The sign of Jonah

A Sermon for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity

July 27, 2025 at Holy Communion

Jonah 2, Matthew 12:38–41

“No sign will be given to this generation except the sign of the prophet Jonah” (Matthew 12:39). In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ☩ Amen.

Today’s Old Testament reading is the story of Jonah and the whale. The story is familiar. Jonah is entrusted with a prophetic warning for the wicked people of Nineveh, but Jonah hates the Ninevites. He doesn’t want the Ninevites to receive the message, repent, and receive God’s mercy. So he runs away: he takes a ship in the opposite direction. His ship runs into bad weather which he understands is a judgement from God, so he fesses up to the sailors, and they throw him into the sea. He is then swallowed by a large fish, traditionally understood to be a whale. In the belly of the whale, he prays with repentance, and we heard his prayer as our first reading. So the fish brings him to land, vomits him up, and he goes to preach in Nineveh, and the Ninevites receive the message, turn away from their wickedness, and are spared by God.

The story is only referred to twice in the New Testament, in parallel passages in Matthew and Luke. Some of the scribes and Pharisees comes to Jesus asking him to perform a miraculous sign (Matthew 12:38). He refuses, telling them that “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” (v 39–40). Jesus is prophesying his resurrection. He will die and be buried, but on the third day he will live again, just like Jonah.

But wait—just like Jonah? When the story is told in Sunday school, Jonah doesn’t usually die. Sending the whale is God’s way of saving him, right? Actually, probably not.

We might get that impression because we hear Jonah pray, apparently from inside the whale. But we have to listen carefully to what he says. He prays, “Out of the belly of Sheol I cried” (Jonah 2:2). “Sheol” is the Hebrew word for Hades, the place of the dead. Later, he celebrates how God “brought up his life from the Pit” (v 6), and “the Pit” is another Hebrew way of talking about death; in Greek and English this term becomes "the Abyss." And the whole psalm—because his prayer is given in a poetic form, the form of a psalm—is filled with references to descending beneath “the flood” (v 3) and a place fixed with bars (v 6), and the psalms regularly use those as metaphors for death.

The point is: Jonah dies. God does not send the whale to save Jonah. God sends the whale to eat Jonah. Jonah spends three days in the belly of death, praying to the Lord from the place of departed spirits, the “hell” into which we confess that Christ descended, and on the third day he rises—in fact, the first thing God says to Jonah is “arise” (3:2), cumi, the same word Jesus would later use to raise a girl who had died with the words Talitha cumi.

The message for us, though, is given by our Epistle from St Paul. He reminds us that baptism into Jesus Christ is baptism into death (Romans 6:3). We have died to our old selves (v 6) and thereby been set free from sin (v 7), so that the glory of the Father could raise us up to “walk in newness of life,” just as he raised Jesus (v 4). And he makes the point again at the end of the passage: “you must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (v 11).

Christians don’t live in the version of the Jonah story where the whale saves us. We live in the version of the Jonah story where our disobedience take us all the way to the place of death, and we die—but then the mercy of God raises us up to live again, to try again, to begin a new obedience.

No one is a Christian until he has died. As St Paul would say, you are a seed which does not come to life unless it first dies and falls to the ground; only then does it bear fruit (1 Corinthians 15:36–37). Or as Jesus says, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

But that’s not all that the sign of Jonah means. Back in St Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus continued his response to the request for a sign by saying that “the men of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here” (v 41). The sign of Jonah is not just that Jonah was buried for three days and then rose, but that the result of his miracle was an even greater one: that a wicked people, hostile to God and to every good thing, repented and turned from evil.

Now that someone greater than Jonah is here, Jesus says, the sign of Jonah will be fulfilled on an even grander scale: the nations of the world which were hostile to the God of Israel would bend the knee. In every country they would tear down their idols and build temples to the living and true God. They would become ashamed of the doctrine that might makes right and would instead proclaim forgiveness and the love of enemies. The sign of Jonah might be fulfilled first of all by the material body of Christ, his flesh and blood, but it is fulfilled most fully by the spiritual body of Christ: his church, his beloved ones from all nations of the world who heard the message and responded with repentance.

Years ago, I picked up an ancient Christian work On the Incarnation (by St Athanasius), and was surprised that the book had almost nothing to say about Jesus’ conception and birth. Instead, it repeats again and again that the evidence for God’s incarnate presence in the world is the destruction of idols and the creation of a Christian people who live with meekness and love. The sign of Jonah is the sign of a dead world brought to life by the spirit of Christ.

And so we have the words of Christ in our Gospel. This is how you will become the sign of Jonah “I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. And as you wish that others would do to you, do so to them” (Luke 6:27–31).