Jonah: From Pagan Prayers to Prophet Overboard

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Three Sundays into an unplanned stretch of consecutive messages — "everybody's traveling and gone, and so I ended up doing these three in a row" — Pastor Dave Waters picks up Jonah where the storm left him, in Jonah 1:9-17, and gives the morning a title of his own: from pagan prayers to prophet overboard. The scene is chaos. The lot has fallen on Jonah, the sea is growing more and more tempestuous, the cargo is already gone, and the sailors are rowing hard for a shore they cannot reach. Before opening the text, Waters does something disarming: he plays a scratchy 1960s gospel number built on this very passage, a song he grew up singing around a missionary home in Spain where the standing house rule was "don't touch the reel to reel." He dedicates it to his mother, who still watches the stream from Spain every Sunday afternoon. Then the levity drops away. What follows, he argues, is the first unmistakable gospel conversation in Scripture — a runaway Hebrew prophet and a boatload of polytheistic Phoenician sailors — and the shape of Jonah's answers exposes a heart problem that belongs to every believer in the room.

The sailors ask three questions in order: what is your occupation, where do you come from and what is your country, and of what people are you? Waters slows down over Jonah's reply, because the order is reversed in the worst possible way. Jonah leads with "I am a Hebrew," and only then adds, "I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." Quoting a commentator he read that week — "since Jonah identifies himself first ethnically, then religiously, we may infer that his ethnicity is foremost in his self-identity" — he presses the point into the pews. Meet him on a plane to South America and he will ask you to tell him your story; if you begin with your nationality or your people, he says with evident affection, "the love of God has not penetrated deeply enough into your heart yet." He also pauses to correct a category the congregation has absorbed from the culture: Scripture never speaks of races. It speaks of peoples, because we are all cousins, descended from the three sons of Noah and before them from Adam and Eve. And the gospel Jonah half-accidentally preaches is not a New Testament invention. Salvation has always been by grace through faith — Moses looked forward to the day the Messiah would be lifted up as the serpent was lifted in the wilderness; we look back to it.

The theological heart of the message is a question about foundations: if everything were stripped away from you, who would you be? Jonah was a genuinely great prophet, Waters notes, one who prophesied to Israel and encouraged the king of the northern kingdom — "but you can be great at a lot of stuff." His identity was cemented in the wrong place, and the proof is that he would not carry God's word to Nineveh because the Ninevites were not his people. Waters piles up the counterexamples: Thomas, so transformed by his time with Jesus that he traveled from Jerusalem to India; Adoniram Judson leaving for Burma; his own wife's grandfather, a young Minnesota farmer, hearing the call to Japan and the Philippines after the war; Bruce Olson going to the Motilone in South America and finally explaining Scripture to them through the banana leaves they already believed carried the words of life. What if each had said, "those aren't my people"? He names the modern word for the instinct — othering, "what we used to call snubbing" — and lists the boxes we put people in: you're Latin, you must be Catholic; you're Norwegian, you must be Lutheran; you're Iranian, you must be Muslim — "well, no, a few weeks ago we baptized a young lady here in our church who became a follower of Jesus, and she's from Iran." Peter makes the same mistake in a different key, building an identity on performance until the resurrection gives him a foundation he did not manufacture. Only one foundation holds in a storm: "When our identity is founded in God's love, man, bring on the rocks. I don't care."

That foundation, Waters closes, always expresses itself the same way — substitutionally. He recounts being jolted awake in an Uber outside Buenos Aires two weeks earlier when a flat-nosed truck went down on the highway in front of them; the driver asked if they could stop and help, and when they reached the wreck they found thirty other drivers had already pulled over. God built enough of Himself into us that His love, allowed through, produces neighbors. Which is exactly what Jonah's terrible, magnificent sentence means. "Pick me up and hurl me into the sea" — whether it is repentance or resignation, Waters admits he cannot finally tell — lands as this: you are willing to die for me, and you shouldn't have to; I will die for you. He returns to the basilica at Aquileia in northern Italy, where the first-century church laid its catechism into the floor as a mosaic of the life of Jonah, and answers the obvious question: why teach new believers the gospel through Jonah? Because God's love is always substitutionary, "even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many." You are the many. And then the quiet confession underneath the whole sermon: "Jonah's problem is my problem. If I fully surrender to the will of God, will God be as committed to my joy and my good as I am?" The chapter answers it. The sailors who had been praying to their own gods now call on the name of Yahweh, offer sacrifices, and make vows; the sea goes still; and God appoints a great fish, not to end Jonah but to save him. The invitation is direct, and Waters refuses to complicate it: "Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved." There is no easy believerism and no hard believerism. "If it's all of grace, it's all of grace."

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