But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. 2He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Jonah 4:1-3
The pr0phet Jonah is expected to deal with a divine-ordered reform: the acceptance of repentant pagan people. As a traditional Hebrew prophet, Jonah holds the belief that Gentiles, all non-Jewish people, are not favored by God. What God says at the conclusion of Jonah is: And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals? (Jonah 4:12).
The implied response to God’s question is “Of course,” but Jonah’s final words in this book are: Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live. (Jonah 4:3). Laughable, but also pitiable, because even three days in the whale could not shake Jonah’s fixation on “chosen people.” The tale instructs us that God is more tolerant and merciful than his chosen people.
I call the rigidity of faith against compromise or reform the “Jonah complex.” It means a faith that expects a certain universal order and rejects anything that disrupts it. Jonah is the extreme case. He says, Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.
Many Christians have no fluid concept of doubt except as abandonment of faith. Doubt can be battled, but it cannot be confronted, except to run from it. As former evangelical pastor, Brian McLaren, writes:
Good Christians (and I’m sure good people of other religions) were expected, quickly and privately, to mend their doubts like an embarrassing tear in the pants and, failing that, to silence and suppress their doubts, to fake confidence and certainty in desperate hope that the next sermon, hymn, praise song, conference, book, or prayer would be the silver bullet that would vanquish doubt forever. (Faith After Doubt, 208)
For some Christians, faith and doubt may be seen as a dualism with a deep gap between. Faith and doubt can also be conceived on a spectrum, one flowing into the other. You may you find yourself in a pit of disbelieving at any point in the day. Rachel Held says, “Sometimes it frightens me how effortlessly I can move from belief to unbelief as one would move from room to room . . .” (McLaren, 210).
McLaren’s ground-breaking reflections on numerous pastors and church leaders, who revealed their doubts to him, shows that doubt follows faith more often than we realize. McLaren has comforted and counseled so many who thought they had nowhere to go with their doubts, without compromising their status as Christians, because doubt seemed like a one-way trip to rejection and exile.
Faith, as a certainty, can lead to rigidity. Nothing new can enter a faith constructed to be stable and unmoving. The rigor of certainty can lead to defensiveness and prejudice about things new. Believing generates a creed that cannot be compromised, because compromise would be a slippery slope that leads to perdition.
For me, the slippery slope was the acceptance of gay men and women. I remember having a discussion about homosexuals with a friend and former Lutheran pastor in the first church I had attended after a long while in a desperate period of my life. He asked me to consider the identity of those born to prefer their own sex. I had preconceptions that I could not see through, and I told him I thought the gay identity was an aberration, learned in the culture. I remember his disappointed expression, when he realized I was implacable.
Two years later Kathy and I moved to Ypsilanti, MI to take my first academic appointment at Eastern Michigan University. We moved to Depot Town, a lovely historical neighborhood. After a year I realized that my new next-door neighbors were lesbians, and my back yard neighbors were gay men. Then I realized there were several gay professors where I worked. It was a classic case of cognitive dissonance: believing something that was contradicted by circumstances.
Kathy was much more tolerant of homosexuality than I, and she invited our next-door neighbors over for coffee and conversation. I was nervous about entertaining them, because of my own hang-ups, but I found we had much more in common than I imagined.
They were married. They were musicians and had met in Europe, where gay marriage had been normalized. They wore ordinary clothes, more mannish than a heterosexual might expect, but nothing disturbing to me. They were interested in acquiring a dog. We had three dogs, and Kathy obliged with most of what she knew about small dogs. We had two Papillons and had bred another Papillon twice, and they were interested in all the details. Kathy loved gardening. So did they. They were the most compatible neighbors we could ask for, and they won my heart over a period of months. It was obvious they were truly in love with each other no differently than that Kathy and I were in love.
The guys over the back yard fence were very friendly. In the summer we would meet at the fence to share the news of the city and the neighborhood. It took me longer to accept gay men, but my prejudices toward lesbians had been broken, so I gradually felt comfortable with my male neighbors.
As for the workplace, my department head was gay as well as many in my department, so I learned acceptance just by working with people I had never known. The city of Ypsilanti brought forth an equal rights referendum, including same-sex rights, within two years of our moving there, and it was passed by a three to one vote. Clearly, we were in a new culture! My experience convinced me that integrating with people was a powerful way to learn to accept them.
So maybe I wasn’t rigid. I certainly had my prejudices changed over a couple of years, and nothing has happened since then to challenge my reform. But I know what I believed before we moved to Ypsilanti, and probably nothing but a transplant into another community could have changed those beliefs.
The research on rigidity of people of faith deals mostly with prejudice toward other groups, rather than susceptibility to changing opinions. “Prejudice” suggests entrenched beliefs, whereas opinions may not always be rigid. The question is: what makes an open mind become rigid? Could the certainty of some people’s faith instill a defense against human differences? Differences in gender preference, the role of women, race, political preference ? “True faith” people can sometimes mean stubborn people.
The narrative of Jonah ends quite differently than the book of Job, a narrative written about the same time. In the very end, Job is restored to double his original family and fortune, but first he says to God, who appeared from the terrifying whirlwind:
I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees you;
Therefore I despise myself
And repent in dust and ashes. Job 42:5-6)
How different from Jonah, who hears the dreaded truth and says, Lord, take away my life. Job survives with a new understanding of God. Jonah despairs, because he cannot accept the new understanding. He is trapped in an ethnocentric view of God, instead of the new vision of an omnipresent God who favors all people.
It is harder for me to identify with Job, who bears so much and hangs on to fragments of faith, in spite of unfathomable hardship. It is easier for me to see myself as the sad sack prophet who cannot accept what I now believe: that God’s mercy is to all people, not just a select few.
I find it easier to learn from Jonah. His lesson is basic: don’t assume you know who God favors and doesn’t favor. Let faith be a matter of “the conviction of things unseen,” things I don’t already know or think I know. Faith is not only what I believe, but what I could believe, as God reveals it. God may be unchanging, but God is not always who I think God is. I can learn from the hapless, whale-devoured prophet, Jonah.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. (Isaiah 55:8)