Jonah and Jesus- Part 4 5.10.26

From the belly of a great fish, Jonah prays. In this episode we sit with Jonah in the darkness of chapter 2 as he reflects on the choices that brought him there and discovers that grace has a way of finding us even in the places we never intended to be. 

His prayer is desperate and soaked in the language of a man fully in the hands of God.  In surrender we begin to see the outline of another who would descend into darkness and rise again, showing us that the deepest prayers are often prayed from the deepest places.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

A reading from the book of Second Samuel. I called to the Lord who is worthy of praise and have been saved from my enemies. The ways of death swirled about me, the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me. The cords of the grave coiled around me, the snares of death confronted me. In my distress I called to the Lord. I called out to my God. From his temple he heard my voice, my cry came to his ears. The valleys of the sea were exposed, and the foundations of the earth laid bare to bare at the rebuke of the Lord, at the blast of breath from his nostrils. He reached down from on high and took hold of me. He drew me out of deep waters. He rescued me from my powerful enemy, from my foes who were too strong for me.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Reading from the book of John, Jesus replied, The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, my servant will also be. My father will honor the one who serves me.

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Now the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah.

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And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights. From inside the fish, Jonah prayed to the Lord his God. He said, In my distress I called to the Lord, and he answered me. From deep in the realm of the dead I called for help, and you listened to my cry. You hurled me into the depths, into the very heart of the seas, and the currents swirled about me. All your waves and breakers swept over me. And I said, I have been banished from your sight. Yet I will look again toward your holy temple. The engulfing waters threatened me, the deep surrounded me. Seaweed was wrapped around my head. To the roots of the mountains I sank down. The earth beneath barred me in forever. But you, Lord, my God, brought my my life up from the pit. When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you. Lord, and my prayers rose to you, to your holy temple. Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God's love for them. But I, with shouts of grateful praise, will sacrifice to you what I have vowed I will make good. I will say, Salvation comes from the Lord.

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And the Lord commanded the fish and it vomited Jonah onto dry land, that he may be seated. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For you are with me.

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Many of us have walked through valleys that have been filled with shadows. I've had a few of my own experiences with that. Oh, hold on one second. Let's go back. This is not my experience. Kind of is, but I'm getting there. Sorry, Julie. One of my experiences was in middle school. Uh, and I know for some of us, middle school felt like a valley of the shadow of death. Just the experience of school. Um I was in middle school in the late 80s, and that was quite a ride. Uh, but one of the trends of the late 80s was when girls uh used entire cans of hairspray uh to prepare themselves for school. Do you remember that? Some of you were there. Um and my goodness. Uh it was the fall of eighth grade. It was in the fall of eighth grade. I found myself, I uh went to Liberty Baptist Church in the heart of downtown Vegas, and uh I was in choir with the youth. We had a youth choir, which was a thing uh at that time. And we uh um I remember most of the time you're singing, but a lot of times you are goofing around. And and so I'm I'm in choir with a bunch of friends. One of my good friends is Aaron, and Aaron used an entire can of Aquanet earlier that day. Um, and she and I we would joke around and um and and uh you know there's something mysterious about a teenage boy's mind. Um and they don't even quite understand themselves either. Uh and for some reason I had this impulse to reach out and touch Aaron's hair, uh, which is a no-no uh for the most part. Uh I learned it quickly. Uh so I reached out, I touched her hair, and Aaron is the middle child of two boys, uh, or sorry, of two brothers. So she sits right in the middle of an older and a younger brother. She has these uh reflexes uh that show that. And so she balled her uh hand into a fist and punched me in the gut. And I was I was bent over. Remember when you get the wind knocked out of you? Most of us haven't had that in years, right? Remember that feeling? I could not catch my breath, and I'm bent over, and I'm I I just I kind of smile, you know, the fake smile that you do. Um, and Erin immediately starts apologizing because we're friends, and she's like, ah, I'm so sorry. And I just couldn't do, I couldn't get up. And so uh I slowly make myself out or walk myself out the trailer because that's we had trailers at fur church. And so I walked out, found my my parents' big green Cadillac, uh, and climbed into the back seat and laid down. Um probably pretty humiliated. Uh just got punched by a girl. Uh and uh but I hurt a lot for the next three days. I was hurting, which was interesting. It put me down for for several days. And then uh I got to move in again, and a couple weeks go by, and we're driving to evening church on a Sunday, and my mom looks over and she starts to notice something strange. And uh and she's like, I I think your eyes are yellow. And so she she's like, I think your skin is yellow. Uh which would have been I'm a teenage boy, I have no idea what she what we're talking about. And uh so she takes me to the doctor, and the doctor's like, I don't know what's going on. Um that was the fall of uh when I turned 14. For several months from then, my mom became this incredible advocate for trying to figure out what was wrong because the yellow never went away. Uh we went through all of these different tests and doctors and so on, and uh finally in March uh um they decided to do exploratory surgery. They felt like, oh, we need to get inside. So they get inside and I go into ICU for nine days after that. Um they discovered I had this massive tumor around my liver and a lot of the other organs, and it did, and it couldn't be something they could remove. Um so when I was uh come to and I've kind of had a little bit more awakeness. Um I remember sitting, Dr. Osis was sitting here, my parents are sitting here, and the doctor says, Listen, you have uh non-Hodgkins Brickett's lymphoma, something I could not repeat for a long time. I didn't know what that. And you have stage four. Um in the late 80s, that that is we were right on the cusp of being able to do uh what was good for childhood cancer. Prior to that, the percentages of survival were really low. I we had about a 50% chance at that point. And um my mom just became this amazing woman. She was already before. Uh but she just uh she went up against a lot of big egos in the medical system, and she just fought for me and got me through uh several uh different things for the next two years of chemotherapy. And uh I remember take me back to the uh the moment I'm sitting with the doctor, my parents, the one thing that I was afraid of, I said, so he said, You're gonna have chemotherapy. It looks like it's gonna be this long and these kind of things. And I said, But am I gonna lose my hair? And and I started to cry when he said yes. Uh and it's just uh uh gonna uh just kept going. Um they they they promised all, like, oh, it could come back bigger and fuller and all the fun stuff, you know. So uh there was a moment I'm sitting with my mom and uh and these two doctors. There were some complications. They had put tubes in me that weren't meant to come out. It was basically just to make me comfortable until I passed. But now I'm not passing and I'm still living. And uh and so they're getting into this argument, and my mom can argue. She's good. And uh I remember hearing the doctor at one point say, Well, if it wasn't for us, he wouldn't be here, or something of that effect. And my mom laid into him a sermon about how God heals, like she just went all in. Uh, and that I I think I remember I have this, I don't know what's true about my memories or not, but I remember I think this doctor just ended up walking out of the room. Um, you know, as a parent now, I I think I feel like I know my parents walked through a bigger valley than I did at 14. I think their shadow was much greater than I felt like mine was as I walked through this. I wonder if the writer of Jonah had Psalm 23 on his mind when he wrote the story of Jonah. The valley of the shadow of death. This writer makes all of these nods to the Psalms and to the prophets. When we read chapter two, we're gonna see all these little hyperlinks that go to different parts of the of the Bible. Chapter 2 is like this psalm that's just dropped right into the middle of the story. Um the psalm that Jonah uses, it has a lot of imagery of death. I don't know if you picked up on that when I read. My life was ebbing away. I feel banished from your sight. I'm in the realm of the dead. Some of your translations maybe be instead of realm of the dead, it may have said Sheol, which is basically, it's not the a Hebrew word for the afterlife, which some may think. It's actually just the word that we use for the grave. It's the grave. And Jonah felt like he was there.

SPEAKER_03 11:54

Some really difficult deaths aren't necessarily physical. They are acts of dying to self.

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Jonah feels both. He's feeling like this is a physical death, but he's also feeling like this is a dying to self. Jonah has found himself at rock bottom. And I wonder if he asks, How did I get here? How did I end up inside this fish? Many of us in this room can relate, asking that question, how did I get here? Here's the thing with Old Testament uh stories. Sometimes what we do is we make them into morals. Uh so we say, This is what this person did, this is how it turned out, therefore, don't be like this person. And we'll do that over and over. This is what they did, this is how it turned out, don't be like this person. And we tend to kind of do this like, oh, that person did this, and that's what happened, so I cannot do that. Actually, when we read Jonah, it's meant to be read like this. This is what humanity is like. I can relate. I am in the same place often. It's not this other that did something, and we need to learn from them. And we can't learn from them. It really is a mirror that says, oh, wait, this is me that I'm reading about. I have found myself in places where I've said, How did I get here? Where maybe at some point you're like, I have to laugh to keep myself from crying. It's that kind of experience where you're thinking, what more could go wrong? Sometimes when things go wrong, it's out of our control. We didn't make it happen. Sometimes it's what others do to us. Sometimes no one is at fault. And sometimes we get ourselves in our own messes. A series of bad decisions. The day filled with putting your foot in your mouth over and over again. Some of us watched a good friend or a family member hit rock bottom after a series of poor decisions or bad habits gone wrong.

SPEAKER_03 14:03

And we wait and we wonder will this finally produce change? Will this be the moment when they will see with clarity and they will experience some transformation?

SPEAKER_02 14:19

It's as if there's a spiritual law that basically says if you experience a type of death, it can possibly produce transformation, transformation. It could actually produce new life. So Victoria uh last week, she did a great job. Um, and uh she left us with this cliffhanger. Um, we have these sailors who don't know what to do, and then they they throw Jonah overboard, and they are wondering, um are we doing this right? Like, is this guy innocent and we're throwing him overboard? What is God gonna do? And Yahweh calms the seas as soon as he's overboard, and Jonah goes under the waters and they don't see him any longer. And he ends up in the belly of a fish, a giant fish. There's a lot of imagery in the in the Hebrew text um uh all throughout, and some of them we'll catch and some of them we won't, but one of them that we can catch pretty easily is that they there's this overwhelming flood of waters that person has to go through, and then when they get through the other side, and there's a possible transformation that happens. Can you think of any stories in the Old Testament where they had to go through waters to get through uh something to get to the other side to be rescued? Uh any stories of water and humanity? Can you think of any? Oh, wow, yes. Okay, so we got Eric, I think I heard your voice. What'd you say? The crossing of the Red Sea, so coming out of this awful situation, making to the other side and discovering who God is. Another one? The Jordan. So later they go right through the Jordan, the same, like getting through this river and onto the other side. Can you think of any others that has to do with water and making it through to the other side? Noah's Ark. So Noah, that whole tragic story of Noah getting abode, and then a lot of death happens. Baptism, when we go into the New Testament, will have this kind of flavor of buried in the likeness of his death and raised in the likeness of his resurrection.

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Isaiah 43 shares about this experience.

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But now, thus says the Lord who created you, O Jacob, and he who formed you, O Israel. Fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name.

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You are mine.

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And when you pass through the waters, I will be with you, and through the rivers they shall not overflow you. Here's a reminder that God is ever present, especially during the most difficult of moments. Here's where Jonah begins to talk to God. This is the first time he talks back to God. And Jonah breaks out into this mournful and yet hopeful song in the belly of a great fish. Jonah's prayer is a confession prayer, but it's also a prayer of lament, a prayer of one that feels like, I am dying here. God, where are you? kind of lament, we see a lot of times in the Psalms. God starts this conversation at the very beginning of Jonah 1. And Jonah never talks back. In fact, at one point the captain begs him to pray to God and he doesn't do it. And here we finally have him responding to God in prayer in the belly of a fish. And we question will this near death experience change Jonah? Will he become more compassionate and empathetic? Will he learn the heart of God? Will he stop running? Will he obey? These are all questions that we could ask before we get to chapter 3. Jonas found himself in a place where the only hope must come from.