The Unlikely Prophet Jonah as a Model for Us in Lent
When is the last time you read the little book of the prophet Jonah? It’s one of the most vivid short stories in the Old Testament, with many colorful and even humorous touches to it (in that regard, rather like the book of Tobit). I think of this book in Lent because Jonah is truly a model for us of God’s grace triumphing over human weakness and sin.
Jonah shows us many typical weaknesses: running away from God’s calling; refusing His demands; sleeping instead of staying vigilant; moaning in self-pity; feeling angry with God’s will; having a mean spirit about God’s generosity and mercy towards others. Basically, all the most petty reactions we can have in the face of God are demonstrated by Jonah, and yet God does not give up on him, but keeps pursuing him, keeps giving him the grace to get up again after a fall—the grace of continual, albeit painful, conversion.
Jonah’s conversion, moreover, does not go in a straight line from victory to victory, but in a crooked, wavering line, from failure to success to failure again. He is a man who breaks down more than once and seems to be, so to speak, discontented with the role God has assigned him, or the results he gets in his work.
He is, in this way, utterly typical of ourselves. We often do not like the role we are assigned in the drama of history. It reminds me of auditioning for plays or musicals in high school. There were only a few really glorious parts you could get, and the rest were scrappy and trivial, like those of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz in Hamlet. We often feel like we’ve been given the scrappy, trivial parts of the drama of life, not the glorious ones in which we flatter ourselves we could really shine with all our talents.
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