Jonah 2:1-9

 

Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying, 

 

“I called out to the LORD, out of my distress,

   and he answered me;

out of the belly of Sheol I cried,

   and you heard my voice.

For you cast me into the deep,

   into the heart of the seas,

   and the flood surrounded me;

all your waves and your billows

   passed over me.

Then I said, ‘I am driven away

   from your sight;

Yet I shall again look

   upon your holy temple.’

The waters closed in over me to take my life;

   the deep surrounded me;

weeds were wrapped about my head

   at the roots of the mountains.

I went down to the land

   whose bars closed upon me forever;

yet you brought up my life from the pit,

   O LORD my God.

When my life was fainting away,

   I remembered the LORD,

and my prayer came to you,

   into your holy temple.

Those who pay regard to vain idols

   forsake their hope of steadfast love.

But I with the voice of thanksgiving

   will sacrifice to you;

what I have vowed I will pay.

   Salvation belongs to the LORD!”

What Is This Psalm About?   

 

Although it’s not officially part of the Psalter, Jonah 2 is a psalm. It is a song of grateful witness to the LORD who rescued the prophet from certain death. When the LORD called Jonah to preach repentance to the bloodthirsty city of Nineveh, Jonah ran away. He boarded a ship heading in the opposite direction. God, however, hurled a mighty wind, tossing the waves and threatening the ship. Jonah knew he had no choice, so, to save the ship, he asked the mariners to toss him into the sea. Even as Jonah hit the water, the winds stopped. Then the LORD sent a great fish to swallow up Jonah. For three days and nights, he cried out to be delivered from death under the sea. After he returned to the daylight world, Jonah composed a beautiful poem of thanksgiving, a psalm that overflows with the relief of salvation.

Matthew recounts how some of the skeptical Pharisees demand a sign from Jesus to authenticate his daring teaching and the rumors of his dramatic healings. Jesus gives them only a riddle: “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:38-40).

 

As we’ve noted, Jesus knows he will eventually be put to death. He also knows he will rise. He draws on Jonah as a type, a preview illustration of his own fate. We can juxtapose these two prophets. The LORD called Jonah to a mission; Jonah fled. The Father anointed Jesus as the savior; Jesus consecrated himself in ministry from his baptism through the cross. 

 

When a tempest at sea threatened the ship, Jonah had enough experiential faith to realize the LORD caused the storm because of him. He knew he could not fight “the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (Jonah 1:9). So rather than crying out in repentance or asking the ship to take him back, Jonah let the sailors toss him into the waves.

 

In his ministry, Jesus created a tempest of resistance not to his Father, but to the rebellious world. Though he knew the storm would eventually kill him, Jesus carried on resolutely. Indeed his whole life was an enacting of Jonah’s words. Not from flight or fear, but from faithful obedience, Jesus pressed toward the defeat that he knew would be a victory for us! 

 

The sea raged because Jonah was on the run from the LORD and his commission. Jesus, by contrast, was the faithful man who set his face resolutely toward Jerusalem and the death to which he was called (Luke 9:51). He, the innocent prophet, let us unjustly throw him into a sea of blood and death that we, the guilty, might be spared the tempest of God’s wrath. Jesus made Jonah’s fearful words into a bold personal mission statement. It’s as if he said to the world which he came to save, “Pick me up and hurl me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you” (Jonah 1:12). 

 

Though very opposite in heart and obedience, both men endured a transforming, hellish three-day journey. As he plummeted under the waves, Jonah felt tons of water pressing on him. But that load was light compared to the weight of sin piling on the savior’s soul in Sheol. Jesus the Son of God felt the horror: “I am driven from your sight.” The great fish that swallowed Jonah saved him from drowning but would soon have killed him. The sea monster of death that consumed Jesus meant to keep him forever. They both went to states from which no one returns.

 

Then both experienced miraculous rescue. They were saved from the great abyss of the ocean of death as well as the monster that inhabits it. Jonah emerged on shore from the mouth of the fish. Jesus emerged from the burial cave, coming out of the darkness into the light of resurrection. So both could declare joyfully, “Salvation belongs to the LORD!” With this understanding, we can read Jonah’s prayer as Jesus’ own. We can hear it as the recalling of a harrowing passage that astoundingly ended in triumph. The dire events of the song get recited almost joyfully because of the tremendous turn 

toward joy.

“Christ in Hades” in Scenes from the Life of Christ. Spanish, 13th Century, The Cloisters, New York City.