jonah. jonah and the sea monster.

i am reading with some friends through jonah. it is an incredibly condensed story, fascinating if you're of the school of thought that everything in the bible is true, and it seems to leave out so many details i want to know. but it's really good. we discussed a lot about how gentle God was with jonah, His grace, His holiness and how He speaks. and how it was all so perfectly set up, how it must have been planned all along. especially with the imagery of jonah in the suffocating, breathing cavity of the fish's belly for three days and three nights, "sheol", as he described it, and the obvious correlation with christ and his time spent... i'm not going to argue or care about theology right now, but i'll say in 'abraham's bosom'. Jesus made the connection himself.

there was on thing i thought of that i didn't say, because it was kind of a weird thought and i didn't know how it would be received. it's a whole train of thought, so i'll try and remember how it was i got on the train.
i thought about jesus talking to nicodemus one night, recorded by john. they talked in secret and nicodemus asked about being born again. we know from what happens later on that the new birth is only possible because of a death, the death of our savior, and his resurrection from the dead into new life. this is the ultimate imagery of being born again. nicodemus didn't know this part of the story yet, and when you read it he seems so dumb to not understand it, but that's because we've been hearing this story over and over our whole lives, a distant song with words we've memorized, not really thinking about it. so, since the story hadn't actually played out yet, the idea of being born again is something really foreign. (nicodemus even asks a gross question about how he can return to his mother's womb, and jesus said something mysterious back, like always.) it seems like i'm rambling, but as odd a picture as it is, the idea of being in the belly of whale and being spit back out is almost imagery of being born again.

if you're born again, you are a being transformed, completely made new and white and pure and beautiful. jonah was given new life in a way, he was given another chance. and he was definitely transformed, because he actually went to nineveh and yelled out to the people there that God was going to overthrow them, which is a terrifying thing to yell at an entire people whose military is oppressing your own nation.
what was it about being in a whale's belly that transformed jonah?
brokenness.
the process that led to his brokennness began with God stirring up a raging storm in the open sea, and was complete after three days inside a fish.

brokenness leads to transformation. this is a beautiful song of scripture, repeated over and over in different ways, with different characters and different imagery and conversations with God. isaiah laid on his face before God's throne, groaning about how unclean he was, completely undone. and a seraph brought a coal to his lips and burned him and he was transformed, ready to be the mouthpiece of God (kind of like Jonah).

oh, may our brokenness lead to this kind of transformation, this kind of action. my roommate said of shakespeare the other night that his plays are supposed to be performed, not read. we decided that's even more true of the bible-- it's supposed to be performed, not read. we read these stories and they are echoes of our own (or is it the other way around?), because we know the same God who never changes.