Asleep in the Ship

Something that has always bothered me about the story of Jonah: In Jonah 1:5, it says that Jonah fell asleep in the bottom of the ship. During a storm. The text indicates that God sent the storm specifically because of Jonah. So here he is, on a ship, running from God, and God sends a storm after him, and he falls asleep. The other men on the ship woke him up, and wanted him to pray to his God. It seems that he almost missed the point.

There is another story in the Gospels about a man sleeping in a ship during a storm: In Matthew 8 (and Mark 4), it says that Jesus and the disciples were crossing the sea in a ship, and a storm hit, but Jesus was asleep. The disciples woke him up, in much the same way that Jonah was awakened, and asked him, “Don’t you care that we’re all going to die?” (my paraphrase). Jesus rebuked them for their lack of faith, and then he rebuked the wind and the waves, and the storm cleared up. Then the disciples marvelled, saying, “What manner of man is this, that even the wind and the waves obey Him?”

The thing that has always bothered me about the story in Matthew, if the disciples didn’t think Jesus could calm the storm, then why did they bother to wake Him up? Of course, maybe they felt like the men in the book of Jonah, they just wanted Jesus to pray to His God, that God would save them. Either way, it seems obvious that they clearly didn’t understand who He was, yet.

Of course, Jesus wasn’t worried. He knew that He was doing God’s will, and He knew that God wasn’t through with Him yet. He knew that His fleshly existence wasn’t going to end by drowning. Jonah had no such assurance, though. Jonah was completely aware that he wasn’t doing God’s will, and at least a part of him was hoping that God was through with him. Perhaps Jonah was just so accustomed to being in God’s will, and under God’s protection, that it didn’t even occur to him that he might die in the sea. Even that, though, seemed to bother him less than the idea that his misdeeds might cause others to die. He told the men of the ship to throw him overboard (apparently not quite brave enough to throw himself into the sea), and once they did that, the storm cleared up.

Jesus once said that He was going to give us the sign of the prophet Jonah. Of course, He went on to talk about Jonah being in the belly of the whale for 3 days and nights, and said that He would be in the heart of the earth for the same time period. Apparently, there was more to the sign than just that, though. Both Jesus and Jonah were able to calm storms, and were willing to sacrifice themselves for the sake of other people.

I think that it is significant, though, that Jesus rebuked the disciples for fearing the storm. He called it a lack of faith. Previously, in Matthew 6:25-34, He talked about the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin, and tomorrow, they are cast into the fire, but Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these. He told the disciples then that they shouldn’t be worried about temporal things, what they should eat, or what they should wear. Does this mean don’t buy groceries, or do laundry? Of course not. It does mean that we don’t need to worry about those things, because God knows what we need before we are even aware of it. I suspect that if we just stopped buying groceries, then God would just let us starve. It does mean that He’s going to make sure that we get what we need. Notice I said ‘need.’ That doesn’t necessarily mean that He will give you money to buy food; He may simply open the door to a soup kitchen or charitable food pantry. He might even want you to fast more often (of course, if you aren’t fasting now, than any fasting would be fasting more often). The important thing is not to worry about, just trust God to take care of it. Again, in Matthew 10, Jesus tells us that God is aware of it every time a sparrow falls to the ground, and that we should not be afraid, because we are of more value than many sparrows.

It doesn’t mean that life will always be easy, but it does mean that we have a promise that He will always hold us, at least as long as we continue to want to be held.