Geography first. Nineveh is five hundred miles east of Israel. Tarshish is due west by two thousand miles. God told Jonah to go to Nineveh. He booked passage on a ship for Tarshish.
We remember Jonah because we are Jonah. The word of the Lord comes to us saying, "Love your enemy," "Take up your bed and walk," "Leave home," "Go home," "Lose yourself," and we head in the opposite direction.
We may find ourselves saying, like Moses when God called him to lead his tribe, "Try my brother, Lord. He talks real good." Unlike the obedient Isaiah, we may say: "Here am I Lord, but send someone else. Send my brother, my partner, my colleague, send anyone but me. I'm not into self-sacrifice this year. I'm burned out. I need a vacation, not a vocation. I think I'll head for Tarshish." Tarshish is a tempting place. It's always two thousand miles from where we should be going.
Notice that after God ordered Jonah to Nineveh, Jonah didn't argue. He didn't refuse or get angry. He just sailed off in the opposite direction, a classic passive-aggressive. He avoided not just God's word, but God as well, and he left without a murmur.
God bless the atheists! At least they argue. At least they complain. At least they question. Like Job (and as God says at the end of that story) they are closer to God than those who offer cheap explanations for life's injustice.
It is the silent leave we take from God that hurts us most-the agnostic indifference, the passionless disinterest that cools the soul and quiets the mind with measurable benefits until suddenly we are plunged into the soul's dark night, when a good friend dies in a car crash, an infant is stillborn, our life savings vanish in one bad investment, the firm collapses, the doctor murmurs on seeing a gray spot on the X-ray.
Suddenly, angry and aware, we find ourselves once again in God's perplexing presence and far from the beaches and bistros of Tarshish.
I know from my own life that no one can forget God faster than a minister. Heavens, I say to myself, if I am talking God-talk, I must be God's servant. Well, no-no more, no less, than any other.
The word of the Lord came to Jonah, and he took a ship and headed for the sunset instead of the sunrise. The world is filled with ?migr?s like Jonah, sipping tequila at little tin tables on dusty streets, wiping glasses behind the bar, making bricks for Pharaoh, tending pigs in the local hog farm-men and women far from home but despite the distance never far from God; never far from God's call to come home and become themselves again, the men or women they were meant to be.
For here's the hell of that half-escape. It never works. We flee God's word, and we flee his mercy. We flee his command, and we flee his forgiveness. We flee his presence, and we flee his love.
That's easy to do when you're young and tough and have a world before you, a world to conquer and command. But the day comes when the heart's hunger wells so huge that we become one vast ache and then it's time to head for home, no longer a place now but a condition, something like peace. At sixty, I think I understand this.
The good news is: We cannot escape.
In our geography Tarshish may be two thousand miles west of Nineveh, but in God's geography they are next-door neighbors in the vast metropolis of his kingdom. The bar and the pigsty and the brickyard and the little tin table are not in hell but purgatory. They are stopping places on the way to heaven.
The ache in the heart and the hunger for home and the sour stink of the whale's belly are scenes from God's divine comedy in which we play our clumsy parts and through which we will at last come home. And the presence of the Lord that we tried to flee is everywhere, in the first act and the last. As the psalmist said, "Though I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me."