treatment he so obviously needs. Not in those days. Not in Nineveh. Let me just say that I was wishing I’d put my affairs in order before I hopped on that ship bound for Tarshish.

But then the darndest thing happened. Those Ninevites actually believed what I was saying! They repented, for heaven’s sake! And God pardoned them and changed His mind about wiping them off the face of the earth! Say what?! The only consolation I’d had in this whole mess was the thought that at least those evil Assyrians were gonna get it and get it good. I didn’t figure on surviving myself, but at least I took satisfaction in the knowledge that my enemies and the enemies of my people would all perish too. You get that, don’t you? Wouldn’t you rather that your enemies and your country’s enemies got wiped out than that everyone came to their senses and worked things out peaceably? But it didn’t happen, which really ticked me off. And I told God as much in no uncertain words. But then God taught me the final lesson out of this whole mess. He said: "Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city"--there was that infernal "that great city" again--"in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons....?" Jonah 4:11