God told Jonah to go to Nineveh and there proclaim the word of the Lord. So Jonah went on board a ship in the opposite direction, towards Tarshish, or Spain. He was not doing what God had commanded him to do. So a big whale swallowed Jonah and eventually burped him back to land. A second time God told Jonah to go and this time he went.
I have had experiences like that, times when I wanted to do my own thing when God wanted me to God’s thing. So off went God to find his trustworthy whale to swallow me, burp me back to receive the mandate once more.
Now picture Saul, who came from Tarsus. He was “still breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord.” He was even on the road to Damascus to arrest and imprison them. Would we call him a bigot or a bully, so full of his own nothingness that he would persecute those who had what he did not have, but what he really wanted? Was he persecuting because his heart was burning for this way of the disciples, while he was refusing to accept it because it would mean change?
This time it was no big fish, but a voice and a bright light. “Who am I, you ask? I am Jesus and you are persecuting me!” Uh oh, back to the whale we go. The persecutor would become the persecuted; the bully would be bullied and the bigot would learn patience and understanding. The new Jonah would find Ananias. He would enter the waters of the deep sea of baptism without drowning. He would emerge from those waters a changed person.
What kinds of ‘murderous threats’ do we harbor as we journey to our Damascus or Nineveh? How will the Lord break into our worlds? Whales for Jonah, bright light and voice for Saul: what for each of us as we progress on our way?