“But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish. So he paid the fare and went down into it, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the LORD.” Jonah 1.3 ESV
God told Jonah to rise up. He did, only to go his own way, which was down.
This is a big deal in OT texts. Usually whenever someone goes down, it signifies death. What’s crazy is that Jonah even paid the fare.
He rose up to go down to Joppa, the oldest and perhaps largest port in Israel. If he could get there, he could find a way to get anywhere, and Tarshish is so far from where God told him to go that it pretty much represented the end of the world.
He paid his own way, which is a demonstration of all that is graceless and futile. There would have been grace going God’s way. Jonah didn’t want that.
Once he had paid his way to the end of the world, he went down into the ship. And all of this going down was going away from the presence of the LORD.
God said, “Rise up.” Jonah rose up, alright, only to flee from His presence. Why?
You have to understand a little something about Nineveh. It was Assyrian. The Assyrians were the antagonists in the lives of the Israelites during Jonah’s life, and they would remain so after he died. Jonah didn’t like the idea of God being merciful to his enemies. Jonah was too much the patriot, too much the nationalist for that idea.
And really, the bigger problem in Jonah here is his extreme religious pride. One commentator quipped that the Pharisaism we see in the New Testament finds its seed and root here, not just in Jonah himself, but in the heart of a whole nation God had commanded to be a light to the world but which had calcified into a cult of privilege and fierce regulation, hopelessly inward-focused.
There was simply no room in Jonah’s world for a Gentile whom God favored.
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