A Place of Discipline
Jonah’s story hardly looks like a wilderness experience but for the Jews the dividing line between uninviting dry land and a nasty wet ocean was a narrow one. Both suggested fear, anxiety, to which the ocean added extremes of unpredictability. They didn’t like it.
From time immemorial they hated it, possibly because they had never had to cope with it, possibly all those stories of crossing the Red Sea and the Jordan, and always, lurking in the background, that mythical monster of the deep (Leviathan, Behemoth or both), believed to have been defeated by God at creation but never far from their consciousness. The sea was wilderness at its worst.
This psalm is probably best read as an act of thanksgiving when it was all over rather than a cri de coeur from down under. Traditionally the wilderness was a place where you were cut off from God (vv 3-6a).
Subsequently Jonah comes to see it as the prerequisite to finding him. Of course he had known God all along. If he hadn’t he would never have had the problem in the first place. What he didn’t know was how limited his understanding of God was.
Fundamentally, Jonah simply could not believe that God would want him to go to Nineveh. He knew them. They were a bad lot. They would give him a rough ride and he would achieve nothing. Anywhere, even Tarshish, was a better proposition.
So when in fact he is forced to Nineveh and they respond positively he is angry. It may be what God wanted. It was not what Jonah wanted. God may be generous. Jonah isn’t. He knows their repentance wont last.
Unable to transfer the generosity of a loving God to himself he tries to transfer his anger to God in the final chapter by venting his wrath on a sympathetic bush which had given him protection from the heat but which failed to survive more than a night, and in so doing opens the door to God who gives him the spiritual insight of a lifetime.