The Sign of Jonah

And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah. And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.

Jonah 1:17

In Luke 24:44-46, Jesus speaks to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, after His resurrection. “He said to them, ‘These are My words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.’ Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, and said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead.’”

Everything in the Old Testament – the Law, the Prophets, the Psalms, everything – though it has its own historical context and several layers of meaning, always in the end points to Christ. Perhaps Jesus Himself even explained to those two disciples how the prophet Jonah’s terrifying and tumultuous encounter with the giant fish foreshadowed His own death and resurrection. After all, He had said as much to the Pharisees sometime earlier: 

"Then some of the scribes and Pharisees answered Him, saying, 'Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.' But He answered them, '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. 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'" (Matthew 12:38-41).

When Jesus spoke these words, He clearly meant for Jonah’s time in “the belly of Sheol” (Jonah 2:2) to parallel His own impending time in the grave. Jesus referred to His death and resurrection directly to His disciples, “the Son of Man must be delivered over to the chief priests and scribes, and they will condemn Him to death and deliver Him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified, and He will be raised on the third day” (Matthew 20:18-19). However, He spoke indirectly when addressing the crowds – “Jesus answered them, ‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up’” (John 2:19). The Pharisees to whom Jesus spoke in the Gospel of Matthew probably did not understand what He meant when He said that He would spend three days in the heart of the earth. Similarly, when He told the parable of the tenants in Matthew 21:33-46 (in which wicked tenants murder the messenger of the king, kill his son, and steal his vineyard), though they understood something about the parable, that it made explicit judgment upon them, they did not fully understand, or in fact refused to believe, that the son was Jesus Himself. 

What would “the sign of Jonah” have implied, then, to the scribes and Pharisees, and why would Jesus tell them what He did, if foretelling His death and resurrection held no meaning for them? The clue lies in the last verses of the passage above, in the comparison between the men of Nineveh and the “evil and adulterous generation.” This is a proclamation of judgment, and the Pharisees would have understood it. In fact, in Luke’s account of the sign of Jonah (Luke 11:29-32), much the remainder of the chapter is the proclamation of woe to the Pharisees and lawyers (Luke 11:37-54). The people of Israel are being called to repentance, and Jesus is comparing them to the city of Nineveh, whose people were called to repent, and did so. 

But it goes deeper than that. When Jonah preached, the city of Nineveh, Gentiles, answered the call to repentance, and it was saved from destruction. The people of Israel at that time did not answer the call to repentance, and only about 40 years after Jonah, the people of Israel were taken captive. Now Jesus preaches, the people of Israel again do not listen, and in about 40 years, the temple is destroyed. The sign of Jonah was more than a sign of the immediate event of Jesus’ death and resurrection; it was also a sign of the coming judgment, of the destruction of the old order entirely, and also of the extension of the Kingdom to the Gentiles. When Jesus said, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” He was speaking of the temple of His body – but He also was about to ascend the throne of judgment, and Jerusalem and the temple would in fact be destroyed. But also, just as Jonah was a prophet sent to Gentiles, so too would the Spirit descend on people from every land, nation, and tongue, and would Paul soon be an apostle to the Gentiles. 

Yesterday, today, and forever, God is the same, “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster,” and His mercy extends not just to one people but to all the ends of the earth.