2022.09.04 - Faces of our Faith: Jonah

Scripture Jonah 3:1 - 4:11

Jonah 3:1 - 4-11 (New Revised Standard Version)
3 The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, 2 “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” 3 So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. 4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” 5 And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
 
6 When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. 7 Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. 8 Humans and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. 9 Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”
 
10 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.
 
4 But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment. 3 And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 4 And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” 5 Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.
 
6 The Lord God appointed a bush and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort, so Jonah was very happy about the bush. 7 But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”
 9 But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” 10 Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 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?”
 
 
Leader: A Word of God that is still speaking,    People: Thanks be to God.
 
Sermon
 
Ah, Jonah. Another Sunday School favorite. It’s a wonderfully dramatic tale, full of twists and turns. God’s got a message for Nineveh that Jonah is entrusted with, but Jonah flees in the opposite direction to Tarshish. En route, the biggest storm you’ve ever seen comes upon the sea, and the crew scrambles frantically, tossing cargo overboard and praying to their gods for deliverance. Jonah, in the meantime, is down below deck taking a nap. The captain wakes him up and suggests that he start praying too but they all figure out that Jonah is actually the problem. Even then, the sailors try to bring the ship back to land to avoid acting on Jonah’s suggestion, which was to pick him up and toss him into the sea. The storm keeps getting worse, so the sailors take up Jonah’s request, throw him in, and the sea calms down. Up comes a big fish to swallow Jonah whole, where he spends three days in its belly, and to be honest, prays this prayer brimming with piety so false that the fish vomits him back upon the shore.
 
That is the backstory to where our scripture passage picks up this morning where God tries a second time to get Jonah to go to Nineveh and proclaim God’s message.
 
One important thing to understand about this book is that, first of all, it’s satire. Jonah, son of Amittai, a prophet who did live and prophesy in the northern kingdom of Israel around 750 BCE, probably did not go to Nineveh - the capital of the Assyrian empire. There was most likely no fish sent to devour our prophet. This dramatic turnaround where the entire city repented, right down to putting sackcloth on the animals, most likely didn’t happen. Secondly, this book of the Hebrew Bible was most likely written in the sixth or fifth century BCE as the Israelites were wrestling with questions of identity and how to relate to their neighbors. The story appears to be set before the Assyrian empire actually destroyed the northern Kingdom of Israel. So again, we have a fictional, satirical story looking back at an earlier period in Israel’s history to explore issues the Jewish people were facing in their own time. One major theme is the relationship between Jews and Gentiles - insiders and outsiders - particularly when those outsiders were once their oppressors - as well as the relationship between the God of Israel and those outsider nations.
 
One of the things I love about this story is how Jonah interacts with God throughout - how God gives him a task and he runs in the opposite direction, how petulant and angry Jonah gets at God - because those are things I can really relate to - I’m sure none of y’all have problems like that. The thing Jonah gets upset about isn’t the storm that nearly took out an entire cargo ship, it wasn’t being swallowed up and violently regurgitated three days later - I mean, those are things that I might get a bit upset about and at least complain to God about, even if I didn’t believe God was the one who caused those things to happen. No, what gets Jonah really mad was that God changed the plans upon seeing the repentant Ninevites. Jonah’s half-hearted message “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown” - a message that didn’t even include God in it - that he preached as he walked around for a day in a city that was exaggerated to be as large as a three day’s walk, inspired such a change of heart in the people (and animals) that God relented and decided not to destroy them. 
 
And in response, Jonah’s like “I knew it! This is why I didn’t want this job in the first place! I knew you were a compassionate God, a forgiving God, a God that is slow-to-anger and abounding in steadfast love, and that given half a chance you’d call off the fireworks. I’d rather die!” And so Jonah builds himself a cozy place above the capital of Israel’s greatest enemy to see if God just might change plans again and decide to destroy the city in the way Jonah thinks it so richly deserves.
 
Sometimes I think it’s hard for us to picture why Jonah would be angry in this situation - after all, shouldn’t he be glad that his prophetic word changed hearts and minds? Shouldn’t he feel like it was a job well-done, that God acted in a way consistent with what he knew about God to be true? Shouldn’t there be some satisfaction that the Ninevites demonstrated repentance before God?
 
What I think sometimes we miss in the story is that Nineveh was the capital of Israel’s greatest enemy at the time, Assyria. The Assyrian empire ended up conquering the northern kingdom of Israel - and while we talk a lot about the later Babylonian exile, the Assyrian occupation took its own toll on the Hebrew people…took its own captives that were never permitted to return home in the same way the descendents of the Babylonian exiles were. Of course Jonah would want to see Nineveh destroyed to remove a threat to his people.
 
And if we’re honest with ourselves, don’t we sometimes operate the same way? Don’t we take secret (or perhaps not-so-secret) delight in the downfall of our enemies? Aren’t we pleased when those we name as “evildoers” get what we think they deserve? Isn’t there some satisfaction when calamity befalls them beyond the natural consequences of their actions and that we can feel resentful or aggravated when grace or mercy is shown? We don’t like to admit it, but it’s sometimes true. 
 
Enfleshed, in the commentary on this passage, poses a series of ethical questions that we might wrestle with as we think about the dynamics at play in our story: 
 
“If Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, was destroyed would their empire fall and the violence, destruction, and war come to an end? Would Israel then be safe?
 
Are the lives of those repenting in Nineveh worth more to God than those who would suffer and be killed under the Assyrian empire?
 
If the repentance of Nineveh is genuine, is it even enough to turn the whole of Assyria around?”
 
I would also add - “If the author of this book and their contemporaries understood the destruction of Israel and Judah as God’s judgment, how could God spare others - outsiders even - whose offenses, in their eyes, were far more serious?”
 
And then there’s the question God asks Jonah - “is it right for you to be angry?”
 
No easy answers to those questions.
 
Truth be told, the book of Jonah doesn’t let us off the hook very easily. After all, one might substitute the American empire for that of Assyria if we were thinking about a global context and the thousands of voices that have cried out in anger to God at the lack of justice, at the violence and harm our country has enacted and enabled within - and outside of - our borders, and at the systems that have irreparably harmed and exploited so many on our planet. 
 
And shouldn’t God save us, too, when we cry out for deliverance? Because aren’t we, too, someone else's enemies? And isn’t that an uncomfortable truth that we don’t much like to admit?
 
This is the difficult thing about grace. It’s really great when we’re on the receiving end - when we experience God as merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. It’s much, much harder to see that play out with those we’d otherwise consider unworthy…consider our enemies.
 
In a world that is becoming increasingly more divided - politically and socio-economically, in a culture where fear-mongering, finger pointing, judgment, cancelling, lying, trolling, keyboard crusades have become the norm, it’s hard not to be swept along by the tide and be devoured by what we take in.
 
Nadia Bolz-Weber reflects this on Jonah with some brutal honesty: she writes, “That’s what’s hard about reading Jonah - I have to look at how maybe I too need my enemies to stay my enemies, since it’s hard to know who I am if I don't know who I’m against…Reading Jonah, I am confronted with how uncomfortable it is for God to show love and mercy to those I do not believe deserve it. Part of me really doesn't want to have empathy for those who have [messed] up, for those who have abused their position, for those who have done harm.
 
But empathy is not exoneration.  
 
So we can fight for justice – we can call a thing what it is and name the harm done by the powerful while also holding the horrible truth that God is super hard to manage, since God loves you and (sorry about this, but…) God also loves your enemies.
 
God is kind of the worst like that.” 
 
The story ends with Jonah still sitting up on the cliff, watching the city. God tends Jonah with a bush, offering shade, before also sending a worm to destroy it and a scorching wind brutal enough so that Jonah reiterates his request for death. God tries to expand Jonah’s horizons - tries to get him to see why grace and mercy for the Ninevites is a better option than death and destruction. We don’t know if it changed Jonah’s mind or changed Jonah’s heart. What we do know is that grace gets the final word. In the midst of all the questions - all the ethical dilemmas - all the emotions and anger - God meets it all with grace. At the end, we are left to wrestle with the goodness of God that shocks us to the very core with what it asks of us - that we, too, are called to embody that same grace to all, no matter how deserving - or undeserving - we think they are of that grace. It’s a goodness, that Debie Thomas writes, that asks us why we so often prefer vindication to rehabilitation.  Why we crave punishment for the lost and broken, instead of healing and hope.  Why we happily grab every second chance God gives us, even as we deny second chances to others.  Why we nurse envy and bitterness in our hearts, refusing to see the complexity God sees in the faces of those who wish us harm.”
 
And the promise of the gospel is - God is who God is - merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. It’s for us - for our enemies too. It’s for all of us in our righteous and not-so-righteous indignation, in our petty Facebook fights, in our woundedness and addictions, in our bargaining with God and in our ultimatums, in our running the opposite direction and in our being so fed up we’d rather wash our hands of it all. In all our humanness, God meets us, and grace wins. God’s lavish and scandalous grace is the final word. 
 
It’s a joy and a challenge and that’s what we’re left with at the end of the book of Jonah - both the beauty of a God who redeems and the responsibility of undertaking the work within ourselves where we, too, can be joyful and willing bearers and vessels of that grace in the midst of a bruised and broken world - even when that journey takes us to the heart of enemy territory. May our paths this week lead us to deeper wells of God’s grace for ourselves - for our enemies - and for this world that God loves so much. Amen.
 
*Hymn Your Love, O God (UMH 120)
 

1. Your love, O God, is broad like beach and meadow,

Wide as the wind, and our eternal home.
You leave us free to seek you or reject you,
You give us room to answer “yes” or “no.”
 
Your love, O God, is broad like beach and meadow,
Wide as the wind, and our eternal home.
 

1. We long for freedom where our truest being

    Is given hope and courage to unfold.
We seek in freedom space and scope for dreaming,
And look for ground where trees and plants can grow.
 
Your love, O God, is broad like beach and meadow,
Wide as the wind, and our eternal home.
 

1. But there are walls that keep us all divided;

We fence each other in with hate and war.
Fear is the bricks and mortar of our prison,
Our pride of self, the priscon coat we wear.
 
Your love, O God, is broad like beach and meadow,
Wide as the wind, and our eternal home.
 

1. O judge us, Lord, and in your judgment free us,

    And set our feet in freedom’s open space;
    Take us as far as your compassion wanders
Among the children of the human race.
 
Your love, O God, is broad like beach and meadow,
Wide as the wind, and our eternal home.
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