I was just walking away from the temple when suddenly my eyes nearly popped out of my head.  There, walking toward me, was a man I had mourned as dead, and, what’s worse, by my hand: Jonah!

You see, it was like this.  We were just about to weigh anchor in Joppa on our last voyage to Tarshish when a man came running up and asked if he could go with us to Tarshish.  Naturally, I was rather suspicious of his motives, given the hurry he seemed to be in – we’re respectable sailors, and want no part in helping criminals escape the law.  But he explained that he hadn’t broken the law, he was merely running away from his god.  Now maybe that should have been a bit of a red flag, but I grew up in a culture with lots and lots of gods, and frankly, none of them seemed much worth worrying about.  Of course, one does hear some strange things at times about the god of Israel, but if he was only running away from his own god that seemed like his business, not ours.

Anyway, that seemed no reason to deny him a passage, so he came aboard and paid his fare – the money was welcome – then he went below to keep out of our way.  (Incidentally, I wonder whether I should be refunding his money?  He didn't really get the passage he paid for….)  Being out of the way, we forgot about him as the weather suddenly turned nasty and soon we were hard put to it to stay afloat.  It was so bad that we even started throwing our cargo overboard to lighten the ship!

It was while we were bringing up the cargo from the hold, though the wild gyrations of the boat made the job difficult, that we were reminded of Jonah again.  We found him fast asleep in a corner of the hold.  Asleep!  In that storm!  Well, we woke him and brought him up on deck to call on his god.  We were already calling on ours, but more gods had to be better, right?  But this time it didn’t help.  Instead, the storm just kept getting worse.

It got so bad that some of the men started saying that it was no ordinary storm, and must have been sent by the gods because of something one of us had done.  I was rather sceptical, but finally agreed to cast lots to see whose fault it was.  Bits of straw of all different lengths were lying around in my cabin, so we collected one for each of us and I held them as each man in turn picked one out of the bunch.  And who do you think picked the shortest straw?  Our passenger, Jonah!

The next question was, what had he done?  Well, he was quite open about the storm being his fault – he said he was a Jew, and worshipped the God who had made the whole world, hence his power over the storm.  He, Jonah, had chosen to disobey this God and try to run away, and this was his punishment.  But his remedy was one that none of us could accept.  Well, how would you feel about throwing a man overboard?  If a man falls overboard accidentally, we go to great lengths to try to recover him – so how could we throw someone in deliberately?  Instead, we tried everything we could think of, even trying to row back to shore, but the storm just kept getting worse.  Finally, we had to acknowledge that Jonah’s suggestion was our only possible hope: to delay any longer would kill all of us, and still not save him.  So we prayed to Jonah’s God, begging forgiveness for what we were about to do in taking Jonah's life, and then over the side he went.

We were given no time to reconsider – Jonah instantly vanished under the water, and at the same instant, the most amazing miracle happened: the storm vanished, the sun shone, and the sea was as smooth as a mirror!  If that's not an answer to prayer, I don't know what is.  Well, there was only one possible response to such a miracle: we offered a sacrifice to Jonah’s God, and made vows.

Because we had thrown all of the cargo overboard, we had to put back into port and load up again, but there was no chance to fulfil our vows then.  Instead, they had to wait until we returned – by which time I think most of the others had forgotten about the whole thing.  But I kept my vows in mind throughout our voyage, and travelled to God's temple to pay them as soon as we landed back in Israel.

So here I am, in Jerusalem at last, after a voyage that was peaceful other than a niggling feeling of guilt over the memory of having sent someone to their death.  Though the others might have forgotten their vows made in the aftermath of the storm, I had to come and worship the one God who had showed himself to be truly powerful.

And God has rewarded me by taking away my guilt about Jonah.  When I first saw him I doubted my eyes for a moment, until he caught sight of me and stopped short, looking momentarily uncertain whether he should slink away and hide, pretend he hadn't seen me or maybe even run up and greet me.  I guess it would be kind of embarrassing to meet someone whom you'd got in such trouble that they'd had to throw you overboard.  Seeing that the recognition was mutual, I cried out, "Jonah!  But – but I thought you were dead...?"

Still with that slight reluctance, he approached me and explained stiffly that he was going to the temple to pay a vow he had made after his own deliverance from death.  Not wanting to let him get away that easily, I asked, "Well, can we meet somewhere afterwards?  I'd love to hear what happened to you."

He finally agreed, and we set a time to meet back at the temple steps.  In what follows, I’ll report his story in my own words, to avoid the confusion that might result if I reported our conversation verbatim, consisting as it did of probing questions on my part and evasive answers on his.  He seemed (understandably) rather ashamed of his behaviour in various parts of his narrative, though I dare say I would have done no better.

The reason why Jonah had been on our ship in the first place was that he had been told by God to go to Nineveh to warn them of impending destruction.  Like all of the other nations everywhere, he hated and feared the cruel Assyrians, and, naturally, would have preferred their immediate, well-deserved destruction to the probable future destruction of Israel at their hands.  Why, believing in God's power as he did, he ever thought he could just run away like that and get away with it, is something that he was quite unable to explain.  Maybe he thought that the delay would use up the time of grace that God had allowed for Nineveh.  Anyway, run away he did – but get away with it he didn't!

On board our ship, he had known that God must have sent the storm, and had been willing to sacrifice his life for ours, knowing that he was responsible.  But God had had other plans.  Deep, deep down into the water he had plunged, until suddenly he became aware of a huge dark shape making for him.  With no way to escape, he was swallowed whole by the monster.  I couldn’t get any description of his time inside the fish, beyond the statement, "It was dark – pitch dark – and slimy.  There seemed no hope, but I couldn't believe that God had done this for no reason.  There was nothing else I could do, so I spent a lot of time praying – and then praying some more." With no way of measuring time, it was only later that he discovered that he had been in the fish for three whole days and nights.

His exit from the fish was another thing that he said he preferred to forget.  The sudden bright sunlight had been quite painful after all that time in unbroken darkness, but the fresh air had been such a welcome relief that it thoroughly outweighed the discomfort.  The vows that he had made while in the fish were about to send him to Jerusalem when God intervened: "Go to Nineveh and preach there the message that I tell you." There was no avoiding this task, any more than there had been any way of escape from the fish by his own power.

This time he knew that he had no choice but to go, so he went. "Yet forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed!" The message was preached all over the city, reluctantly but thoroughly.  Unfortunately – as he viewed it – he had all the success in preaching that he had expected, and that any prophet might envy.  He got the undivided attention of the whole city, from the king down.  They all repented, fasted and put on sackcloth, and then God relented.  Suddenly Jonah's message was no longer needed – and no longer even true!

Jonah was out of a job, and was forced to accept that he had saved Israel's enemies from destruction.  He left the city and sat down outside to watch, in the hope that God would see something he didn’t like and go back to his original plan of treating the Ninevites as they deserved.  But God showed him, using a plant and a worm, that the people in the city were important to God, and should likewise be important to Jonah.

Jonah glossed over what he did after that, and I didn't press him, seeing that he obviously wasn't happy with the subject and feeling that I had the basic story anyway.  Eventually, though, he ended up in Jerusalem, fulfilling the vows he had made in the fish – just in time to meet me as I came to pay my own vows, and to set my mind at rest at the same time.

Such an ending!  Only an all-knowing, all-powerful God could have arranged such circumstances, for, in bringing me to a belief in God, Jonah's defiant flight had saved a man from death, after which his grudging obedience had saved a whole city.