Augsburg Fortress Canada

An Approach to Leadership

Study Guide on Jonah 1-4
By Nathan Frambach

Introduction

The Old Testament book of Jonah, tucked away toward the end of the Hebrew Bible, consists of only four short chapters. This is good news because a prerequisite to studying the Jonah story is reading the book of Jonah—the whole thing, beginning to end. If you are in a group setting, have someone read the text aloud so it can be heard. In fact, I suggest that you have four people read one chapter each. Then discuss what you read, or heard read, using the questions that follow.

Nate’s thoughts on the text

Many are familiar with the somewhat comical story of Jonah, but let’s recap the high points. Jonah was called by God to deliver a prophetic message to the people of Nineveh whose great sin was that they had flaunted their enormous power before God and the world through numerous acts of heartless cruelty. But it was difficult for Jonah to imagine preaching to the great Assyrian city of Nineveh. In fact, Jonah found his mission so distasteful that he decided not to obey God’s call. As you remember, Jonah boarded a boat going nowhere near Ninevah and attempted to run away.

God judged Jonah’s disobedience and, as a result, we have the strange story of Jonah spending three days and nights in the belly of a great fish. After much soul searching and some nudging from God, Jonah eventually repented of his disobedience. When God called a second time for Jonah to go to Ninevah, Jonah obeyed – although reluctantly – and he proclaimed God’s prophetic Word to the people of Nineveh. The message was terse, simple in content, and difficult to pronounce, let alone hear: “forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (Jonah 3:4). The result, to Jonah’s surprise, was that the people of Nineveh heard, believed, and repented, God decided not to destroy the city, and so on and so forth.

What captures my imagination and invites me to take seriously the Jonah narrative as an analogy for leadership aren’t the immediately obvious themes of Jonah being a reluctant, recalcitrant prophet or of God’s mind being changed. What stands out for me is the manner in and through which leadership was exercised. Look again at the third chapter of the book of Jonah. The Bible tells us that Jonah proclaimed God’s Word and the people of Nineveh believed God. In turn, the people of Ninevah made a proclamation to which the king listened and responded. In other words, the people led and the “leader” followed, all in response to the opening created by the public leadership of God through God’s Word. This is, I believe, an analogy for the kind of leadership needed in Christian communities today in our emerging post-whatever context.

Questions for reflection