Living in The Story reflections from
Matthew 26-28
The Book of Jonah
On many an
Easter morning, we wipe tears of joy as we share in the baptism of some of
God’s precious children. Easter is a perfect time to celebrate baptism because
for us Christians, it pictures death and resurrection. That’s what this life
with Christ is all about: dying to ourselves, admitting we can’t save
ourselves, recognizing our own helplessness, giving ourselves over to the
Source of all life - The Life that burst from the tomb on that Easter morn long
ago - so that, in our own dying we too trust we will find new life. Baptism
gathers up all this multitude of meaning and symbolizes all this mystery.
Death.
Resurrection.
We see hints of it even in the
little story of Jonah tucked away in our Old Testament.
You remember Jonah. It’s a
wonderful story, a kind of parable about human folly and divine mercy. In the
story, Jonah is called by God to preach repentance to his mortal enemies (not
at all a pleasing assignment) so he promptly boarded a ship that was headed in
exactly the opposite direction. But then a great storm rose up out of the chaos
of the sea and threatened to swallow the ship and everyone on it, and Jonah figured
out that he had not been very successful hiding from God. He convinced the
sailors to toss him overboard in order to save themselves. Sure enough –
immediately the sea grew calm while Jonah sank into its depths.
But God had a surprise waiting
for Jonah, a mixed blessing, as it were. A great sea creature gulped him down
and saved him from drowning. And here is Jonah – in the belly of the beast –
for three long days and three long nights.
And we hear Jonah’s prayer from
the deep darkness:
Out of
the belly of Sheol I cried
and the Lord heard my
voice.
The
waters closed in over me;
weeds were wrapped around my head
at the roots of the mountains.
yet you brought up my life from the Pit,
O Lord my God.
When Jonah finally was able to die to himself and his own
plans and schemes; when he admitted he couldn’t save himself; when he
recognized his helplessness and gave himself over to the Source of all life, then
the Lord spoke to the fish, and it spat Jonah out upon the dry land.
In the Gospel of Matthew, there
is an odd exchange between Jesus and some religious folks who wanted Jesus to
prove he was the Messiah. “Give us a sign. Give us proof that you are the
Anointed One of God,” they demanded.
But [Jesus] answered them, “…no
sign will be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was
three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days
and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth. Matthew 12:39-40
The “sign” Jesus offers is an odd one, don’t
you think? Jonah’s sign – Jonah in the belly for three days. Jonah in the
depths of the sea, at the roots of the mountains, with the seaweed wrapped
around his head. This is a good sign? How can the sign Jesus offers as
hope be something that comes from our most hopeless situations?
I’m guessing most of us live
much of our lives in the belly of some monster or another. Disease that
swallows up all our energy and sucks us dry. Broken relationships that break
our hearts and overwhelm us with grief or anger or loneliness, A job that
sometimes feels like a black hole with no glimmer of light and air. Financial
worries that flood us with fear and anxiety. Death itself: those whom we have
loved, hands we have held, lips we have kissed, sunken into the darkest places
of the earth.
But it’s there, right there in the despair that we find God at
work. And sometimes we discover – like Jonah did – that the belly of the beast
actually saved us, kept us, preserved us for a time and gave us a chance to see
life from a different perspective.
It is good for us to stare
death in the face, to acknowledge our finitude, to recognize the fragile and temporal
nature of our living. It is good for us to be challenged to turn away from
putting our trust in our own selves and to turn toward God - depending on God’s
strength, God’s wisdom, God’s power for our living. It is good to remember that
God is God and we are not.
And it is good to remember that God is constantly at work
creating life out of death. Sometimes we take life for granted; it’s hard to see
God working on behalf of life when we are living pretty well and we think we
have everything under control. But when we find ourselves in the belly of a monster,
we know what dying feels like. We remember how hopelessness can wash over us
like mighty waters as we sink deeper and deeper into despair.
That’s when we hold on to the
sign of Jonah because if we are watching for the signals that Spirit is weaving
into every hopeless situation, we will be able to see God’s glimmer of light in
our every darkness; and we will be able to hold on to hope.
Jonah’s sign also reminds us that our own “three days” in
the belly of the beast will not go on forever. In the language symbols of the
Bible, “three days” means: “whenever the time is right.” Whenever the soil and
the seed discern it’s time for the sprout to push up towards the sun. Whenever
the womb and the baby discern it’s time for labor to begin. Whenever the Spirit
moves. Whatever it may mean that God’s time is “right,” that’s when one thing
passes and another comes into being. It’s good to remember that our days in the
belly are not forever.
We can trust this because life itself teaches us that winter
will pass and spring will always come; because the flowers bloom again and the
frogs sing again and because the darkest night will always fade into the bright
light of day.
But there is another reason we trust, we believe, we hold
onto hope. Because The Story of Scripture confesses that there was a time in
human history when God broke in and disrupted the normal cycles of living and
dying. There was a time that the sign of Jonah pointed to when the Spirit of
Life reached into the tomb after three days in the belly of the monster and
defeated its power. There was a time when – in the power of the resurrected
life of Jesus Christ – death died.
And so hope lives.
And so we are Easter People.
Whatever the belly of darkness and hopelessness that
swallows us or those we love, we hold onto this hope – that the God of Life is
constantly at work creating life out of every death.
Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed.
© Charlotte
Vaughan Coyle 2014
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