The Sign of Jonah

This weekend I went book shopping and picked up N.T. Wright’s Matthew for Everyone. I had read a little after Wright and this little book fit right in my carry-one bag. I thumbed through the book and landed upon Wright’s commentary on Matthew 12:40. Matthew 12:40 says,

for as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale (sea monster in the Greek), so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.

Wright says, “This is an odd way of saying, ‘he will be buried,” Jesus says it like this because it ties in his future fate with the stranger fate of the prophet Jonah.” (Page 150).

Wright’s rendering exhibits the limitations of a theology that fails to understand the spiritual side of the crucifixion. Wright, quite the eminent scholar, is confounded by Jesus’s statement and can only say that it is “odd.”

Nothing that Jesus did or said was odd. Indeed, He said that he only spoke and did the things that the Father had Him speak and say. Jesus’s statement has nothing to do with burial, per se. Jonah was not buried at sea, but he was swallowed alive by a great fish. He stayed alive in that fish for three days and nights and called it “the belly of hell.” His prayers give us a graphic description of his “strange fate.” After the three days, the fish vomited him out at the command of God.

In Acts 2:27, Peter refers to the 16th Psalm of David (LXX), “Because thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades,” and in Acts 2:31 he says to the people, “he (David) foreseeing this spake of the resurrection of Christ, that neither was he left in Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption.” Peter also says that Jesus was loosed from the “pangs of death.”

For those Jews who heard Jesus and who were familiar with the plight of their prophet Jonah, Jesus’s invocation of Jonah as a sign was not odd in the least. They knew exactly what he was saying.