Jonah, Whom God Loves

© 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 17, 2009

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 — to be despicable, murderous, rapacious conquerors.

After Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian empire, was destroyed by Babylon, the next empire on the scene in the Middle East, in 609 B.C., Nahum, one of the 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 little book. But imagine the way we might feel if Germany had won World War II and we had just recently been freed from 60 years of Nazi domination of our country. Think of words the supressed and oppressed masses in Somalia or Zambia 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 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 Pol Pot, or Idi Amin, or Saddam Hussein, or Adolf Hitler?

The recitation of the story of Jonah is an essential part of the annual Jewish celebration of Yom Kippur. It is known as 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 this 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 story really, for those of us who keep little adding machines 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, 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,” 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. And 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. 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. How will it be?

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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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.

Jesus’ Prayer

© 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Fifth Sunday of Easter, May 10, 2009
Mothers’ Day

John 17:6-19

Holy Father,
protect them in your name that you have given me,
so that they may be one, as we are one.

A friend of mine sent me a poem by Wendell Berry the other day, and since I can barely resist poems, and inasmuch as it is a poem entitled To My Mother,1 today, Mother’s Day, seemed like a good day to read it out loud for you.

I was your rebellious son,
do you remember? Sometimes
I wonder if you do remember,
so complete has your forgiveness been.
So complete has your forgiveness been
I wonder sometimes if it did not
precede my wrong, and I erred,
safe found, within your love,
prepared ahead of me, the way home,
or my bed at night, so that almost
I should forgive you, who perhaps
foresaw the worst that I might do,
and forgave before I could act,
causing me to smile now, looking back,
to see how paltry was my worst,
compared to your forgiveness of it
already given. And this, then,
is the vision of that Heaven of which
we have heard, where those who love
each other have forgiven each other,
where, for that, the leaves are green,
the light a music in the air,
and all is unentangled,
and all is undismayed.1

Not too many months ago another friend of mine — a good poet in his own right, and a fellow pastor — recommended to me a recording of a poetry reading by Billy Collins. Collins is a former U.S. Poet Laureate. I wondered how interesting a recorded poetry reading could be, but I was ashamed to have asked even myself that question after I listened to the CD the first time. I have listened to it several times since.

Anyway, Collins read one poem which, as I prepared for today, I decided seemed almost custom-made for this passage about the protecting, mothering care of God through the gift of the name of Christ in the prayer that Jesus uttered in John 17. The title of the poem is The Lanyard2. In it, Collins remembers a craft project at summer camp years ago:

The other day ...
... I found myself in the “L” section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.
No cookie, nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past —
a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp
by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid long thin plastic strips
into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one if that’s what you did with them.
but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold facecloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift — not the archaic truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

“And now we are even.” How often has that phrase passed human lips over time? Is being “made even” even a possibility in the world of human relationships? There is blessing in recognizing the reality that the deepest truth of our lives is not about being made even. It is about lives given to loving others with self-yielding and sacrificial love. It is about receiving the love of God that is high as the stars and deep as the oceans, a love that is as impossible to repay as it is to repay our great-grandparents for having had the wisdom to have given birth to folks who would one day be the parents who gave birth to our parents. It is a deep truth about loving others and not waiting for a payback. It’s not “Deal or No Deal,” a love like this. It is simply given. That is all. It’s not tit-for-tat, even steven, compromise, or even mutual indulgence. No, it is a love that gives, and finds all the blessing it needs hidden in the giving.

In his prayer in the 17th chapter of John, Jesus says, “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them [meaning the disciples, or all those who call on Jesus’ name, or, by extension, us!] into the world.” As disciples, we are not saddled with a need to manufacture our own calling. This is an assuring word. The very nature of our faith is to carry it to others, and that faith is a gift given whether we actually perform as good disciples, ambassadors for Christ, or sit in our rooms and do nothing. The gift to us from Christ cannot be returned to him by anything we have to give. Our only options are to pass the gift along, or to do nothing. In either case, there is no payback, the gift is ours anyway, no strings attached.

Some of you — I suspect very few of you — may know that the church I served in Salem was chosen by the media people at the General Assembly offices in Louisville to host the videotaping of our Christmas Eve service, which was broadcast nationally at 11:30 PM on Christmas Eve back in 2003 to an audience of a few million people. It was quite an experience for me and for the congregation, but that’s not the point of sharing this story. The next summer, in 2004, I was at a meeting of our denomination’s General Assembly in Richmond, Virginia. That meeting was the last week of my service on the Council of the General Assembly, and I more or less lurked about during the week, bumping into a few old friends, looking in vain for ways to make my lame-duck self useful. Late in the week, I was standing in the rear of the assembly hall as the delegates worked their way through their business.

A young man walked by me and glanced at my name tag. He stopped, looked more intently at the tag, then at me, as though he disbelieved what the tag said. I even worried for an instant whether I had inadvertently picked up someone else’s tag by mistake. Then he looked me in the eye and asked, “You are Rob Elder, the Rob Elder?” as if I were someone of some significance, and not just another in a long line of lame duck council members, waiting another 24 hours before I could catch a flight home. He grabbed me by the hand and said, “Yours is the church that hosted the Christmas Eve service for CBS television last year, isn’t it?” I nodded, said that yes, that was me, er… us, whatever.

He proceeded to thank me profusely for the gift that service was to his church and to him personally. And he appreciated the theme of gifts that characterized the service. Then he said, “I especially appreciated the story about your father and the golf clubs he left behind when he died, the unexpected blessing they turned out to be for you.” I recall thinking, “Always remember to be careful what you say, you never know what people will hear!” He went on, “You know, my father died not too long ago, and I’ll never forget the last time we played golf together. He taught me how to play and I vividly remember carrying his clubs from the clubhouse for the very last time...”

And we went out of the hall to sit, and we shared a brief conversation about our fathers and what really is the meaning of gifts.

Michael Lindvall, a pastor friend, once wrote, “Life together stretches us, pulls us, strains us, but in it we are nourished by the struggle itself. It is the best chance Providence gives most of us to grow out of ourselves and into something more like what we were meant to be. Life together is the welcome tether that kindly but relentlessly binds our ravenous egos. … The only thing harder than getting along with other people is getting along without them…”3

God gave us Jesus Christ to save us. Jesus gave himself. We can’t thrust the gift back; as with my father’s golf clubs, there is no “back” where we can send it. It is just there for us to deal with. We can look at it, use it, study it, maybe even try to make a lanyard or two to hang somewhere, but nothing we do will make us even, nothing will fully repay Jesus for his gift of himself to us, to the world. Our only option, if we are moved by a need to give back, to be even steven, is, as a friend of mine told me once, to avoid trying to “give back,” and instead “give forward.” It’s what stewardship, support of mission, support of ministries for children and young people in the church are about. It’s what we’re always yammering about in the church, drumming up enthusiasm for things we are often reluctant to do, especially if they involve giving away our money or our time or both.

Well, it’s no news to any of you that today is Mothers’ Day. This is always a difficult day for preachers, not because we don’t or didn’t have mothers or because we have something against them. It’s just that it’s a Hallmark holiday, not a liturgical one. Standing up to praise mothers on a given day is not difficult, we all know how important mothers are in the shaping of their children. But we have, parading through the back of our minds on a day like this, words of the gospels such as these from Matthew:

“While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and his brothers were standing outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” But to the one who had told him this, Jesus replied, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”4

We recognize from this, not a sudden desire on the part of Jesus to disdain his mother, rather, we see a new idea of what it means to be family emerging in the very beginnings of the Christian church. It is because of this and other sayings of Jesus that early Christians referred to others who were not blood relations as “brother,” and “sister.” The familial nature of the church was meant to be understood as a sort of bond as strong, even, as any bonds we may have known in our own families.

Jesus’ prayer in our reading from John speaks to this very thought:

Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me,
so that they may be one, as we are one.

This suggests what it means to be part of a family of faith. It means, both figuratively and literally, to be part of the family of God, and it is a big family, not confined to one household, to one church, to one congregation, but part of the whole household of the family of faith wherever it gathers, and under whatever denominational name. To be one with this family is to be part of a big house, an immense family tree, an enterprise that is so much larger than we are, yet which so intimately values each one of us. That is the point of Jesus prayer for unity. It is the point of our gathering together any time, on any given day.

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserve

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1 “To My Mother” from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, by Wendell Berry, Counterpoint Press, Copyright © 1998.
2 From Billy Collins Live, Random House Audio, www.randomhouse.com/audio.
3 Quoted by Lindvall from his own book in a sermon, “Can’t Live With ‘Em; Can’t Live Without ‘Em,” preached at the Brick Presbyterian Church, New York City, May 8, 2005.
4 Matthew 12:46-50.

Jonah: Concise Prophet
Third in a Series of Four Sermons on Jonah

© 2006, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
First Presbyterian Church, Cottage Grove, Oregon
Fourth Sunday of Easter, May 3, 2009

Jonah 3:1-10, 4:1

Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk.
And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”

This is certainly not the portion of Jonah that we think about most often. Where is the boat trip that Jonah took to get away from the call of God? Where is the big fish that swallowed him up when the sailors tossed him overboard? Is something fishy going on here? Well, no, those parts of the story occur in the first two chapters. Today’s lesson gives us a start on the rest of the story.

This portion of the story gives us the entire prophecy that Jonah delivered to the Ninevites in 8 words. It has to be the shortest prophecy in all of scripture. He didn’t even bother to start with “Thus saith the Lord...” His prophecy marks him as the most concise prophet in the history of prophecy. And they were words totally lacking in any hint of hope or help:

Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!

The reason there is no hint of help or hope is that Jonah did not want to offer them either one. So he gave them only the bad news side of God’s judgment. He likely hoped and prayed for all he was worth that it would simply come to pass, that Nineveh would be destroyed, along with everyone in it.

But then came the shocking response. Based on no more than eight words from the reluctant, angry prophet, the entire city, described several times as great and big, everyone, from the king down to the livestock, sincerely repented of all their evil. It was the possibility that Jonah dreaded, knowing God to be merciful. It was this result he knew to be possible but hoped would never come to pass:

When God saw what they did,
how they turned from their evil ways,
God changed his mind about the calamity
that he had said he would bring upon them;
and he did not do it.

God changed his mind? What does it mean for the creator of all the worlds there are to “change his mind”? This can be a disquieting thought for us. What does it mean to confess belief in a God who would do that? There are two things about this divine change of mind that intrigue me. One is that God’s mind changed at all. How is it that that happens? The other is Jonah’s response to the change that comes over God.

I

First, to the issue of God’s changing mind. Does God’s mind change? Do you believe this to be true? Does the very idea sound comforting or threatening? Apart from the question whether the idea that God has a mind which is any way similar to our minds might be just too anthropomorphic, what would it mean to us that God’s mind could change? One thing we know, this idea of the changing mind of God is not unique to the story of Jonah. In Exodus, God peered down from the mountain where he and Moses were huddled around the tablets of the law, and noticed the newly freed Israelites dancing around the golden idol they had made. His anger burned against them, and he declared that they would be destroyed on the spot. But Moses pleaded with God, saying,

“‘Why should the Egyptians say, “It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth”? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people’ ... And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”1

Jeremiah, that Old Testament prophet who was so close to the spirit of the New Testament, was the authority who spoke most frequently to a disbelieving people about the hope that still resided even in their damaged relationship with God:

“But if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it ... but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it.”2

The Psalms also are laden with laments that suggest petitions may be addressed to God without regard to the way things appear. The Psalms are filled with examples of prayers for relief from a God who the psalmist obviously hopes will change his mind.

How do we account for the fact that so many Bible passages suggest that yes, God’s mind does change? Is this idea a comfort to us or not? The only way I know to account for it — and this does suggest that the changeability of God could be a comforting thought — is by reflecting on God’s constant desire to be in relationship with people. If we know anything about relationships, we know that healthy ones are those in which both parties to the relationship take each other’s participation in the relationship seriously. It appears that Jonah and the psalmist and Jeremiah all believe that is what God does. God takes us seriously, even when we don’t appear to deserve it. If we refuse God, God is refused, if we acquiesce, God is obeyed, and God apparently allows that. But apparently God is willing to make some adjustments for our reluctancies.

God changed his mind? This might be a frightening thought if we take it out of context. So, as one preacher said,3 “Don’t take it out of context. Here it simply means that God can be moved.” As the Ninevites turned to God, God turned to them. God desires relationship, and will move toward it, taking our part in it seriously.

II

This makes Jonah’s part in the whole little drama all the more amazing. While we may always have thought that God never changed, that God was immutable, immovable, and — like preachers on our off days — incomprehensible, we probably also thought that people are likely to change with every alteration in wind direction. Not so Jonah. In this story, the human protagonist demands the right to keep his opinion intact no matter what. Clearly, knowing God’s steadfast love as he obviously did, Jonah knew he was likely to be merciful with the Ninevites, and he wanted no part in it. Never mind that God desired their rescue, their transformation, the very idea that God could love these people judged Jonah’s firm opinion that they were not worth saving. So he demanded the right not to change his mind, no matter what the desires of God might have been in the matter.

And it strikes me that oftentimes we are Jonah. Most of us carry around inside our heads whole lists of people whom we believe in our secret moments to be quite beyond the rescuing love of God. It frustrates us to learn that God loves these others as unequivocally, as fully as he loves us. And that is because if we really believe in this all-encompassing love of God, we might find it necessary to change our own minds about others we may have judged unfit for fellowship in the kingdom. Better to go off to sea, better to be swallowed by a big fish and die than to have to be in community with those whom God cherishes but whom we despise.

The unchanging mind in this story, as we’ll reflect on it more next week, is not God’s as we might have thought, but Jonah’s. And, if we are often honest with ourselves, the unchanging mind can also be ours. In the end, God will have spent more time working to redeem Jonah from the prison of his own rigid hatred than he did rescuing the Ninevites. How ironic, that the prophet of the very people chosen to be a light to the nations should spend so much time trying to extinguish that light!

Jonah wanted nothing to do with relationship, not with those people!

III

Now might be the point in this sermon when the preacher is expected to bash the congregation with a list of folks that we often overlook, that we judge, and do not welcome. But why do this? We all know who they are. And chances are good that they are a bit different for each of us. One of the underlying currents in many church quarrels has to do with differing ideas about who is and is not an appropriate candidate for membership in the kingdom. Years ago, I remember phoning a person about another church member whom he had once seemed to like but later abandoned as a friend. The former friend was crushed. I called the man to encourage him to go to his old acquaintance and rekindle friendship. The response was, “He is such a pain. Who needs him?”

That sounds to me a lot like Jonah’s angry response to God’s mercy for the Ninevites. The fear that lay at the base of his reluctance wasn’t in announcing the words God had given him, but in the knowledge that those words would inevitably be just the prelude to relationship. And Jonah wasn’t about to engage in relationship with those people. I recall someone once declared that when Jesus said, “Love your enemies,” it made all the sense in the world. What sense would it make to say, “Love your friends”? It would be like saying, “Breathe the air” — who could help it?

God changes toward us because he so desperately desires to work a transformation in us. It can happen. We ought to be glad that it can happen. That way, some day when we find we must don sackcloth and ashes, perhaps we will be able to say with the king of Ninevah, “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.” It is hope worth nurturing anyway.

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 Exodus 32:12-14, italics mine, of course.
2 Jeremiah 18: 8-10, (see also 26:3, 26:13, 26:19), again, italics mine.
3 Craig Barnes, in his sermon, “Changing God’s Mind,” preached at Shadyside Presbyterian Church, 2-6-05.

Jonah: Fish Food
Second in a Series of Four Sermons on Jonah

© 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Third Sunday of Easter, April 26, 2009

Jonah 1:7, 17; 2:1-10

Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish, saying,
“I called to the LORD out of my distress, and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.”

Do any of you remember those old movie serials from an age gone by, when for a quarter or fifty cents, you could go spend a hot summer day in a cool movie theater and watch an hour of the Lone Ranger or Zorro or some other show? Each episode would end with the hero in a precarious situation — surrounded by hostile natives, or perched atop a cliff with no escape — that all but guaranteed that everyone in the audience would be back next week to see how it turned out.

That’s what we did with Jonah last week, leaving him there in the fish’s belly. I am glad you all came to hear what happened next!

If you were to approach most people on the street or in the hallways of most churches and ask what comes to mind when they hear the name “Jonah,” chances are good they will mention something about a whale. Even the oldest translation still on bookstore shelves, the 17th century King James Version, says “fish,” not “whale” in the translation of Jonah, but, along with others, the King James translators slipped when the story was mentioned in Matthew’s gospel, turning the Greek for “sea monster” into “whale.” And whale it has been in most people’s minds ever since. Even with the mistranslation, there are only three verses referring to this actual incident in the whole book, it is hardly the main theme.

It will come as no surprise to those of you with whom I have spoken about this little sermon series that to me, Jonah is one of the most ingeniously crafted stories in the Old Testament. Whoever was its true author was a creative genius at storytelling. The fact is that Jonah was a missionary tract; it was never intended to be read with a straight face as history any more than parables like the Good Samaritan or stories like Hansel and Gretel. Probably the creator of Jonah would turn over in the grave at the thought of a literalism that strained to make this fanciful tale into a so-called “true” — as in “historic” — story. Which is not to say there is no truth there. Once we let go of the idea that Jonah has to be a factual account of some historic event, there is truth aplenty available here about the nature of God, and the nature of God’s human servants, and especially about the grace of God; yes, especially about grace.

For example, the first hearers of this story would perhaps not have noticed the inconsistency of a Jonah who was willing to give his life to save pagan, foreign sailors, yet not able to bear the thought that the Lord would want to save the pagans of Nineveh. Even the most vengefully minded person would have been impressed by Jonah in his self-sacrifice in last week’s reading, as he willingly offered himself to save the foreign sailors on the storm-tossed ship; his faith had taught him to be considerate of others. But the thought that the Lord might have mercy on foreign Nineveh, no, for them he would accept only wrath.

In his own behavior the character of Jonah demonstrated the complete absurdity of a prevailing attitude among so many of his fellow countrymen. And probably, truth be told, it is not an attitude that is absent among us.

So, we left Jonah in the fish’s belly not for three days, but for all seven since last Sunday. And today we heard the lovely psalm that Jonah recited. What a beautiful psalm. Except that most of it wasn’t original with Jonah. Remember, when Jesus was on the cross he quoted Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me...?” Well, here in his desperate hour, Jonah did what many of us have done in a tight spot, called to mind some hopeful or helpful verses of scripture, like the 23rd psalm or John 3:16. When Jonah says, “all your waves and your billows passed over me,” he is lifting the words right out of Psalm 42:7. So also when he says, “you brought my life up from the Pit” that’s an idea taken straight from Psalm 30.

Isn’t it true that desperate times call forth our memories of words providing the greatest consolation? And our hero Jonah had hit a desperate time.

Think of all the ways his life had gone literally downhill as he pursued a path leading to the depths of disobedience: Since he first said “no” to the Lord and had run down to the seaport of Joppa, he descended down into a ship for his storm-tossed voyage, down into the hold of the ship for his tempestuous nap, and he had finally found himself thrown overboard, down into the depths of the fish’s belly, down to the bottom of the sea! You can’t get much further down than that! Once there, it took three days — though how he marked the passage of the days in the belly of a fish at the bottom of the sea we can’t imagine — it took three days for him to come to his senses and begin to sing the prayers of his people, a psalm of deliverance, which, when we look at it, is pretty much in the past tense, as though not only his downward spiral, but also his deliverance were already accomplished.

I am trying to think what Disney would do with this picture of the belly-bound prophet, wrapped in a blanket of seaweed, a sea snail stuck to his forehead, a tiny squid hanging out of the corner of his mouth, coral scratches all over his exposed limbs.1

Jonah really wrestles with himself now that he is caught in his own little corner, in his own tight spot, and the Lord will not let him go. It’s like the experience Francis Thompson described in Hound of Heaven, a poem once on the memorization lists for generations of school children:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways2
Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy
They beat—and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet—
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”

Even after we have turned our backs on God, even after we buy tickets for Anywhere-but-where God has in mind, we are not alone.

There is an old story of a man who didn’t agree with giving to mission efforts overseas. When a special offering was taken, the plate was passed, an usher put it in front of him but he passed it back, saying, “I don’t believe in foreign mission.” The usher set the plate back in front of him and said, “Then take some out, it’s intended for the heathen.”

Even if in a fit of pique we turn our backs on the church, the church does not go away, God does not cease to call to us, ministry does not come to an end. It is an enterprise that is so much bigger than our small part of it. And yet our part is desired, even demanded by God who will call and call until we respond. That is a reminder we receive particularly in every annual stewardship season in the church. It’ never just a call for financial support, it is much bigger than that. It is God’s ever-present call to Jonah — to all of us — to return to faithfulness.

Jonah’s second chance comes with words not all that different than the ones that announced his first chance, from the same God, announcing the same purpose as Chapter 3 begins for our reading next week:

The word of the Lord was addressed a second time to Jonah: “Up!” he said, “Go to Nineveh, the great city, and preach to them as I told you to.”

And Jonah turned to go God’s way. Perhaps this time the People of Nineveh will get their second chance too. Perhaps the people of First Presbyterian will as well. Be sure to tune in next week. With God, you never know what’s going to happen.

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 I am thankful to my friend Carlos Wilton for sharing images of Jonah’s travails in his sermon, “Jonah: the Journey Home.”
2 Cf. Augustine, Confessions IV.iv.7: “And lo, Thou wert close on the heels of those fleeing from Thee, God of vengeance and fountain of mercies, both at the same time, who turnest us to Thyself by most wonderful means.”

Jonah: Dove of God
First in a Series of Four Sermons on Jonah

© 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Second Sunday of Easter, April 19, 2009

Jonah 1

Now the word of God came to Jonah ...
But Jonah set out to flee ... from the presence of the Lord.

This is the first part of a series of four sermons on one of the most charming stories in the Old Testament, at least in my view. Probably it’s not as familiar as a lot of Bible stories except for the King James mistranslation of “fish” as “whale,” and children’s musicals with titles such as “A Whale of a Tale.” Parenthetically, I think it’s an odd story to choose for a children’s musical in many ways, because if we read it with even a small degree of understanding, it’s a pretty terrifying story.

Sometimes, when I preach from a story or passage in the Old Testament, people will ask me why I am not using the New Testament, especially in these next Sundays that the church refers to as the Sundays of Easter. Well here is a little New Testament connection and quiz for those who enjoy Bible games. Can you think of the man in the New Testament whom Jesus called “Simon bar-Jonah”? I’ll give you more of a hint than that. Simon bar-Jonah means “Simon, son of Jonah.” I hope this helps some cranial lights to come on. He is the Jewish man who, according to Acts, was in the coastal town of Joppa — incidentally where Jonah’s ocean voyage began — and who had been praying peacefully up on the roof when he came down for lunch and fell into a trance. In that trance he was instructed to be receptive to folks who, before, as a faithful Jew, he would have thought were unclean. He had no sooner come out of this dreamlike state, when representatives of a Gentile Roman centurion named Cornelius knocked at his gate. Who was this rooftop pray-er, named for the reluctant Old Testament prophet sent to the Gentiles in Nineveh by way of Joppa? It was none other than Peter, foremost of the disciples, the rocky apostle on whom the church was to be built.

So, Jonah is a story well-fit for fans of the New Testament as well as the Old.

About today’s sermon title: in Hebrew the word Jonah means “dove.”1 And what is a dove but an albino cousin of the common pigeon, something, colloquially speaking, that Jonah apparently was attempting not to be, a sucker, a dupe who travels on a one-man mission to Israel’s bitterest enemy to deliver a prophecy. To hear the name Nineveh the way the first readers of Jonah would have heard it, think “Berlin” for a mid 20th century Jew. Why wouldn’t he try to flee the task that God presented, to prophesy to the bitterest enemy Israel ever had? We shouldn’t forget, though, that it was a dove that Noah sent from the ark looking for land after all the wicked people of the earth were destroyed in the flood story. There’s more to this dove business than we might think. A dove is a sign of hope on tiny wings, which is the way hope often appears, tiny, vulnerable, and seemingly powerless, yet possessed of a power most often misunderstood by the world.

One of the very first examinations that I had to take in my very first semester of seminary was in an Old Testament class. The question was “What is the point of the story of Jonah?” It’s a really good question. What do you suppose this story of Jonah is really about, anyway?

I have discovered over the years that there is no one answer to that question, which is one of the reasons this little book is so much fun. To determine what a passages says, difficult as that is, is not impossible; there are ample highly trained translators who spend hours deciphering such things for us. But what is the point of the story of Jonah, what does it mean? Today and over the next three Sundays I’m going to talk about what I think the story means, but remember that it is supposed to mean something special, something unique to each of us as well as to all of us. Here are some starters:

• Some would say that this is a story about God’s judgment. “Indiana Jonah and the Temper of Doom.” That’s really what it was, you know: a message of doom. Straightforward and dangling out there like an exposed nerve. No “Telling them what they want to hear,” so that the Ninevites might be more inclined to hear a pasteurized word of judgment and accept it. Lord knows, in the end Jonah had very little interest even in their hearing his message, let alone their being moved to repentance by it. Still, it obviously worked on the Ninevites. In fact, the message of doom, which comes on week 4 for us, worked better on the foreigners in Nineveh than it ever had back home in Israel. But since the narrative spends so much time on board ships, and in a fish’s tummy, and elsewhere, it is easy to lose track of the central message that Jonah was called to proclaim, which was — there is no getting around it, even in a Sunday after Easter — that God was upset with these people, and they were going to suffer for it.
• Others might agree, up to a point. But they would add that judgment tells only half the story. Since the outcome ultimately was a happy one for Nineveh, they say the story is about disobedience and repentance. Disobedience, of course, brings on the wrath of God in the first place, but then the repentance brings about his broad mercy. Never mind such nagging little details as how the Ninevites were supposed to know what they were disobeying since they hadn’t been privy to the Hebrew covenant with the Lord in the first place. They were apparently just so bad that anyone should have known it.
• Some might say the story is for sailors. Notice the subtle irony in the story that one outcome of the sailors’ encounter with their trouble-making guest was that, though they were pagans in the minds of Israelites, they were moved to offer a sacrifice to the Lord of Israel, even using Israel’s most sacred name for God, and promised to serve him. The chosen prophet of God couldn’t be counted on to head East instead of West, but so able was he at his unchosen profession that he converted even those who threw him overboard. Which brings us to another related interpretation.
• Some folks might want to say that the story is about one of the greatest missionaries of all time. Without meaning to, he converted a whole shipload of pagans.
• There are other interpretations. Some say it is nothing more than a fairy tale about a man named Jonah. Others say it is strictly a moral lesson about God’s mercy. I say it combines something of all these interpretations, but that it receives its most perfect interpretation from the preaching of Jesus.

Mark records that when Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of God, his preaching could be summed up in one short verse: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel.”

Jonah preached a one point sermon which we could sum up, if we want to bother to sum up seven words, by saying “You’re going to get it.” Jesus said essentially the same thing, but added, “Repent and believe.” The fact is, the Ninevites did repent, and they were spared. God’s mercy is not simply a New Testament idea any more than judgment is solely a feature of the Old Testament. Any time the word of God is faithfully preached, there is an element of decision involved. The time is up, decision time is here, whether it is a decision to follow Christ made for the first time, or a decision to reaffirm, or a decision to hear the word of God to us today, as we have heard it in the past, and be renewed by his Spirit.

In Moby Dick, Herman Melville’s classic novel, Father Mapple, the preacher at Whaleman’s Chapel in New Bedford, specifies “willful disobedience” as Jonah’s sin. He declares that God more often commands than seeks to persuade because what God wants of us is too hard for us — if we must obey God then we must disobey our own desires, and it is in this disobeying ourselves that the difficulty of obeying God is found. The sailors, agnostic as far as Jonah’s God is concerned, still managed to behave so much better than the lone-ranger prophet. Together they have a conscience, while, on his solo flight West when God commanded him to go East, Jonah finds his sense of right and wrong too easily influenced by his own willfulness. It is a continuing theme that will play itself out over the next three sermons. By the way, for those keeping track, the four sermon series will finish in five Sundays, interrupted on Mother’s Day so that we can have a word perhaps more specific to that day.

So who is Jonah to us? In our world he is likely to be the one who does not bother to list Iraqi casualties while making daily newspaper tallies of our own. He is apt to be the person who exits the church services scratching his head and wondering why “there wasn’t a personal message for me today.” He is the person who sees in the sacrifice of Jesus only a personal salvation with little regard for all the others in the world who have not responded, or even who may have responded badly.

What is Nineveh to us? It is whatever person, nation, or force that threatens all the things we hold most dear, a terrorist with bombs strapped to her waist, a character assassin who belittles us at every opportunity, anyone who scorns and laughs at our most deeply-cherished beliefs. And no sooner do we start thinking about what that might mean than we realize this is precisely the sort of place to which God will direct his prophet, this person who perhaps had the absence of mind to have said once, “Here I am, send me.”

Yes, Jonah is a masterpiece of writing, and it is both captivating and terrifying in what it suggests about the nature of God, the nature of human life, and the nature of our call to serve God’s purposes no matter what. No wonder he headed West when God said East. Who among us, left to our own devices, would have been likely to have done any differently?

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 slang. Pigeon: One who is easily swindled; a dupe.

We Have Waited for Him

copyright © 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor
Easter day, April 12, 2009

Isaiah 25:6-9, Mark 16:1-8

It will be said on that day,
Lo, this is our God;
we have waited for him, so that he might save us.

It seems that every year when we gather following Good Friday to celebrate the death of death on Easter, we have to admit that death has not taken much of a vacation. It’s not something we like to think about really, but it remains true, death stalks the world as it always has, whether from roadside bombs in Iraq, collapsing coal mines, traffic accidents and disease, or the simple slipping away at the end of life. Since we last thought about the death of death on Easter a year ago, death has not ceased to stalk the world.

When Isaiah declared, “we have waited for [God], so that he might save us,” exactly what did he mean? If we are waiting, how will we know when the saving of God has arrived? What will that arrival look like? Are we saved from something, or for something? Or both? If death continues to stalk the earth, what does it mean to be saved? What are we waiting for? The women who arrived at the tomb on Easter day didn’t wait around all that long to find out, according to today’s gospel anyway.

I have always been attracted to Mark’s account of the resurrection. Its ending is so completely different from the other gospels, it simply leaves you hanging, almost in mid-sentence. “So [the women] went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” That’s it. That is “all she wrote.”1 It’s even more abrupt than the tidy version that translators give us. In the original Greek it simply says, “afraid they were, for.” Is that anyway to end a paragraph, much less a gospel? My high school English teacher, Mrs. Lanier, would not have been pleased. Still, I think I am drawn to Mark’s gospel because it reflects how natural it is for us to react to shocking circumstances the way these women did. They dropped everything and ran from the tomb the same way it appears Mark dropped his pen and ran from his writing desk. Whereas the other gospels report positive reactions on the women’s part (they ran to tell the other apostles what happened, what they had seen and heard) here in Mark they are overtaken by fear and they can say or do nothing other than just run from the empty tomb in a kind of panic. Who among us can say we would have behaved any differently?

Is this any way to end a gospel? It is hardly the best setup for a triumphant singing of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. One New Testament professor shared a story of a student who memorized the whole of Mark’s Gospel in order to present a sort of one man show before live audiences using nothing but the actual words of the gospel. After thorough study, he determined to stay with the original, abrupt ending we heard today, as the most authentic. At the first performance, after he spoke that dangling, final verse, he stayed onstage, standing awkwardly for what seemed like an eternity of silence. He was through, but like most of us, the audience knew other, more satisfying endings of the Easter story and simply were not aware that he was finished. Anxious seconds ticked by until he spontaneously added, “Amen!” and made his exit. The relieved audience applauded appreciatively. Still, as he thought about it further, he recognized that his addition of “Amen!” had actually betrayed the dramatic intention of the text. So at the next performance, after delivering the final words: “they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid,” he simply paused for a brief moment and then left the silent audience to contemplate for themselves what that meant. “The discomfort and uncertainty within the audience were obvious,” his former professor reflected later, “and as people exited ... the buzz of conversation was dominated by the experience of the nonending.”2

The women at the tomb that first Easter morning weren’t weak or cowardly. They alone had watched the crucifixion on Friday, Mark makes no mention of male disciples at the cross. They were long gone. So here were these women alone again on Sunday morning. Do you suppose they were looking forward to handling a corpse, dead for some 36 hours? These were not giddy women, easily frightened. They were brave, courageous even, in their commitment to do the right thing. In the end, though, the last word was that they were afraid. Even though later manuscripts contained additions to Mark’s original, trying to tidy up that abrupt ending, all the earliest copies have the ending just the way we heard it today. They fled from the tomb in fear.

Now, all these centuries later, as with the women at the tomb, isn’t it true for us that our experience, particularly our fear, gets in the way of understanding more often then we’d like to admit?

I read of two people who sat next to each other on an airplane. In the few minutes before takeoff, they introduced themselves to each other. One was a minister who was taking his first airplane trip. He was as nervous as could be. He kept opening and closing a small copy of the Bible he had with him, wiping his brow with a handkerchief; he was unable to sit still.

Seated next to him was a businesswoman who traveled a lot and wasn’t scared at all. She was reading the Wall Street Journal, totally relaxed, and could not help but see the minister’s anxiety. Finally, she asked him what his problem was and he admitted his fear of flying.

“How come?” she asked. “You’re a person of faith. Doesn’t your Bible have Jesus saying something like, ‘I am with you always, even to the ends of the earth?’ What have you to fear?”

The minister thought deeply about what she had said, reflecting on the woman’s point and knowledge of scripture, and then he replied, “That is very helpful, but, you didn’t get the quote exactly right. Jesus says, ‘Lo, I am with you always ... Lo(w)!’”

Fear can do that to us, make us unreasonable, impervious to a word of hope or help. We often choose familiar ways, even though they are painful, disappointing, self-limiting, because we know what to expect and for many of us, the pain, the disappointment, the failures we know are less fearful than the uneasiness of a future that is open but filled with uncertainties.

The women at the tomb that day were thinking just the way we do, contemplating the physical realities of our living and dying. They went to the tomb the same way we would go to the cemetery, not with notebooks and pencils, hoping a crucified Jesus would awaken and continue to teach them. They brought no one to the cemetery for healing. What they brought, the gospel tells us, were spices, traditionally used to anoint the bodies of the dead. They expected the tomb still to be sealed the way we expect to arrive at the cemetery and still find the graves of our loved ones covered in earth or stone. They anticipated no encounter, no voices, and certainly no instructions to greet them there.

Of course, as we heard, upon arriving at the tomb they found all of these unanticipated things:

• a rolled-away stone, some living presence sitting in a tomb where no one would expect to encounter anything alive,
• the absence of the body for which they had gone to the trouble to gather and carry all their anointing spices,
• A firm instruction about where they were to go, who they were to tell, who they were going to see.

It turns out that the unlikeliness of everything they encountered, along with the very emptiness of the tomb will frustrate our every attempt to possess the man from Nazareth rather than be possessed by him. In order to see Jesus, we must do what the women, the disciples had to do. Go to Galilee. Galilee, the most distant, least interesting district of ancient Israel, represents to us the challenge of the whole world lying beyond the tiny circumference of Jerusalem, the tiny circle of our own experience, it represents leaving behind old thoughts of what is holy, and realizing that Jesus’ dying has sanctified every place, not just sanctuaries and cemeteries but sidewalks, and offices, and buses, and bridges.

Mark leaves his story with us. No neatly packaged ending here, we are challenged to help determine how it will come out. We are invited to become part of the story of the Gospel. No written conclusion could contain Christ, any more than any tomb could. He always goes before us, always beckons us to a new appearance in Galilee of the nations, Galilee of daily life, where there is work to be done, truth to be told, compassion to be manifested, healing to do, justice to be established, Galilee of the other 364 days of the year beyond Easter.

Easter is not a call to believe something. It is a call to do something. And as if to provide an example we can’t refuse, Jesus has already left town to do something himself. Go to Galilee if you’d like to sign on.

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 Factoid: The standard theory about the phrase “That's all she wrote” is that it arose during World War II referring to "Dear John letters" received by many service personnel from sweethearts back home bluntly announcing the end of their relationships
2 I am thankful for Tom Long’s sermon, “Dangling Gospel,” in Christian Century, April 4, 2006, for the reminder of this story from the late Professor, Donald Juel.

A Day the Lord Made

Passion/Palm Sunday, April 5, 2009
Copyright © 2009, Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Psalm 118:1-2, 19-29
Mark 14:1-11

This is the day that the Lord has made;
let us rejoice and be glad in it.

I remember the day Gene Pitney died a few years back. Some will recall that he was a teen idol pop singer of the early 1960s, a sort of cross between Bobby Darin and Frankie Avalon. These were teen idols who were in a kind of leftover generation from the music, style, and fashions of the late 1950s, and their world rolled to an abrupt stop when the Beatles brought their music across the Atlantic from Liverpool and a revolution in popular music and culture was fully underway.

The day I heard that Pitney had died, I felt a little twinge of sadness, I had liked some of his music, especially his ballads. My two college roommates and I exchanged e-mails about his passing, one of them remembered a record I bought in our freshman year of Pitney’s greatest hits. I know I still have that record somewhere, though I no longer have anything that I can play it on.

Our little e-mail exchange got me to thinking about the portability of our lives, or the lack thereof, and the useless junk we cart along with us. My story is common in mobile America, having lived in six different cities since I left home for college. Every time I’ve moved, I’ve done what we all have done at one time or another, sorted through all that stuff we drag along with us through life, deciding what to keep and what to let go. The only certainty is that whoever is following us won’t want it left behind, and certainly won’t bother to keep any of it, they will be bringing their own mounds of junk. I can’t think that anyone living any place where I’ve lived before would want my old Gene Pitney 331/3 rpm record.

There is something cleansing about moving though, deciding what goes and what goes away. It is a cleansing feeling really. You never really liked that old painting over the hutch anyway. Thank goodness for a reason to let go of that horrible tie, or that summer suit that hasn’t fit you since 1981. Too bad we can’t have that same choice with other things that burden our lives: the bad memories that won’t ever change, no matter how often we remember them; the injuries we have suffered over time, both physical and emotional; the losses we have known.

Well, “this is the day that the Lord has made,” said the psalmist, and today it’s time to pack for a one-week trip to and through a land called Holy Week. One thing we should carry is the story from Mark.

There is a story in John’s gospel1 about Mary who anointed Jesus’ feet in the home of Lazarus, spreading the ointment with her hair. Today we heard what may be Mark’s account of the same event, or perhaps a different event altogether. Some details differ. Mark, characteristically, pays scant attention to the names of other people present, most remaining nameless: those who complained about the apparent waste of the expensive ointment, the woman doing the anointing, though Judas is named in both accounts.

Because a good understanding of first century Jewish meal customs is not one of the things most of us have packed around with us since Jesus walked the earth, the scene set by Mark does not shock us, though it certainly would have shocked its first readers, for several reasons.

First, a woman appeared in the room where men were eating. There is no way I could get you to look as shocked as those early listeners to the story would have looked. Remember, in those days, men and women had very little contact with one another socially. Women basically stayed home, men ate with other men. To shock you as much as those first listeners, I’d have to say something like, “a woman entered the room with snakes for hair and smoke coming out of her ears.” Men were eating and a woman came in. That in itself was a shocking thing for those folks. It was something which, as my little grandmother used to say, “simply isn’t done.”

But that wasn’t the half of it. If they were shocked to see her appear, imagine their shock as she:

1. Cracked open an alabaster jar of extremely costly ointment; This would have been a very expensive jar, which together with its very expensive contents was likely to have been worth more than the house in which they were dining, about year’s wages;
2. Poured the contents on his head. Anointing on the head was something reserved for royal anointing, as when the prophet Samuel anointed David to be king over Israel

In one stunning succession of events, this woman broke the taboo of women being in the presence of men who are gathering socially, and declared by her action that when they sat with Jesus, they were sitting with royalty. When the Bible says she “broke open” the jar, the Greek word is much stronger, it mean she literally smashed it to bits, it is the same word used in the Greek version of the Exodus story of Moses smashing the tablets of the law when he came down from Sinai and saw the golden calf.

Mark reports that some of the reactions to the woman were filled with anger, anger about the waste, the lack of concern for the poor, the sheer inappropriateness of the entire sequence of events. The one who seems not to have been troubled at all was Jesus. As they fumed and fulminated, Jesus said not a word until after their scolding, when he said enough is enough, this woman has done something good for me.

This is a funny week for the life of faith, isn’t it? We have this day that most of us associate with the laying of palms before Jesus as he entered Jerusalem, though only John reports the actual use of palms, and we know that palms didn’t grow naturally in Jerusalem, it was too dry. But that triumphant ride down the hill from the Mount of Olives rests right alongside these stories of Jesus at table, Jesus anointed as a king would be anointed, Jesus being betrayed by one of his own chosen disciples into the hands of those who wanted to do him harm. The triumph of Easter, which is yet to come, is set right up alongside the hard reality of suffering and death. We’re all in favor of the former, not so sure about the necessity for the latter, if attendance at most mid-week services in most churches during Holy Week is any indication.

The psalm for today places together the same sort of thoughts that we might normally think would be at odds with each other: the triumphant “This is the day which the Lord has made, let us rejoice,” set alongside “the stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” That psalm, which the pilgrims repeated as Jesus made his way into the city astride his colt, carries alongside the note of triumph an equally loud note of foreboding.

Verse 22 in particular gnaws at the sense of triumph and disables it. The stone is not to be used until first it has been rejected. Everything around that note concerning the stone has an air of celebration, but this line suggests that before there is triumph there must be denial. The context of rejoicing carries within it the seeds of a prior sorrow to be endured before rejoicing can predominate.

On this day which the Lord has made, we probably all carry our own jars in need of smashing to let the anointing of the Lord happen in our hearts. There are folks who need to smash the jar of addiction.2 There are many of us who have probably arrived yet again at a time in our lives when we need to decide what we will carry forward with us in our lives, and what we will leave behind. Go ahead and keep storing away your GI Joe action figures or your 78 rpm records, or the dress you wore to the prom if you want to. But you and I both know, there are things in our lives that we can lay aside, leave behind. We will box our things up, and they may look so precious as they go in, but sometimes, at the end of months or even years, when we get around to opening those cartons, all we find in them is trash, things no longer filled with life, things that need to be smashed open, and used to anoint the one who comes to bless who we are, not what we’ve been or what we have, but who we are and who we can be, now that the day which the Lord has made has arrived.

Let us rejoice.

Copyright © 2009 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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1 John 12:1-11
2 Thanks to Anna Carter Florence and her sermon, “Smashing Beauty” Journal for Preachers, Pentecost 2004, pp. 18-22, for this and some other images in the sermon.