Word of the Wives by Guinness Michele;Guinness Abby;

Author:Guinness, Michele;Guinness, Abby;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL012040, book
ISBN: 4573169
Publisher: Authentic Media
Published: 2010-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

Mrs Jonah

The book of Jonah is compact and beautifully written. The story, with its absurd turn of events, could be one of the best known in the Bible. Jonah runs away from the challenge God sets out for him, so the Almighty takes drastic measures to sort him out. He whips up a storm, and has Jonah thrown overboard and swallowed by a big fish, where he has three days to think about his actions before being vomited onto dry ground and sent back to try to achieve his mission.

Jonah’s prayer of thanksgiving in chapter 2 is moving and exultant. Here is a man who knows, loves and hears God, and is not in the habit of running away. Excuse the awful pun, but I think the fishy part of the story is a red herring. Jonah’s resistance to doing what he is told is actually due to his horror of Nineveh, a large city renowned for its injustice, brutality and aggression. But God still cares for the locals there, and sends Jonah to warn them of the disaster that will arrive in forty days, unless they change their ways. The warning is heeded and the inhabitants are transformed. ‘When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.’1

In response, Jonah becomes really angry, ‘O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.’2 Jonah avoided his calling because he would rather see the inhabitants of Nineveh destroyed. That is the shocking heart of the story, which is all too human and easy to relate to today.

God gently reveals the quality of his love to Jonah when the bush that gives him shelter from the sun dies in the heat of the day. ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow . . . 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?’3 Jonah knows God is merciful, but he can’t quite get his head around it, because the forgiving nature of that love is so different from his own instincts.

Here, Mrs Jonah is the type of woman who likes to do the questionnaires and quizzes in women’s mags. She is excited by the idea of adventures, but doesn’t believe they happen in her own life. She cares deeply for her husband, but struggles to communicate, as many women do, with a man who is a natural loner and so easily withdraws into himself. She earnestly prays for him and, because he listens to God more than to her, her prayers probably work.

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