The life of St Jonah
God sent him to preach repentance to Nineveh, the great pagan city, and the account of his flight from that calling, his time swallowed in the depths, and his eventual obedience has been read by the Church from the earliest centuries as a figure of things greater than itself.
Christ himself pointed to Jonah's three days in the belly of the great fish as the sign of his own three days in the tomb before the Resurrection, and held up the repentance of Nineveh at Jonah's preaching as a rebuke to a generation that would not turn back to God even with someone greater than Jonah standing before it. Modern scholars generally read the book that bears Jonah's name as a crafted, later work of instruction rather than a strict historical record, composed some centuries after the prophet mentioned briefly in the Book of Kings would have lived, though the Church has always received it as a true and prophetic word regardless of the mode in which it was written. Jonah is remembered for having carried God's mercy to a people outside Israel and for the sign his story became of death and rising to life.
