A reflection by Trevor Bechtel on March 22 2026

Good morning

Jonah has been a favorite story of mine for as long as I have known about the bible, which is probably my whole life, but certainly ever since the Wanner Church Summer Retreat when I was 7 or 8. That year the theme of our Sunday worship for the retreat weekend was Jonah. We were at a camp with a small lake. 

Jim Snider, a big athletic but very gentle man about my father’s age was assigned to play the part of the whale. I think other people must have been assigned the parts of the sailors and I think they must have taken me out on a canoe into the middle of the lake. The “middle” of the lake was probably actually 20 yards from the shore. I was playing the part of Jonah, and because the only way you can exit a canoe in the middle of a lake is unceremoniously, I was dumped unceremoniously into the lake from the canoe. Jim then deftly scooped me up and carried me on his belly to the shore where he heaved me up out of the water and onto the shore. Whatever I weighed back then it was a weight that Jim could throw and I am pretty sure I can remember getting some good air on my way to the beach. The version of this that exists in my head is one of my favorite memories. 

But I’ve had lots of other reasons to love Jonah since then, the primary reason being all the nature in Jonah. We have had a lot of nature focused Lenten series since I’ve begun pastoring here at Shalom. And something about this that you might not believe is that these topics have never been my idea. So I’m grateful to worship committees present and past for giving me the opportunity to think again and again about how nature frames Lent for us. 

This year we have noticed the whale and the gourd and all the wind and the sun and the worm and the cattle, but we haven’t made it the central focus of our intention. Instead we have mostly probed the character, conviction, calling, and commitment–or lack thereof–of Jonah, and of God, and the Ninevites. I feel like I have learned a great deal about this text and its relevance for contemporary life, and I’m grateful to Jo, and Maddie, and Max for leading us forward through this text. In particular I feel like I have a better sense of what Jonah may have been up to, and how God was leading him. 

In particular, I hadn’t considered that when the Ninevites put sackcloth on their animals that they may have been trying to preserve their ill gotten wealth. Jonah’s obstinance at God’s forgiveness makes more sense to me when it is directed at unjust acquisition. Before this series I was also just impressed that the Ninevites included their animals in their repentance. Jo and Maddie especially filled out a nuanced picture of repentance that I have found helpful for these days when I spend so much time thinking that I know what’s right. 

It may make sense to think of Lent as a natural season coming as it does before the most supernatural event there is. People commonly give things up in Lent and there is a kind of withholding that might encourage us to think about the world around us as well as the world within, and to think of these worlds alongside the world of faith, a faith that is grounded in the resurrection in God’s power over the ordinary drama of life and death.

This basic contrast between the natural and the supernatural has been central to Christian Theology and a key focus of much preaching, and I think this is for good reason; attempting to understand the relationship between the two grounds both. The tension, I think we might benefit by following Alice Fulton and call this a passional tension, between the natural and the supernatural is important. When we think that only the supernatural is important we start to ignore and devalue nature. When we dissolve the supernatural and seek only natural explanations for everything we become vulnerable to the kind of mistakes she details in the poem Curtis read today. We forget the importance of belief and imagination in learning about the world. We also lose some ability to think clearly about how we as humans order our lives.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this in terms of human government and I imagine I’m not alone. I remember learning about the philosopher Thomas Hobbes in college. He described the state of nature without government or law as nasty, brutish and short, with intense competition for resources creating endless fear and violence. 

One can’t deny that much of human history has been this way, but is it actually the state of nature? If you were transported to an island with 100 other people what would happen? Would you fight with them or would you cooperate? Robert Shaver, who taught me about Hobbes at the University of Manitoba used a similar question inside a bit of game theory to explore these ideas with us. I remember creating a bit of a ruckus in class when I insisted that I would cooperate with people around me regardless of whether or not they were cooperating with me even when I knew in advance whether they would cooperate or not. My point was that I was so committed to cooperation that I would try to encourage it even when it would affect me negatively. This was not an approach he had had someone articulate in this way and he was surprised by it. I remember thinking, have you not had a Mennonite in this class before?

I tell this story because it an example of a belief that has been very important to me, that humanity is at our core good and cooperative and that especially competitive behavior is deformed in some way. It is not for me natural. And even if there are more examples of violence and fear in human history than cooperation and peace, I have still believed that the arc of history was bending towards societies that were seeking more cooperation. 

I believe this less fiercely now than I used to, and this causes me a not insignificant amount of pain. In 2020, I thought a bunch of things were breaking towards this. Post George Floyd in the midst of a pandemic there were significant movements reimagining the police, reimagining race and reparations, reimagining health and economy. And, as you remember, none of that took, and we got a federal government bent on self destruction and war. 

Beyond the arc of human history are God’s plan and God’s history. It has long been Mennonite dogma that God’s vision for human society is one of cooperation and peace, and that that reality is more true than whatever human structures exist. That community sees the coming together of the natural and the supernatural. This imagination allows us to see the truth we don’t expect making itself felt. 

But how do we know it’s right? 

How do we know that our vision of cooperation and peace is indeed both natural and supernatural? 

We know we are the shy one, whether we are lizard or electron, but how do we know we are right?

We need to look with repentance to God and trust that whatever happens next will move God’s plan forward. 

I do believe that we know that cooperation and peace are God’s imagination because participation in a truly peaceful and cooperative community is voluntary and non-coercive and prefers forms of organization that exercise a minimum of power. But that’s not the lesson from Jonah that I’m talking about this morning. That lesson is the same one in the poem to take a passional stance towards the universe. 

Throughout Jonah God moves the story forward seamlessly and everything moves in accord with God’s purpose. 

The story begins with God’s purpose to call Nineveh to account. Jonah is the only creature in this story bringing main character energy. No one else deliberates or even really chooses anything. Last week we rightly imagined a lot of complexity in the real sailors and whales and Ninevites who interacted with Jonah but the text is all about Jonah and God. Still, we do well to remember that God’s purpose is to call Nineveh to account, not to test Jonah, or frighten the sailors. 

Jonah’s response to this purpose is not to complain or deliberate or reason with God but simply to flee in the opposite direction. Jonah, like all of us, makes a bad decision and one that has significant consequences, not just for him but for everyone around him. 

We could pause for a moment here and think about Jonah’s state of mind here. How is he parsing the significance of the relationship between the natural and the supernatural? Is he thinking if I get on this boat i am good for a week, and then I will be in Tarshish. God can’t get me. 

God sends a storm to threaten the ship that carries Jonah. The wind works for God shortening the distance Jonah can flee. The sailors work for God in throwing Jonah overboard. 

This is really the only Old Testament moment in Jonah. None of us think its ok to throw someone overboard, even if they have made a decision that endangers us all. It is logical and rational to throw Jonah overboard and Jonah deserves that fate in that he decided to flee, but we don’t and we shouldn’t live in a world where we hold people to this kind of consequence. 

What God should have done was bring the whale up alongside the ship so that Jonah could realize he needed to leave the ship and do so safely. Yes, safely by stepping onto a whale in a storm. 

I guess that just wouldn’t be believable. 

It’s much more believable that Jonah is thrown into the sea that a whale swallows him and that he spends three days in the whale’s belly. 

Violence and cooperation are interesting things and sorting through how they show up in our scripture and how we respond is tricky. This is an interesting detour but I’m not going to take it. 

Whether in the whale’s belly or on the whale’s back Jonah gets thrown up onto the shore and God again state’s God’s purpose to hold Nineveh to account. Jonah obeys this time and goes to Nineveh. 

He walks one day into the city so large that it would take three days to walk across it and says, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be destroyed.” And immediately everyone repents. 

Nineveh works for God by repenting. Just as God commands the wind on the sea and creates a situation that casts Jonah out of the ship, Nineveh’s complete repentance creates a situation that casts Jonah out of the city.  This is an interesting parallel. 

One lesson here is that cities can repent. We need to expect that Washington and Caracas and Tehran and Jerusalem and Moscow and Kiev and Islamabad and Kabul can repent. We need to hear that God is calling them to account. 

Another is that the wind and Nineveh are much the same to God. God is in control of history in the same way that God is in control of the wind. 

To demonstrate this God brings another wind to make Jonah uncomfortable, a plant to shade him, and a lizard to destroy the plant. God is in control of every aspect of Jonah’s comfort, but is still interested in Jonah’s belligerence, and in guiding Jonah towards repentance. But God does not force repentance on Jonah or even need to hear an answer. 

God, having accomplished God’s purpose through Jonah is still interested in Jonah and what Jonah thinks about it.