Everyday God. Paula Gooder

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      3. You cannot be serious!

      Jonah 1.1−3 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’ But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.

      For further reading: Jonah 1.4−17 and chapters 3—4

      One of the glories of deciding to choose to look at the ‘ordinary’ people of the Bible is the almost unlimited choice that this presents. The Bible is stuffed with stories of ordinary people, doing ordinary things until God breaks in to call them into extraordinariness. So why choose Jonah? Surely he was a prophet already, so not strictly ‘ordinary’? I would argue that while his job may not have been ordinary he himself, as a person, was gloriously ordinary, with ordinary responses, reactions and grumbles.

      Jonah turned aside but not in the way that Moses did. Jonah’s turning aside took an entirely new direction (literally!). Jonah has to be one of the most comic books of the Bible, a comedy that begins even in its first three verses. This is even more vivid in the Hebrew than in English, where the word of the Lord came to Jonah and said, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh.’ So Jonah arose … and went to Tarshish. No one is quite clear where Tarshish is but the one thing that scholars are agreed upon is that it is in the opposite direction to Nineveh. Jonah half obeyed God in that he arose and went, the only problem is that he didn’t quite go where he was meant to go! Jonah certainly turned aside but this time he turned aside to run in the opposite direction.

      It seems as though Jonah is all too aware of the consequences of encountering God, and thought that he would cut these short by eluding God’s notice. Again the Hebrew seems to stress this by saying that Jonah went to Tarshish ‘away from the face of the Lord’. The implication seems to be that God is looking from Jonah to Nineveh, therefore if Jonah scarpered to Tarshish God might be so busy looking at Nineveh he wouldn’t notice that Jonah had gone. Jonah was playing hide and seek with God but one of the many points of this story is that God is not such a local God that you can escape his gaze. Wherever we go, God is there (as the Psalmist who observed in Psalm 139: ‘If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there’). In other words there is no getting away from God.

      The story of Jonah is the antidote to any fear that we might have somehow missed the moment – the one moment − when God wanted to speak to us, to which I referred to at the start of this chapter. There is, in fact, no need to ask the question of what might have happened if I had turned aside at this moment, or had the time to encounter God properly on that occasion. While it is entirely possible that we can and do miss glimmers of God’s presence in our world, the people who lose out when we miss these glimmers are ourselves. The story of Jonah is a story that reminds us that God doesn’t give up all that easily.

      This is a truth that runs as a strand through the many stories of people’s calling to ordination that I have heard during twelve years of teaching in theological colleges. Over and over again, I have heard people describing that un-scratchable itch, or that unavoidable sense of calling that eventually and inexorably brings them to the point of ordination. Of course vocations are not just to ordination but to all aspects of our lives: to marriage or singleness; to having or not having children; to the work we do; to the places we live; to the communities we serve; to the churches in which we worship and the various and varying ministries to which we are called.

      Whatever our vocation, the one marker of genuineness is that the sense of calling will simply not go away. So if you really want to test a vocation, whatever it is to, then fight it. Fight it with all that you have. Be like Jonah and run as far in the opposite direction as fast as you can – and you can be sure that if your calling is true, God will find you there and draw you back.

      Jonah is probably the most reluctant of all reluctant servants of God. He makes Moses’ response to God at the burning bush look positively enthusiastic. One of the reasons I love him so much as a character is that he is in my mind a cross between John McEnroe (he who used to throw his tennis racket to the ground while shouting ‘you cannot be serious!’) and Eeyore, from the Winnie the Pooh stories, who is depressive and never expects anything good anyway. Jonah reminds us powerfully that for some crazy reason, despite the fact that we are often a hindrance rather than a help, God wants to include us in his mission and message of love.

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