I’ve found myself sitting with the story of Jonah a lot recently. Specifically chapter 2; where Jonah is swallowed—and subsequently vomited up on the beach—by a rather large fish. Prior to his unpleasant trip the wrong way through a fish throat, Jonah spends three—I would imagine fairly long and miserable—days in the belly of the aforementioned fish. Imagine what it must be like in the belly of a fish. Dark, I think, and dank. It probably smells horrible. The inside of the stomach, partially digested pieces of other things the fish had eaten recently, and stomach acids probably pressed down on Jonah from all sides, making it difficult to move. At the mercy of the fish, unsure if he would live or die, swimming through the murky insides of a stomach, Jonah must have felt very alone, very afraid, and very miserable. Jonah’s three days in the fish correspond to the length of time in which ancient Israelite tradition said it took to travel to the land of the dead. Thus it seems like Jonah went through a metaphorical death in the belly of the fish. And then on the third day, the unexpected happened. Jonah prays to God and finds himself vomited (the NRSV translates it as “spewed,” but the Hebrew yaque is much more closely translated as “vomited”) onto the beach. For Jonah this, with all its stench and unpleasantness, was resurrection and new life. Free from the belly of the fish, he set out to Nineveh.
As I mentioned in my last post, this past semester, past year really, has been a difficult one. As thing after thing piled up around me; the weight of expectations pulled on me in an almost physical manner. I mucked around, feeling like I caused more trouble than I helped. I couldn’t see my way out of a year where crises fell one after another; some major, an unexpected family emergency and the loss of a serious relationship, and some not so major. As I struggled to make it through the day, I felt dragged down, like someone was pressing on my shoulders, like slogging through mud, like swimming through the belly of a giant fish. Problems with friends, masses of paperwork, half-finished school assignments, and my own mistakes floated around me like partially digested hunks of fish food. In this year of my own fish belly I did the only thing I knew to do. I pulled inside myself. I tucked into a ball, hunkered down, and did what I needed to do. I was not thriving by any means, but I survived.
And then, unexpectedly, a few weeks ago, I felt the rumblings of change. It started with a change in the weather, the gradual shift from winter to spring, the first few brave buds poking out of the frozen soil. Then it was the shift in my course schedule, as daily work fell to the side in the focus of final projects. The end was in sight, the year could not last forever, the fish was about to release its victim. The semester came to an end, spewing me out onto the beach of summer (I joked with a friend that being vomited out by a fish is not a pleasant experience, but at least there’s light at the end of the fish throat), and I hopped a plane to anywhere but here to recover, to count my losses, and to figure out how to go forward.
Sitting on the beach, God speaks to Jonah again and sends him to Nineveh. Jonah still does not want to go to Nineveh but grudgingly, slime oozing from his body and squishing between his toes with every step, he does. And then, to Jonah’s disgust, God forgives the people of Nineveh, just as Jonah had suspected God would. Jonah laments in 4:2, “O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning.” I don’t benefit from this, God, Jonah laments, this is the same mess we were in when I started! I spent three days in the belly of a fish for this! God comforts Jonah, maybe this is bigger than you. More is going on here than you can see, trust me. I know you are miserable, but if I love Nineveh this much, how much must I also love you.
Like Jonah, I am learning that new life is rarely clean or orderly. I think we expect that of new life; we expect it to be, well, new. Pop Christianity says that if we only accept Jesus Christ as our personal Lord and Savior everything will be all right. Pray to God and all our prayers will be answered, we will get everything we have ever desired, life will be easy. Jesus suffered and died for our sins, and now we live as post-resurrection people free to live forever with Christ, shouldn’t that mean something? And yet, here I sit, stranded in an airport from my own stupidity, angrily picking hunks of partially digested fish vomit out of my hair, tired and frustrated and sore. Don’t I deserve a break, God? I want to yell. Hasn’t this year been long enough?
But new life is just that, life. And life is messy and complicated and sometimes smells like the inside of a fish. Jesus promised that we might “have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10), not that abundant life wouldn’t be hard. But this hard and abundant life is good. So I struggle to my feet on this beach called life, blinking in the bright sunlight, brushing seaweed and fish innards and muck off my arms and shoulders as best I can. I wish I could tell you that in the sunlight I dance and rejoice and praise the God who rescued me from the depths, but realistically it is all I can do to grit my teeth and set out doggedly again in the direction God pointed into this new life. Jesus came out of the tomb, Jonah went to Nineveh, and I too will keep on walking. And I know in front of me there are more Ninevehs, more tombs, more fish bellies. I know this post-resurrection life will not be easy. There are ahead of me more days, weeks, months, even years, where the weight of the world will drag on me so much that it will be enough to get out of bed and brush my teeth in the morning. In those dark days, as in these ones, I am grateful for good friends, friends who are willing to sit in the belly of the fish with me. Who do not try to lessen the pain, but who instead make me laugh as they assure me that yes, it really does smell that bad in here, and lean over to wipe away the hot, salty tears that leave trails through the fish ooze on my cheeks. And mostly I am grateful for a God who is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Jonah 4:2). Thanks be to God, who is with us in life and death, on beaches and in fish bellies. Amen.
