Jonah, Whom
God Loves
© 2012, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
First Presbyterian Church,
Vancouver, Washington
Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 6, 2012
Jonah
3:10, 4:1-11
God’s mind changed about the calamity
that God had said would be brought
upon [Nineveh];
and God did not do it.
But this was very displeasing to
Jonah, and he became angry.
If
we were challenged to do so, it would be difficult to conjure up a people that
Israel hated any more than they hated the people of Nineveh. Theirs was the
empire that in 721 B.C. had conquered ten of the twelve tribes of Israel and
driven them into exile, from which they were never to return, referred to ever
after as the “ten lost tribes.” The remaining two tribes in the south, in
Judah, knew the Ninevites – we might recognize them more readily as Assyrians,
Nineveh was their capitol city – to be despicable, murderous, rapacious
conquerors.
After Nineveh, the capital city of Assyria, was
destroyed by Babylon, which was the next empire to come on the scene in the
Middle East, in 609 B.C., Nahum, one of those seldom-read prophets of the Old Testament,
devoted the entirety of his brief prophecy to bitter denunciations of the
hundred year dominance of that cruel empire over Israel:
Your shepherds are asleep, O king of
Assyria;
your nobles slumber.
Your people are scattered on the
mountains
with no one to gather them.
There is no assuaging your hurt, your
wound is mortal.
All who hear the news about you clap
their hands over you.
For who has ever escaped your endless
cruelty?[1]
Saying all this still doesn’t make it seem very
real, though, does it? Unless you happen to have a singular fascination with
ancient history, it is all a sort of long ago, far away set of distant
historical facts, not very much connected to our own times and lives. So it is
difficult to see, much less to feel, the sort of rage that the character of
Jonah represented on behalf of Israel in the story we have looked at on the
four Sundays we have devoted to this quirky little book. But then imagine the
way we might feel today if Germany had won World War II and we had just
recently been freed from some 60 years of Nazi domination of our country. Think
of words the supressed and oppressed populations in Somalia or Syria would have
for those who this very day seek their extinction.
Who are the Ninevites today, both on the global and
personal scale, in our international news and in our own neighborhoods? I know
you are kind people, but if you can imagine the rage you might feel at people
who had captured your neighbors, killed your family, and sought for years to do
the same to you, what would you like to do to them? What sort of judgment from
God do you believe they would deserve for their crimes against you?
Then, if you can, imagine that God called you to go
to these very people and utter a word of God’s judgment, when you knew all the
while that – since the Bible teaches that God’s character is merciful, always
ready to forgive those who repent, and abounding in steadfast love – your
bitterest enemies might experience the same forgiving love that God offers to
you and me. Does the character of Jonah seem all that far away from the very
sort of attitude we would be likely to have in the face of the possibility of
forgiveness for our enemies? In hindsight, the Marshall recovery plan for
Europe following World War II was a godsend to millions of people living amid
the social and physical wreckage of war, yet historical accounts of that time
record how difficult it was to convince a wounded nation that rebuilding our
former enemies was in our own best interest. There was strong opposition in
Congress at the time, some of whose members favored a return to isolationism
and the sorts of policies to punish and impoverish former enemies that had
followed World War I, the very policies which sowed the seeds of hopelessness
that led to Germany’s turn to fascism and the second world war. Revenge can be
a strong motivator, even if a suicidal one. If called on to announce a word
which might lead to forgiveness and blessing, might we not have hopped the
first freighter in the opposite direction had God asked us to go and prophesy
to Charles Taylor in Liberia, or Idi Amin, or Saddam Hussein, or Adolf Hitler?
Many of you probably know that the recitation of
the story of Jonah is an essential part of the annual Jewish celebration of Yom
Kippur. Yom Kippur, of course, is the Jewish day of atonement, a day when all
Israel attempts to follow the stipulations of Leviticus 16, seeking to be
cleansed before God. Reading or chanting the book of Jonah has been a part of
the observation of Yom Kippur since the 2nd century. “On [that] sacred day,
Israel lifts up as the model of repentance not itself, who is like the Hebrew
Jonah resisting God, but the outsider: pagan sailors and especially penitent
Ninevites. From the transformative deeds of these outsiders Israel learns
accountability and responsibility. From the divine compassion that spares them,
Israel finds reassurance about itself in relationship to God and learns
compassion in relationship to others.”[2]
As Eugene Peterson once declared, “Jonah thought he
had come to Nineveh to do a religious job, to administer a religious program.
God had brought Jonah to Nineveh to give him an experience of amazing grace.
The tables are turned: it is no longer Jonah preaching to the people of
Nineveh, but the people of Nineveh preaching to Jonah – inviting him into a
vocation far beyond anything he had supposed.”[3]
So in this last chapter of the little story of
Jonah, we have the prophet sulking outside the forgiven city. He had announced
the punishment which he and every other Jew knew to be Nineveh’s deserved fate,
“Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” But God had a desire to
exercise the very nature of God’s character in Nineveh, the forgiving character
of God that Israel had come to depend on: “And should I not pity Nineveh, that
great city?” God’s purpose and plan, as always, far exceeded not only the
prophet’s words, but his imagination. Just when our enemies have done something
that so completely places them beyond our capacity to forgive, that is when God
takes the extra step, walks the extra mile, offers the cloak as well as the
coat, offers his body, broken for us, his blood, shed for the forgiveness of
sin, hands over the last dime when there are no other dimes left.
Some preachers and other moralists among us stand
in our pulpits, or before the cameras of our nationally syndicated religious
talk shows, and wag an index finger at our listeners as we tell them to tidy up
their morals, or pray more piously, or read more of the Bible in order to
become more worthy of a God who is demanding and severe with those who fail to
attend to God’s commands. Meanwhile, the God we meet in the book of Jonah is
beckoning to us with both hands, welcoming the lost, the least of these, the
one we knew to be our enemy, the dissolute and the drunken, beckoning them all
to grace and mercy and salvation.
Why does God act this way? Why is the mercy of God
at the same time the very welcome characteristic that saves us when we had
presumed ourselves lost, and yet the unwelcome characteristic when we find our
enemies included under the umbrella of that same mercy?
Jonah is a maddening little story, really, for
those of us who keep little calculators inside our heads, toting up the goods
that others receive, always comparing them to our own supply, which never seems
to be enough. For after all the chuckles and tut-tutting we have had at Jonah’s
expense these four Sundays, all our consideration of his willful disobedience
as well as his unrelenting hatred of the enemies of Israel whom God sought to
save, when we turn around to the mirror, we see that Jonah is us, smelling like the fish that
swallowed us, still with that bit of seaweed dried onto our foreheads. We are
the ones who struggle to find an umbrella large enough to keep God’s rain from
falling equally on the just and the unjust.
“Even when we know that the blessings that come to
us have been delivered to the wrong address, there are not many of us who will
send them back. We thank God quickly and carry them inside. But when we look
out the window and see the delivery man carrying an identical package next
door, to those really unpleasant people who sit on their porch drinking beer
after beer,”[4] playing
their music too loudly until the wee hours, and whose children stray into our
yard only to deposit debris which we have to clean up, that is something we
tend to resent. We believe undeserved blessings are only supposed to go to the
deserving, apparently.
In Jonah, we learn God does not give us what we
deserve. And thank goodness for that. God gives not what we deserve but what we
need. Grace is not fair, doesn’t know the word “fair,” that’s a human word, not
a divine one.
How does the Jonah story end? We really don’t know.
It has that enigmatic finish that you heard earlier:
And should I not be concerned about
Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a
hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from
their left, and also many animals?
Well, Jonah? Should I or should I not? Lots of
people. Animals too. What do you say, is my concern, my mercy appropriate?
Well, is it?
But we don’t know how Jonah responds. We can guess,
but we don’t know. The story doesn’t supply his response. Why do you suppose
that is?
I think we don’t know because, for a religious
people, Jonah’s story is our story, and our own stories are not yet finished.
Did Jonah turn back toward the loving mercy of God which had birthed and
sustained Jonah and his people and which God now sought to extend to the world?
Or did Jonah remain a prophet of petulance and pouting? Jonah cannot answer
now, but we can. So how will it be?
Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder,
all rights reserved
[1] Nahum 3:18-19.
[2] Phyllis Trible, New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume VII, Abingdon, 1996, p. 528.
[3] From the 1990 commencement message
at Princeton Theological Seminary, “A Pastor’s Quarrel with God.” The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, New
Series, 1990, pp. 27-275.
[4] From “Ninevites and Ne’er-Do-Wells,”
Gospel Medicine, by Barbara Brown
Taylor, Cowley, 1995, pp. 91-95.
