The Sign of Jonah

The Heavenly Banquet

In this episode Chad Rhodes and Charlotte Elia talk about Jesus' sayings in Matthew and Luke regarding the "sign of Jonah." Here they revisit the story of Jonah, investigate how it illuminates Jesus' work, ponder how Jesus might have understood Jonah's story, and ask what bearing these comparisons have on the work of biblical interpretation.

Charlotte: What I love about Jesus’ interpretation of Jonah, shall we say, is he’s kind of doing some midrash here. He’s filling in some blanks in the book of Jonah… You wonder why would you have been so taken with this person, this Jonah, that you would have responded.

Chad: Unless you saw him come out of a fish.

Charlotte: Unless you either saw him or that word got around. And that word probably would have traveled faster than Jonah, wouldn’t it have? I mean, that word gets on the trade routes before Jonah can figure out his way to get to Nineveh. So I like to think that’s what Jesus is doing, is filling in this part of the tradition… It’s certainly not the effectiveness of Jonah’s speech. Probably more compelling than Jonah’s speech is “That’s that guy what got thrown in the water and the storm stopped, was in a whale and got vomited on a beach. I’m curious what he thinks about things.”

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Charlotte: From the beginning, literally in the beginning, Genesis 1:1, it’s a story about us and the world, us and creation, not as just actors on a stage of creation. And part of our responsibility then of caring for creation is to be mindful of all of our impact on creation, the fact that everything that we do impacts creation.