Learning in the Belly of the Fish

Last year our congregation took a journey through one of my favorite books of the Bible, the book of Jonah. Many are familiar with the basics of the story:

There’s a guy named Jonah and he gets eaten by a big fish. Jonah miraculously survives three days and nights in the belly of the fish.

What is most remarkable to me about the story of Jonah is how little we actually know about this story and the circumstances that led him to the belly of the fish, and how much we can learn from his story today. 

See, Jonah was called by God to live among a people not his own. A people who looked different with a different culture, language and set of customs. Jonah had written off this people and fled his calling to them. He later finds himself thrown overboard where he has his encounter with the big fish.

Sometimes we find ourselves in the belly of a beast due to our own failures to see past our prejudices, preconceived notions and comfort zones. Especially now living in the era of COVID-19 we are confronted with family and personal challenges as we cope through the quarantine. Jonah couldn’t see past his own sense of identity even though God was asking him to be and think bigger.

We live in divided times where we are divided by partisan lines, cultural lines, racial lines and even county lines. But division is nothing new, it is human nature to find distinction and to divide based upon our distinctiveness. But that is not entirely the way God intended it, and it is what Jonah had to find out the hard way. God created us distinct and he celebrates diversity as He himself is the highest manifestation of unity and diversity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

At the conclusion of the book of Jonah, God demonstrates mercy to the outsiders, those whom Jonah had written off. In order to start healing some of the divisions we face as a people, we should remember God’s heart for those who we consider the “others”.

Jesus often uses the outsiders and rejects of society to put to shame the arrogance of our prejudices and to remind us that true unity is not the surrender of our distinctions, but rather in the embrace of love for God and neighbor.

Pastor Brian Garcia

Crossroads Church of Sturgeon Bay