The Sign of Jonah

#48: “The Sign of Jonah” by Brendon Wahlberg
High School readers of Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” may have been asked to discuss the Christian symbolism in the book. For example, when the old man carries his boat’s mast on his back, teachers might point out that this is symbolic of Jesus carrying his cross on the way to Golgotha. Actually, looking for Christian symbolism in books is a very old tradition. In fact, it goes back to Jesus himself.
Consider this passage from the Gospel of Matthew. “Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to him [Jesus], ‘Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.’ But he answered them, ‘An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was for 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. The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and see, something greater than Jonah is here!” (Matthew 12:38-41)
Readers of the Hebrew Bible know that Jesus is referring to the Book of Jonah. Jonah is a very short book which is grouped with the Prophetic books, although it differs from books like Jeremiah because the story in it is thought to be largely fictional. Jonah reads like a tall tale designed to make an important theological point. The humorous elements of the story entertain us while the message at the end changes the way we think about God. To be fair, even if the story is fictional, Jonah himself may have been a real person. 2 Kings 14:25 mentions him: “He restored the border of Israel from Lebo-hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher.”
In the story of Jonah, the prophet is told by God to go to the people of the Assyrian city of Nineveh, and warn them that God is going to destroy them for their sins. Assyria was the greatest enemy of Israel; this would be like telling Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel to go and warn the Nazis of Berlin that they were going to be destroyed. Jonah wants them to be destroyed. Instead of obeying, Jonah flees in the opposite direction. But God will not be denied. When Jonah flees by ship, God sends a storm which threatens to sink it. Jonah admits to the crew that their peril is his fault, they toss him overboard, and the sea quiets. Then God sends a large fish that swallows Jonah. He remains in the fish for three days, during which he prays for deliverance from the Lord. The fish spits him out onto the shore, and Jonah is again commanded to go to Nineveh and warn the people there.
Finally, Jonah obeys. To the prophet’s amazement and disgust, upon hearing the warning, all of Nineveh repents and fasts in sackcloth and ashes. God sees this and decides not to destroy them. Even though Jonah had just been delivered from death himself, he cannot stand to see the Assyrians saved. In a terrible mood, Jonah gets upset at the death of a plant that was shading him. God uses this as a teachable moment to reprove the prophet. “But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’” (Jonah 4:9-11)
The main point of the story must have been seen as somewhat controversial when it was written. Prophets of Judah and Israel often spoke about the Lord’s righteous judgment of enemy nations, but here, the final outcome was to save the enemy, because all people are valued by God, even if they are supposedly “the enemy”. This is best expressed in the Apocryphal book “Wisdom of Solomon”: “But you have mercy on all, because you can do all things; and you overlook the sins of men that they may repent. For you love all things that are and loathe nothing that you have made; for what you hated, you would not have fashioned.” (Wisdom 11:23-24)
So that is the story of Jonah. Now let us get back to how Jesus used the story in Matthew. The Pharisees demanded a sign to prove Jesus’ claims. Jesus told his unbelieving audience that they were not going to get a sign of the sort they desired. The people of Nineveh were smart enough to repent at the word of the Prophet Jonah. Why won’t the Pharisees believe the word of the Son of Man, someone greater than Jonah? The only sign which was going to come was the “Sign of Jonah”. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days, Jesus was going to be dead for three days, and in the underworld, before being resurrected. In other words, modern readers might say, Jonah in the belly of the fish was a kind of “foreshadowing” of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Ancient interpreters of scripture would say that Jonah was a “type” of Jesus.
This brings us to the study of Typology, the idea that things which were hidden in the Old Testament are revealed and made plain in the New Testament. Who would have thought, holding only the Book of Jonah in his hands, that the fanciful fish portion of the story was a cosmic hint that someday, the Messiah was going to die and be raised back to life after three days? Nevertheless, the Gospel writer Matthew thought so, and so did many ancient interpreters. Typology was a fascinating pastime for them.
Here is another example of Typology from the Book of Numbers. “The people came to Moses and said, ‘We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.’ So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’ So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.” (Numbers 21:7-9)
Believers in Typology would say that the metal snake on the pole is a “type” of Jesus on the cross. Just as the bronze serpent was held on high, and anyone who looked at it was saved from death, so too, Jesus was nailed to a cross and raised aloft. Those who “looked at” him, or, those who believed in him, were saved from death through forgiveness of sin and the giving of eternal life. And, just as we saw in the “Sign of Jonah” passage from Matthew that begins this article, it is Jesus himself who explains that the thing in question is a type of himself! Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” (John 3:12-15) Christ evidently found his own Christian symbolism. Hemingway would have been easy for him.
Many other people and ideas from the Old Testament were thought to be “types” of things in the New Testament. Passover and the Day of Atonement were both thought to prefigure Jesus’ sacrificial death. The near sacrifice of Abraham’s son Isaac was thought to prefigure the sacrifice of Jesus as well. Beginning with the early church, and becoming popular in the middle ages as well as in post-Reformation Calvinism, Typology flourished until modern times, when it has fallen into disuse and some disrepute (perhaps because some of its adherents got too wild with their theories).
What do you think about the basic idea of Typology? Did God preview the events of Jesus’ life during Old Testament times, ordaining that certain people and events would hint at what was to come? Ultimately, that is for us to guess at and only for God to know. In the meantime, the only sign we get is the one that has already been shown to us, the Sign of Jonah. We are told in words of scripture that Jesus, like Jonah, was returned to life after three days. The Bible we read is like Jonah walking into Nineveh, bringing words of warning that we should believe and repent. What will we do in response to our sign?
Note: This column is number 48 since I began it. That’s four years worth! Thanks for reading!
-Brendon