What is your mission?
Learning from Jonah, the fugitive prophet

The Bible tells the story of a stubborn prophet, a prophet who did not want to do the right thing, what God told him to do; This is the prophet Jonah.
“The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai, saying, Get ready, go to the great city of Nineveh and cry out against it, because its wickedness has come up to me. Jonah got ready, but to flee from the presence of the Lord, to Tarshish; and when he had gone down to Joppa, he found a ship going to Tarshish; So he paid his fare and got on board to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
But the Lord sent a strong wind over the sea, and a great storm arose on the sea, and the ship was about to be broken into pieces.
Then, the sailors, filled with fear, each cried out to their god and threw the cargo that was on the ship into the sea, to relieve it of its weight. Jonah, however, had gone down to the cellar and lay down; and slept soundly.
The master of the ship came to him and said to him: What is the matter with you? Caught up in your sleep? Arise, call upon your god; perhaps, in this way, this god will remember us, so that we do not perish. And they said to one another, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know because of whom this evil has befallen us. And they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.
Then they said to him, Tell us now, because of whom this evil has come upon us. What occupation is yours? Where are you from? What is your land? And what people are you?
He answered them: I am a Hebrew and I fear the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the land. Then the men were filled with great fear and said to him: What is this you have done! For the men knew that he fled from the presence of the Lord, because he had declared it to them.
They said to him: What shall we do to thee, that the sea may be calm for us? Because the sea was becoming more and more stormy.
He said to them, Take me and throw me into the sea, and the sea will be calm, for I know that this great storm has come upon you because of me.” (Jonah 1.1-12)
Many Christians have come across this text at some point in their lives, but today we will do it in depth; My objective in writing this article is to bring the reader to a deep reflection on their calling before God and that there is no point in running away, He finds us (even if it is in the belly of the whale).
Those who do not delve deeper into the text reach the point of judging the prophet: “Ah, he is a disobedient man, he wanted to escape”; What exactly was Jonas running from?
He was called to preach in Nineveh; today, Nineveh is Mosul, an Iraqi city; Mosul was under the control of the terrorist group called the Islamic State (IS), which occupied it in June 2014 and declared it its capital on Iraqi soil. In mid-October 2016, the Iraqi government (supported by the Kurds and for a international coalition) launched a major military offensive to regain control of Mosul and neighboring regions. The city was recaptured by Iraqi forces on July 10, 2017.
The radical spirit of the Islamic State did not only occur during this period, but came from a long time ago; Sennacherib, king of Assyria, the same one who sent a letter of affront to King Hezekiah (2 Chronicles 32.1-23), made Nineveh an imposing city; in stone sculptures on the walls of his palace he made a point of displaying his victories and how he subjugated enemy peoples: scenes of battles, impalement and scenes of Sennacherib's men parading the spoils of war before him.
Now we have an idea of why Jonas fled: he did not have the slightest appreciation for those people; the Ninevites were cruel, wicked. For Jonas, they did not deserve forgiveness. And the prophet's anger didn't stop there: Jonah knew that, by preaching, those people could repent and be saved!
And one more aggravating factor for the reader to understand Jonah: of the twelve tribes of Israel, he belonged to the tribe of Zebulun. Throughout the history of the Hebrew people, Zebulun was the “Elite troop”, a kind of Bope, who always took up arms to defend their nation. In other words, Jonas wanted to escape so he wouldn't have to kill someone.
All of this made him flee (how deluded!) from the presence of God three thousand kilometers. Jonah boarded a ship leaving Joppa (which was in Samaria) towards Tarshish. This was a port city located in southern Spain; it was considered the longest sea voyage.
The image below shows the distance from Joppa to Tarshish

It is possible that the reader, upon reaching this point, will ask themselves: “But then, why did God call Jonah to this very difficult mission?” It’s because he was what we popularly call “thick skinned”; God knew Jonah could handle it.
And isn't that what we do today? In order not to fulfill God's call on our lives as a whole, we try to run away! We run away from profession, marriage, parenthood, responsibility, education, regimented life, discipline and so many other things. We act as if God doesn't know what he's doing! It becomes a sin, because we are, with our attitudes, saying “I know more than the Lord”. And that's when the storm comes and the whale swallows us.
Why did God stop Jonah? Couldn't he call someone else to carry out the mission? It even could. But there are situations that we have to confront, and until we go through this, we will not be healed in our emotions nor will we be fulfilled, because true joy comes when we fulfill our mission. It was God saving Jonah from himself!
Imagine being swallowed by a whale! It must be pretty disgusting, right? But it was the only way for Jonas to be interrupted in his escape and to be placed, literally, in a “corner of thought”, from which he could not leave. In the darkness, in the dark, in the impossibility, Jonas had to reflect on what would be less costly: fulfilling the mission or running away from it.
In this last edition of the year of the Magazine I want to challenge the reader to do a self-analysis: “Was everything I experienced in 2024 a desperate attempt to escape what God called me to do? Could it be that God didn’t close the doors so that I could make amends?”
When the storm came, the sailors asked Jonah: “What occupation are you?”; in other translations it is “What is your mission?”. In other words: what is your calling? What are you running from? Remember: you were not born to escape, there is no point in buying the most expensive ticket to get out of this, your mission is irreplaceable, there is only happiness in fulfilling the mission that God gave even if it is difficult. The one you chose is with you and knows your ability. Don't run away, face it!
Happy 2025!
Article published in Revista Conhecimento & Cidadania Vol. IV No. 49 – December 2024 Edition - ISSN 2764-3867
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