Spluttering up the beach to Nineveh . . . fleeing from the word (Alison, 2001)
Thank heaven for Jonah’s flight! Think how much more damage is caused by those who are not vulnerable to their own shame, who really do manage to fool themselves that their righteousness and God’s are cut from the same cloth. Something in Jonah’s being was vulnerable to the suspicion that the word of the living God would wreak havoc with his own carefully covered hatred and fear — the suspicion that that hatred of others and fear of himself were aspects of the same as yet unredeemed dimension of his own life. In that vulnerability was his flight, and through it, ultimately, he was reached so as to be taught how to be a bearer of God’s word.