A Biblical Exploration of Mental Health: Jonah

 The fourth in a series by Tom Fairman

There are certain people who you meet whom seem to excel at whatever they turn their hand to. When you ask them to do a job, you know you can rely on it being done well and that you can trust them. One such student I taught fitted perfectly into this category. From the moment they started at the school, they made friends quickly, found themselves as captain of the sports team they were in and despite having only been at the school for a short time, they became a prefect and were leading their peers in the intra-school competitions. They worked incredibly hard at everything they did and staff and fellow students alike spoke highly of them.

When the exam season came around, they attended the revision sessions and started to sit their exams. However during this time, they began to hear voices telling them to kill themselves. The situation led to them having to be sectioned and only being allowed out to complete the exams under strict one-to-one supervision. The situation led to a summer where they should have been celebrating the successful end to their school life, to one where they were being supported by their family and health care professionals just to stay alive. Having done everything that was asked of them, they found themselves in a truly dark place.

Jonah is one of the oldest stories that exists in the Bible as we know it. He was a man to whom the word of God was addressed, but not someone who may have been used to hearing God's word addressed to him. He was familiar with God and familiar with the world around him. He knew the nature of God, the nature of God's love and the nature of God's mercy. He also knew the nature of the people of Nineveh whom God had told him to go and visit, proclaiming the message that God had noticed their wickedness and was going to bring judgement upon them. It is not the best job to be given; to go to a foreign land to tell people whose reputation for doing bad things had reached Jonah's ears long before God spoke to him that they were doing something wrong.

When Jonah considered this, he weighed it up against his experience of God; compassionate, slow to anger, rich in faithful love (Jonah 4:2). He made the conclusion that he knew who he would rather offend and decided to ignore God and run away from this particular instruction (Jonah 1:3). However a large storm and a giant fish later, Jonah was vomited onto the beach in Nineveh (Jonah 2:11) and obediently followed God's instruction to preach to this great city. Jonah's stubbornness in defying God was exactly the trait God was planning to use in Jonah to get the job done properly.

As much as Jonah knew God, God knew Jonah and knew Jonah was the right man to deliver this message. He knew he could trust him and knew the job would be done properly. Jonah deep down would have known this as well, or at least known enough to realise God would be able to work through him. The story tells of Jonah having to walk one day into the city before he got somewhere important enough for the people to take the news seriously (Jonah 3:3). Remembering that he was proclaiming judgement from a God of a foreign nation, Jonah's message was delivered in such a way that the news even reached the king who then proclaimed a fast and ordered the whole nation to repent, fasting and wearing sackcloth (Jonah 3:7).

For Jonah, there must have been an enormous sense of job satisfaction; he had finally done what God had asked of him and the effects showed he had done it well. There is a certain peace that comes with knowing you have done what you supposed to do and although there is an element of pride to guard against, this feels like a true peace of mind. Although his path to Nineveh was not exactly straight, he had gotten there in the end. He had done what he was supposed to do, in the way it was supposed to be done and deserved to be content with that.

However people can find this satisfaction hard to come by. We can be our own harshest critics, focusing on the negatives, despite their size, and failing to see the greater light in the positives. Whether this is a fault with our human psyche, our tendency to place greater worth on losses than gains, does not matter when it can steal away the joy and peace that should be felt from hearing the praise of our Father, who says well done, good and faithful servant. Instead of allowing our hearts to share in this joy, other voices and clouds come in to tear it away from us as Jonah's experience shows us.

When God sees the people of Nineveh repenting, He relents and has mercy on them (Jonah 3:10). Instead of Jonah being able to share in the joy this brings the people and God himself, he can only feel rage and indignation as his hard work seems to have been for nothing. He can only feel the toll his efforts have had on him, physically and mentally, and lets this sense of injustice lead him to leave the city and set himself outside of the jubilation that must have been occurring in the city (Jonah 4: 1-5). 

When we start to lose our peace of mind, it can be all to easy to isolate ourselves, take ourselves away from others, to allow ourselves to dwell on the dark thoughts that we feel are justly thought. We pay no interest to where these thoughts come from, whether these thoughts have any foundation or where these thoughts will lead us. We feed them with our isolation, becoming our own echo chamber or even worse, we find others who corroborate our version of events and push us quicker and faster down the whirlpool. Our peace now only comes in believing we were right all along and it is the world that is against us.

Jonah reaches this place and makes himself a shelter to hide, hide from the joy that is trying to get in, hide from the God whom he still knows, but now blames for this lack of peace, hides from shame of having failed at a new set of objectives, rewriting history to fit into this ill humour. In this place, acts of kindness can be mis-interpreted as patronising or gloating such as God raising a plant to provide more shade for Jonah (Jonah 4:6). Alongside this events that bring more misfortune are blown out of all proportion, such as the plant dying and Jonah becoming mortally angry, a phrase to suggest he is ready to kill (Jonah 4:9). This spiral for Jonah is quick, and although the length of time can vary, the point at the bottom is always the same.

In this place of isolation, on this path of destruction, Jonah is so overcome that he concludes he may as well be dead, even resorting to begging for death (Jonah 4:8). This may have been Jonah's thoughts at this moment, but the source of these thoughts may not have been his own. He has lost the ability to listen to outside voices, can no longer hear God's reasons or even feel the mercy and faithful love he once did. It is a path that slips and slides and is so difficult to get off, particularly by yourself. At this moment, we need to be taken away from ourselves, to be isolated form the dark echo chamber of our minds and to helped to look upwards and outwards. To see the joy and kindness of those around us, to learn to share again these moments with those around us, to know again as Jonah once did that there is a tender and compassionate love out there for us, this seems to be the healing that Job's story offers us.