Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jonah 3:1-10
January 25, 2009Compliment or Curse?
I pulled up behind a car the other day. The driver’s hair was long and curly, so I took the driver to be female. I think she was talking on a cell phone, but it was hard to see for sure through the clouds of blue smoke billowing from the car’s tailpipe. As she pulled away, I caught sight of her bumper sticker. It’s one I’d never seen before: "I’d rather be prophesying."
This got me to thinking, W.W.J.D? What would Jonah drive? A mustang perhaps, or maybe a secondhand bronco. Whatever it was, it wouldn’t have had a bumper sticker like that. His would have read "Repent!" or "Duck and Cover," or, if he were fully honest with his public: "I’d rather not be prophesying." Jonah is at the same time the most effective and the most reluctant of all the prophets in the Bible.
You remember Jonah’s story. The Lord tells him to go to Nineveh, the capital of Syria, also known at the time as the Evil Empire. There Jonah was to preach the word of the Lord. This is the rough equivalent of being told to start a Bobby Bowden fan club in downtown Gainesville. Being a reasonable man, Jonah promptly goes to the nearest port and sets sail in the opposite direction, toward Spain. The Q.E. II is not available, so he has to make do with a Phoenician fishing boat.
A fearsome storm comes up, and the sailors, being both suspicious and superstitious, demand to know Jonah’s line of work.
"I’m a nuclear physicist," he tells them. They don’t bite.
"Would you believe a Spanish bullfighter?" No go.
"How about an AWOL Hebrew prophet?" That accounts for the storm at sea, but it doesn’t make the sailors feel any better. They try rowing hard for shore, but the storm just gets worse, so at Jonah’s suggestion, the sailors chuck him overboard with a quick prayer to the God of the Hebrews not to hold them responsible for this dramatic loss of prophet.
Jonah is promptly swallowed by an extremely large fish. From the interior of said creature Jonah utters a prayer so full of pious banalities that the fish can’t stomach him any longer, and pukes him onto dry land.
If you find this a bit farfetched, just wait. It gets even weirder.
Again the Lord commands Jonah to go to Nineveh, and this time he obeys – sort of. The city turns out to be enormous – a three-day’s journey across, and that’s if you hit all the green lights. Jonah travels for a day, pulls out his bullhorn, and preaches the shortest sermon in sacred writ. It’s in Hebrew, of course, but the rough translation is, "Forty days and this whole city is toast."
Seeing as how this is the capital of the Evil Empire and the Lord seems to have made up his mind, you’d think this would be the end of the story. But it isn’t. It turns out the king of Nineveh is a pretty good theologian. He reckons that YAHWEH, the Lord, the God of Israel, is not like other gods. Other gods behave pretty much like any other middle eastern potentate, lopping of heads and boiling people in oil, and destroying whole cities because the people in them don’t obey.
But the God of Israel is different. The Lord, the king suggests, is capable of changing his mind, of reassessing the situation, of altering even his own divine decree.
So the king orders a fast. Everyone is to refrain from food and drink, turn away from violence, and put on sack cloth and ashes. "Who knows?" the king says. "God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish" (Jonah 3:9).
Just to be on the safe side, the king orders everyone to fast, including the livestock. He also orders every creature in the city, human and beast, to wear sack cloth and ashes.
Picture every man, woman, child, horse, cow, dog, cat, and parakeet in Nineveh decked out in sack cloth and ashes. Quite a sight, isn’t it? If you find this picture odd, even just a tad funny, you’re quite possibly on the right track. The whole scene is meant to be preposterous because the notion of a righteous God letting these evildoers off the hook is equally preposterous.
For God does change his mind. Whether God is moved by the thoroughness of the Ninevites’ repentance or rolling on the floor of heaven at the sight of sheep and cows wearing sack cloth, the text doesn’t say. It just says,
When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity he said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it (3:10).
This tendency of Israel’s God to give the bad guys another chance turns out to be the reason Jonah was so reluctant to get into the prophesying business in the first place. I knew it, he tells the Lord. I knew it from the start.
(4:2).
I knew you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing
I’ve noticed the same thing about God. Haven’t you? It’s downright infuriating, isn’t it? God should be more like John Rosemond, that child-rearing expert whose column appears in the paper every now than then. He says parents should stick to their guns. Well, so should God! When people break the rules, they should pay.
Suppose, for instance, God should run across a nation that imprisons foreigners for years upon end, without regard to their rights under that nation’s own laws. Suppose that country built a prison just for those special prisoners. Suppose the prisoners were tortured. Suppose they were all set to be tried, not in courts of law, but by special military tribunals?
Why, that’s evil, you say? That’s unforgivable. What kind of people would let that kind of thing happen?
People like the Ninevites, I suppose, who are famous for their love of violence. People like Jonah who preach violence on God’s behalf, knowing deep down violence isn’t what God really wants. People who have lost sight of the difference between justice and vengeance. They’re the ones who let this kind of evil happen.
Perhaps I’m reading this story wrong, but it seems to be the butt of the joke in this very fishy tale is not the Evil Empire, but the prophet of vengeance who preaches a God who is far more merciful and far more generous than the prophet himself lets on.
Why would you preach an inflexibly vengeful God while secretly clinging to a merciful one? Maybe it’s because you’re afraid God will run out of mercy and steadfast love when it comes your turn to repent.
I knew you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing (4:2).
In other parts of the Bible those words form a psalm of praise. On Jonah’s lips they come over as an indictment. Not of God, but of Jonah. If he knew God was like that, why didn’t he say so in the first place? He’s very much like a prosecutor so intent on a conviction that he leaves out the very evidence that reveals the truth.
If Jonah weren’t so much like you and me, I’d say he should get what he deserves. But he doesn’t. Thank God for that.
The text leaves Jonah in a pout, behaving very much like a lot of other people in the Bible.
A woman named Martha comes to mind. She’s the one who stayed in the kitchen and made supper while her sister Mary sat at the feet of Jesus. She really wanted to do the same thing, but somebody had to make the supper. So Martha served up fruit salad with sour grapes.
And then there was the older brother in one of Jesus’ stories who refused to take part in a welcome home party for his kid brother. "Come on in," his father pleaded. "No way! I’m going to stay right here and pout."
The Bible is full of folks like that. So is the church – folks who sing of God’s grace and love until God looks kindly upon someone they don’t approve of, and those very words stick in their craw.
(You are) a gracious God and merciful, |
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love . . .Is that a compliment or a curse? Jonah no doubt found out when he got to heaven, provided the Ninevites let him in.
If you would like to receive these sermons by e-mail, send a note to brant@oldfirstchurch.org.