Spluttering Up the Beach to Nineveh...

SPLUTTERING UP THE BEACH TO NINEVEH... James Alison Rio de Janeiro I. Fleeing from the Word Jonah, ifyou remember, was a most unwilling prophet. The word of God came to him, telling him to go and preach against the great city ofNineveh, for its wickedness had come up before God. Jonah immediately went in the opposite direction. Rather than heading across the fertile crescent to Nineveh, he rushed down to Jaffa and booked passage on a ship. Scripture tells us that he went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord (Jon 1,3) Not only was Tarshish quite the wrong way to go, it was a serious attempt to get away from the presence of the Living God. Why was Jonah so frightened? What was it about Nineveh that scared him? We get a clue later, when Jonah gets cross with Nineveh for repenting on cue. He hated Nineveh. He wanted it to be destroyed. He knew it to be wicked. Why go somewhere which should be destroyed and shout at its inhabitants to change their ways? They will probably give the messenger a rough time! Jonah did not appreciate that he was being sent to Nineveh for the good ofthe people there, yes, but also for his own good. At the end ofthe story he tells God that he hadn't wanted to go because he knew God was a loving God, and was too 'This talk originated as a presentation for the third annual conference ofthe Roman Catholic Caucus of the Gay and Lesbian Christian Movement held in London in March 1999. James Alison109 angry at the thought that the people ofNineveh would get off so lightly. But we're not told that at this stage. Jonah is the son of Amittai, which is to say son of "My Truth." So the whole story is set up from the beginning as one in which someone who is wedded to their own truth comes to learn God's truth the hard way. He knows what is wrong with the gentile world, but was at first able to hear only half of the word of God. He heard it as he was able to receive it: as a stern word of rebuke that he was to pass on to others. That was the state of his soul. Luckily, God had chosen someone who, invincible as he was in his righteousness, knew perfectly well that it is a terrible thing to fall into the presence ofthe living God, and suspected, at some level ofhis being that if, he, Jonah were to obey God, God would certainly break through the carapace ofordered adhesion to true religion, and come into contact with a much more turbulent, stormy world, the world of shame and fear and hatred that is the underside ofall ordered righteousness. Shame is a compulsion which heeds only one command: flee! And Jonah fled. Thank heaven for Jonah's flight! Think how much more damage is caused by those who are not vulnerable to their own shame, who really do manage to fool themselves that their righteousness and God's are cut from the same cloth. Something in Jonah's being was vulnerable to the suspicion that the word ofthe living God would wreak havoc with his own carefully covered hatred and fear, the suspicion that that hatred ofothers and fear of himselfwere aspects ofthe same as yet unredeemed dimension ofhis own life. In that vulnerability was his flight, and through it, ultimately, he was reached so as to be taught how to be a bearer ofGod's word. Andrew Sullivan has a line which catches this dynamic exactly: "Shame forces you prematurely to run away from yourself; pride forces you prematurely to expose yourself. Most gay lives, I'm afraid, are full of an embarassing abundance ofboth."2 Faced with the prospect ofshouting at an incomprehending Nineveh with the hollow pride of those who love neither themselves nor those whom they must convince, Jonah, who knew at the root ofhis heart that he had been giveln something to say, went, as many of us do, into exile. Shame forced him prematurely to...