Jonah 2 Q&A

Happy Friday everyone! I got a doozy of a question from the previous sermon, and have been thinking about it a lot this week. I wanted to provide a response here....

So, if Jonah did not repent (in his prayer), and God tells him again to go to Nineveh, did he, (do we?) really have free will?

Ah, the "free will" question!! First, let me say very emphatically that I won't resolve this with a paragraph or two (or three, or four...)! But this is a question that (along with other ongoing questions like the "problem of evil") deserves careful thought and response, rather than shrugging and saying "it's a mystery!" even though complete resolution remains beyond our grasp until the full redemption and healing of all things. So allow me to offer a few thoughts as it relates to Jonah specifically....

It's perfectly legitimate to read a story like Jonah and be prompted to ask questions about free will and human agency, but it's also important to consider what kinds of questions the story of Jonah is actually trying to speak to (and, conversely, what questions it isn't trying to give answers for). And I see Jonah as a text that talks much more about themes like grace, repentance, conversion and whether there are ethnic boundaries to God's mission, rather than attempting to give answers to the philosophical questions of human free will and divine determinism. So for that reason, I wouldn't want to press Jonah too, too hard on the topic.
 
(Incidentally, I suspect the whole debate about free will is a much bigger deal in our cultural moment than it was to ancient readers - it seems to me that ancient people were much more willing to submit themselves to the mysteries of the cosmos, and forces like nature and seasons that were so obviously beyond their "control," whereas we seem to live under the illusion that control of the universe is within our reach, but perhaps that's a tangent for another time....)

That all being said, it is interesting to note the interplay between Jonah's choices and God's intentions throughout his story. On one level, Jonah absolutely expresses free will and makes decisions that undeniably impact the narrative - his flight to Tarshish, after all, is depicted as HIS choice - so it is true that he has agency on a very basic, literal level. And, as we will see in chapter 4, the story intentionally ends very abruptly, as if to say, "Jonah has a FINAL choice in his response to God's work," and this choice is left open! It seems that free human response to the scandal of God's grace is an important point of the whole story!

On the other hand, it is also true that God does not allow Jonah's choices to fully derail God's project, so one could potentially argue that Jonah doesn't have free will in a final, ultimate sense (as in, Jonah cannot fully prevent God's word from getting to the Ninevites, despite his efforts!). But frankly, if it comes down to that, I'm pretty glad God's plan wins out over Jonah's destructive, stubborn agency to choose away from God's call! That's good news!

I'll end by reiterating that I don't think Jonah is attempting to present a systematized understanding of how God's plans interact with human choice/agency, though we can glean some interesting lessons and observations from his story. At the end of the day, I take great comfort in the notion that God's grace meets us in the mystery here - that somehow we do seem to have the ability to choose, our agency isn't removed, and yet God's plan is never fully derailed or defeated by our poor exercise of that agency - and that ultimately Jonah's story reveals to us a "merciful and compassionate God" who is sovereign over creation.