Jonah

The Sign of Jonah

By John Taylor; 2008 Jan 24, 6 Sultan, 164 BE

A careful reader of these essays will notice with feelings of frustration how I always begin to waver, wobble and finally wander completely off-track. My attention span, like Pooh's brain, is very small. But thank God now I have my beloved friend ePhilo to steer me back again. This is from our latest exchange.

ePhilo: "This is why I'm frustrated by your continued description of the God/No-God debate as something which doesn't concern Baha'is."

JET: "Oh, it concerns us alright. I just read in the Wiki article about proofs of deity that there are two kinds of theists, those who believe that God can be proven and those who, like atheists, hold that such a thing is impossible. We are in the latter camp, Christians tend to be in the former. The reason Baha'is stay silent while Christians are arguing, then, is that we agree that there can never be a proof, by definition. That does not mean that we do not care, or have nothing to say about it. It is possible to believe in God, even though we hold Him above conception, if you accept that through His mercy He sends perfect reflections, Manifestations, who stand in His place..."

For extraneous reasons, ePhilo also asked about the place of Jonah in the Baha'i teachings, but I could find nothing in the Writings themselves in a superficial search of the Ocean program, though I did find to my surprise that Baha'u'llah on His exile walked right by Nineveh and the traditional grave of Jonah. Maybe some of my readers, most of whom are much more focused and systematically learned than a flibbertigibbet  like myself, will be able to find something.

In any case, what I did find about Jonah in the Bible and the Qu'ran seems relevant to our discussion of the existence of God. Although I shared these quotes from the Bible and the Qur'an with ePhilo in bulk format already, I would like to reorder and re-arrange them into a more consistent argument.

We are all familiar with the story of the reluctant prophet Jonah, God calls him to warn the Ninevites, he shirks his duty, runs off in this medieval galley, gets shot out of a cannon -- no, wait, I am thinking of the Veggietales version. Anyway, he ends up in the belly of a whale -- Abdu'l-Baha, being shown a whale skeleton by Juliet Thompson in New York's museum of Natural History remarks, "That whale could swallow seventy Jonahs!"

On a not totally unrelated note, the atheist writer Thomas Paine cynically commented that being swallowed by a whale is not miracle enough, it would only be a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale. Do not be a pain, Paine, miracles are not proofs. Really, they are not. This explains why I made up that little mind experiment a few essays ago about the word "Jesus" being written in the sky. A determined skeptic could doubt such a sign, saying it is not enough, until "Jesus" were written on every atom of the universe, and even then he could continue doubting internally, as long as he had free will. Conversely a totally credulous believer could do the same with "There is no God" being written on every atom of the universe. We are all somewhere between these two extremes, total skepticism and total credulity. Safe to say, and just as well.

Atheists like Richard Dawkins love to solidify their position by defining faith as "belief in spite of all evidence to the contrary." In other words, the blind faith of a believer makes him, whether he admits it or not, that blathering idiot who would believe even if every atom in the universe had a big sign on it saying: "There is no God." Which is why this Baha'i at least feels uncomfortable when Christians and other believers try to adduce proofs that God exists. If you start walking down the path of "proving" that God exists, you only show that your belief in the Oneness of God has been compromised, and that is our greatest shield against doubts of all kinds.

It seems to me that the miracle in the Book of Jonah never did have anything to do with the whale. The miracle came when he repents, gets spat up by the whale, decides to obey the call of God and finally he does warn the Ninevites. When he does, to his surprise (and, yes, dismay) they actually heeded the warning! Who'da thunk? People are dumb, they would rather die than admit they are wrong. But hey, these people, given a choice between carrying on and meeting certain death, well, they made the right choice.

This was a miracle according to my favorite definition of a miracle; a miracle is "anything that turns the soul towards conscious acceptance of God and God's Will." Note that it does not "prove" anything. A proof is something that must follow, and this is a question of will, of acceptance, it is a decision. God's will is going to be done anyway, if we accept it or not. As the Bab's prayer says, "All are His servants and all abide by His bidding." As the prayer of Jesus says, "Thy will be done, on earth as in heaven." If the Ninevites had said `No, we would rather die than change,' they would have fallen quicker than they did, but their city today is in any case yet another ruin on the banks of the river Tigris.

Jesus upped the stakes of Jonah's story, as Luke 11:29-30 recounts,

"When the multitudes were gathering together to him, he began to say, "This is an evil generation. It seeks after a sign. No sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah, the prophet. For even as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will also the Son of Man be to this generation."

 First of all, note that Jesus is not talking about proofs. Proofs have nothing to do with it. He is talking about a sign, an indicator, a pointer -- in computer programming a pointer is often used in place of an actual program. Windows users are familiar with this: if you delete what it terms a `shortcut' you are not deleting the original file or uninstalling a program, you are just deleting a pointer. You can have a million pointers scattered all over your desktop and you can alter them, rename them, give them different icons, or you can delete them all, but the thing pointed to is not affected in the slightest. The program abides, just as the prayer says of the Will of God, "All abide by His bidding," "Thy will be done." That is what a sign is, it is a virtual proof that, from our point of view, stands for but does not take the place of wherever it is that God lives, or abides.

 Specifically, the sign the Jews were looking for was the Messiah, a conquering savior who would come and liberate them from Roman overlordship. And recall that Jesus did conquer the Roman Empire, just not in the outward way that they hoped for and expected. They wanted a political solution, a nationalist leader like, well, Hitler or Genghis Khan. The only sign they got was that of Jonah. Jonah's "sign" to the Ninevites said that they must stop the way they were going, repent, and submit to God, or else face imminent destruction. The fall of Jerusalem happened only a few years after Jesus had been crucified. In the face of that total destruction, the Jewish Faith reformed itself, it got rid of Temple priests and went over to rabbis and synagogues, and ceased its persistent political, nationalist agitation. But the message of Jesus spread across the Roman Empire.

 There is more I should probably say about that, but I want to rush on to the Surih of Jonah, the tenth book of the Qur'an. It says in the 96th verse,

 "Those against whom the word of thy Lord hath been verified would not believe- Even if every Sign was brought unto them,- until they see (for themselves) the penalty grievous." (Qur'an 10:96, Yusuf Ali tr)

 The fact is that never in history has any people, no matter how rational, reasoned out the way to get ahead. For a skeptic there is no proof, never can be. The vast plains of Asia are scattered with the ruins of past cities and civilizations that fell because they did not recognize what had to be done to survive. You do not have to look far to see a more impressive example. Climate change deniers, who, in the words of Paul, hold their religions in their wallets, are willing to be skeptical until doom is printed on every atom of the universe before they will eat crow and admit that global solutions are our only way to survive.

 And note what it says: "Even if every sign was brought," that would be our skeptic who denies the word "Jesus" printed on every atom of the universe. Nor is the God of the Qur'an talking about atheists and honest skeptics, undoubtedly He is talking about so-called fundamentalists, so-called believers, wolves in sheep's clothing who in their hearts are total skeptics, who go for outer power using religion for their own ends. These are the tares among the wheat. These were the nationalist agitators whose incessant rebellions caused the Romans to lose patience and crush Jerusalem.

 Recall that Jesus had stood on the hill over Jerusalem, seen what was about to happen, and shed tears for His "chicks" that He would have gathered under his wing. Nineveh was quite the reverse, the people heeded the "sign" and Jonah, out of spite, afterwards had shed tears of frustration that they had saved themselves. God had proven Himself right, and Jonah was still angry that he was dead wrong about the worthiness of his prophetic calling. This is now called "cognitive dissonance." Humans hate being proven wrong, and deny or ignore every evidence that they were mistaken. God, in the Qur'an, seems to be commenting on this when it continues,

 "Why was there not a single township (among those We warned), which believed,- so its faith should have profited it,- except the people of Jonah? When they believed, We removed from them the penalty of ignominy in the life of the present, and permitted them to enjoy (their life) for a while." (Qur'an 10:98)

 There was an incident in the flight of Muhammad (I shared Balyuzi's full account of it with ePhilo) where a Christian slave from Nineveh meets the Prophet, Who says something innocuous like, "Oh yes, Ninevah, the place where my brother prophet, Jonah, lived." The Christian falls to His feet and believes, in spite of the contemptuous comments of his master, who says, "Your religion is better than His..." It seems clear that this Christian had Jesus' warning about the "sign of Jonah" in mind, and seeing the persecution of Muhammad, plus His radiant personality, renounced all skepticism.

 As it says in the quote above, Ninevah was the only place in history where a prophet came and the people actually listened to him. Jesus Himself had confirmed this when He said, "A prophet is not without honor save in his own country." And, hey, Jonah was not from Nineveh, they were a foreign, contemptible people in his mind. Why should he care about them? Yet to prove something to Jonah, God made the only exception in history to the rule. In Jonah's case there was a cross-cultural transference of truth, as with Christianity. Thus the sign of Jonah for Jesus was that His message went beyond Palestine. The Qur'an continues,

 "If it had been thy Lord's will, they would all have believed,- all who are on earth! wilt thou then compel mankind, against their will, to believe! No soul can believe, except by the will of God, and He will place doubt (or obscurity) on those who will not understand." (Qur'an 10:99-100)

There are no proofs, just signs that we can pay attention to or ignore at our peril. It is and always has been an act of will to believe. Signs that it was the right thing to do come afterwards, confirmations that the decision was right or wrong, but let there be no mistake, either way, the judgment of God is on us. Truth is truth, whether we say "Thy will be done" or not.

Jonah did the will of the Lord, he presented the warning to the Ninevites. Then he went up on the "east side" (the east is where the sun comes from) and sat on a hill to look down on the city to see what happens to them -- which of course was nothing, since they had heeded and repented. His anger seethes.

"Yahweh God prepared a vine, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shade over his head, to deliver him from his discomfort. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the vine. But God prepared a worm at dawn the next day, and it chewed on the vine, so that it withered." (Jonah 4:6-7, WEB)

Hot sun and wind blow on Jonah so hard the next day that at the end of it he faints dead away. It is necessary that a prophet suffer, for the greatest men suffer most. Jonah has hit his limit and gone beyond. Like Job, in his extremity he curses his own life (a believer in God knows that there is no point in doubting God, the source of all being, but does so indirectly by cursing his or her own existence). This, the God who says "Choose life," disapproves of, but there is a purpose behind the lesson.

"(Jonah) requested for himself that he might die, and said, `It is better for me to die than to live.' God said to Jonah, `Is it right for you to be angry about the vine?' He said, `I am right to be angry, even to death.' Yahweh said, `You have been concerned for the vine, for which you have not labored, neither made it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night. Shouldn't I be concerned for Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?'"

A footnote in my edition explains that a person who cannot tell between right and left hands was understood to be a child.

It all boils down to love.

God, the creator, loves all His creatures, especially the innocents, the poor and the children, and even the animals, for these go down when the ones in a position to decide make the wrong choice. Yet we, from our limited individual perspective, minimize that greater love and get petulant only over what affects our interests directly, in this case a vine sheltering Jonah from death by exposure under the naked sun. His selfish huff proves itself self-contradictory right away, because soon afterwards, Jonah, a spoiled child, asks to die. If he wants to die, why was it so bad for God to take away the vine? Jonah learns on that high hill that God loves all His creatures, even if they live in a strange place and a foreign land.