In the belly of the Word/2 - The vocation and the trials to which we cannot submit
Luigino Bruni
published in Avvenire on 25/02/2024
So a change has taken place during these last few weeks. But where? It is an abstract change without object. Am I the one who has changed? If not, then it is this room, this city and this nature; I must choose. I think I'm the one who has changed: that's the simplest solution.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Nausea
It is not uncommon that in the life of those who have received an authentic vocation, one day a different word from the same friendly voice bursts in, saying new things that are too far from the good words familiar until yesterday. Some people continue to lead the same life as before. Others, on the other hand, freeze - they don’t understand why they cannot understand; they feel that the truest and most beautiful part of life is about to die. And they say ‘no’, they disobey the true voice out of a strange loyalty to another voice, just as true and profound. Perhaps this was Jonah's crisis.
“He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish” (1:3). Jonah did not obey the Lord's command to go to Nineveh to prophesy to that great city. Instead of going up to Nineveh, the great Assyrian city, he went down to the port of Jaffa - today near Tel Aviv. The verb ‘to descend’ (yrd) here also contains a moral nuance: Jonah did not go up to Nineveh to carry out his prophetic mandate, and he went down to the sea in the west. He descended geographically and spiritually. Tarshish in the Bible is almost always associated with ships, the famous ships of Tarshish, which we find in the story of Solomon, in the Psalms, in Ezekiel, many times in Isaiah. ‘Ships of Tarshish’ had even become an idiomatic expression, similar to Faience (Faenza in French) to say majolica, or Venetian blinds and shutters in houses.
However, the meaning of this escape of Jonah is not hidden in geography. He embarked as someone who wanted to escape from a family, from a home, from a destiny; he arrived at the first station and said to the ticket master: ‘A ticket to the farthest destination’, hoping that physical distancing would also become distancing of the heart.
Jonah did not leave: Jonah ran away.
We don't know why he did it, the text doesn't tell us. That ancient anonymous author wasn’t interested in that why - but we are, we are very interested. We must look for the meaning of his disobedience outside his Book, in some ancient commentary or we must try to create it ourselves. Commenting on an ancient text, already commented on a thousand times, may not be completely useless if we risk such daring experiments, guided by the whole Bible and its logic. So let's try to dig into this escape of Jonah. Perhaps we could find some clues to try to understand the prophets and vocations more (in every vocation, religious or civil, there is an echo of the prophets).
First of all, we can probably imagine that in the command that Jonah received from God (to go to Nineveh) there must be something that that prophet didn’t like or didn’t understand and that he didn’t want to do anyway. Let’s not forget that the Bible makes us understand that Jonah is not a false prophet: it treats him as a true prophet, perhaps bizarre, but not false. So there may be something serious in that ‘no’ of his, which could directly concern his vocation. Before we continue our exercise, we need to remember what the Voice of God is in Bible prophecy. The prophet is the ‘echo of God’. He may have many doubts about many things, and he usually does (like us), but he cannot have doubts in recognizing God's voice because in this special discernment of voices lies the essence of his vocation. A prophet cannot doubt where the voice that speaks to him comes from: maybe he doesn’t like it, he argues about it, he complains, but he recognizes it. When the text then tells us that “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai saying” (Jonah 1:1), we are not justified in thinking that Jonah doubted that the ‘word’ was truly the word of YHWH. This doubt is not part of the narrative resources available to us. Jonah knew that the command was authentic, and we must know it with him; yet Jonah, the prophet, decided not to obey. The reason for Jonah's disobedience must therefore lie on another level. Which? Over the millennia, interpreters have imagined many, including his feeling of inadequacy (like Moses), fear, fragility, and others.
The Bible can also suggest something different to us. If we look carefully at the prophetic and wisdom literature, in particular some pages of Job, the Psalms, Hosea or Jeremiah, we could hypothesize that Jonah experienced a special vocational crisis - the Bible is also a grammar of vocations and their crises. So let's try to outline the features of this type of crisis, of Jonah’s crisis.
The text doesn't tell us if Jonah was young, adult, or old. However, we find a clue, fleeting but suggestive, in St. Jerome’s commentary on Jonah. Jerome was the translator of the Bible into Latin (the Vulgate), a fundamental point of reference in biblical studies. He wrote about the person of Jonah: "The Jews report that Jonah was the son of the widow of Serepta raised by the prophet Elijah" (Commentary on the Book of Jonah, p. 36). Jerome therefore referred to an episode that was at the beginning of Elijah's vocation, when, due to a drought, YHWH ordered him to, “‘Go now to Zarephath, which belongs to Sidon, and live there; for I have commanded a widow there to feed you.’ So he set out and went to Zarephath” (1 Kings 17: 8-10). That Lebanese widow, a pagan, fed the prophet, although she had answered Elijah's request saying, "I have nothing baked, only a handful of meal in a jar, and a little oil in a jug; I am now gathering a couple of sticks, so that I may go home and prepare it for myself and my son, that we may eat it, and die” (17:10 -12). The mother then gave the prophet what was necessary, but instead of dying “the jar of meal was not emptied, neither did the jug of oil fail” (17:16). A wonderful story, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, which also tells us who are those poor people that Jesus will call ‘blessed’: only those who feed the prophets with what they need. Jonah therefore, for some rabbis of the late fourth century, was that son, a ‘resurrected’ son. We know that when someone enters the Bible as a ‘son’, as a boy, that first youthful identity remains with him throughout his life, it becomes part of his vocational personality (David will always remain the young shepherd). We are then in good company if we too, in this narrative exercise, imagine Jonah still young at the time of his escape, that Jonah was already a prophet but a young-adult prophet experiencing his first real vocational crisis.
Jonah's escape could have taken place at any age, but it is more likely for it to come when a person, who is still young but has reached early maturity and has already learned the ‘craft’ of the prophet. It is someone who has already developed a familiarity with the voice that speaks to them, who has already had their first charismatic experiences, has already reaped the first tasty fruits. He found his own spiritual and anthropological balance, and he understood his place in the world. Someone who is in that phase of life when they no longer distinguish man or woman from the prophet: they are now the same thing, the two dimensions live in mutual inhabitation, two natures that in the individual person become one.
It is at this point that ‘the crisis of Jonah’ can break that balance. Let’s say we had spent the first part of our life in a spiritual community, it was our home, internal and external. The promised land, the dream of dreams. The first years pass, the community also becomes our individual soul; the community charism is now our own charism, we do not want anything else. But then comes a day when the voice that we had followed and that had brought us here, suddenly tells us: ‘go away’. We sense that it is not the good ‘leave’ of Abraham or that of Elijah: it is the terrible ‘go away’ of Jonah. It seems impossible for the voice to ask us today to leave the greatest gift it had given us yesterday, to go on a journey to an unknown land, a ‘Nineveh‘ that we don’t like and which appears to us as the denial of the first beautiful land. At first we do not believe it, we think it is simply a temptation, that it’s Satan disguised as Elohim speaking to us and we cry out to him: ‘go away, you cannot be my God’; but on another day it becomes clear to us that it is the same good voice that has always spoken to us but that is asking for something that seems impossible to us, the end of everything. This is the beginning of Jonah's crisis.
Generally, this crisis is expressed in escape: we leave in the opposite direction to that indicated by the voice, we board the first ship, because the important thing is to leave, it doesn’t matter where as long as the place is not the indicated destination. We know that we are going ‘far from the Lord’, and yet we say no, we run away, because it seems to us that answering yes simply means denying the origin and principle of our life, engaging in the end of the masterpiece that we had created so far. We flee because we cannot, by vocation, obey: true prophets disobey only to obey a deeper and truer voice than the true one that speaks to them, and they are almost never wrong, if they are authentic prophets.
The Jonah crisis can last for many years, decades. I have known some Jonahs, people with true vocations who one day do not obey a request of the voice because they cannot obey. But above all I met some Jonahs, women who, faced with God's request to offer their son as a sacrifice on Mount Moriah, replied: ‘I won’t obey you, and I won’t do so in the name of that life that you yourself taught me, because you are the God of life who loves children: with my ‘no’ I give you back that different face of yours that you revealed to me one day; disobeying I remind you who I am, who my son is, who you are’. They are special versions of the Deus-contra-Deum, so common in the Bible and even more so in life. Sometimes we leave physically, like Jonah; other times you leave by staying in the same room as always.
Not all vocations go through the Jonah test: some do, often the most beautiful ones. Jonah went down to the harbour and boarded the ship. On that ship he will have an extraordinary spiritual experience, but he could not have known that while he was fleeing. And he would never have had it if he hadn't fled in what to what to everyone seemed to be the wrong direction that day.
