The Prodigal Prophet by Timothy Keller

Author:Timothy Keller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

The Pattern of Love (Jonah 1:11–17)

We need not doubt that the New Testament sees Jonah’s near death to save the sailors physically as a sign of Jesus’s actual death to save us eternally. Commentators have pointed out the fascinating parallels between Jonah’s experience in the storm and Jesus’s experience in the storm on Lake Galilee in Mark 4:35–41. Both Jesus and Jonah are out on the water in boats. Both Jesus’s and Jonah’s boats are overtaken by storms. Each storm is described as particularly violent. Both Jesus and Jonah are, surprisingly, asleep in the midst of the mighty storm. In each case, the others in the boat come to the sleeper and cry out to him that they are perishing and that he needs to do something. In Mark 4:38 the disciples seem to express our personal feelings toward God in suffering: “The disciples woke him and said to him, ‘Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?’” In both Mark 4 and Jonah 1 there is a miraculous intervention by God and the sea is calmed. And finally, after the deliverance, both the sailors and the disciples are described as more terrified than they were in the storm (Mark 4:41; Jonah 1:16). These parallels can’t be coincidences. By this parallelism, Mark is telling us that Jonah’s willingness to die for the sailors points us to an infinitely greater sacrificial love that brings an infinitely greater salvation. Unlike Jonah, Jesus was not thrown into the waters, because Jesus came to save us from a far greater peril than drowning. Jesus was able to calm the storm on Galilee and save his disciples because later, on the cross, he was thrown into the ultimate storm of divine wrath so he could save us from sin and death itself. Jesus himself says, “For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40).

When Jonah told the sailors to throw him overboard, sacrificing himself to save them, he was enacting perhaps the central theme of the Bible. There are at least two aspects of it that we can consider. One aspect is the ethical—that love should be self-giving. We can live life well in this world only through sacrificial love.

New Testament writers took a rather general Greek word for affection—agape—and infused it with a new, unique meaning. In the Bible, writes biblical scholar John Stott, “agape love means self-sacrifice in the service of others.”8 1 John 3:16–18 says, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.” When John says that “this is how we know what love is,” he is arguing that, on this side of the cross, love is ever after defined as self-giving. “Just as the essence of hate is murder . . . so the essence of love is self-sacrifice.

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