Scripture: Jonah 3 and 4
I was having some trouble this week with how to approach this last of the sermons on the book of Jonah, which is why I came up with such catchy and creative sermon title: Jonah Part Three. When I have trouble coming up with a sermon title, it’s usually a good indication that I don’t know what I’m talking about—not necessarily that I don’t know what I’m talking about, but that I don’t know exactly what I want to talk about. In any case, I was having some trouble.
One of the reasons I was having trouble, I came to realize, was that I was unsure about whether to treat this material in a lighthearted manner or not. This has been an issue for me the last two weeks as well, but it became even more pointed this week as I considered how I wanted to end my preaching on Jonah.
The book of Jonah is a piece of comic writing that concerns some very serious issues. Commentators often say that Jonah is a very funny book. In my experience it’s often been hard for people to get into that mode. We tend to think that we’re not supposed to laugh when we read the Bible. It’s a very serious book after all. It’s about God, and God is some very serious stuff. But Jonah is definitely a book with a sense of humor. I don’t know about being laugh-out-loud funny, and some of the humor may be a touch obscure, but it does have a kind of comic flair and we do well to read it with a sense of humor.
The story of the fish coming along to thwart Jonah’s plans to escape and carry him back to shore is not there to produce angry arguments about whether this actually happened and whether the bible should be taken literally. It’s meant just to produce a smile. As are other parts of the story. The fact maybe that when the storm comes up at sea, the people who immediately start saying their prayers are the heathen sailors, not the Hebrew prophet-elect Jonah, that Jonah, who is doing his best to avoid being an evangelist, ends up converting the sailors to Judaism in spite of himself, and the fact that when Jonah finally does get around to acting pious, when he’s in the belly of the fish and praying up a storm, the fish isn’t very impressed and actually spews Jonah out, throws him up on the beach. It’s all told in a kind of a light-hearted vein, as though part of the message might be that we shouldn’t take ourselves so darned seriously all the time. Things often happen in spite of us, not because of us, and our piety is often not very impressive to God. That sort of thing.
Chapters three and four continue in that vein. When Jonah finally arrives in Nineveh, after going to extreme lengths to escape, causing God to use some extreme counter measures, after all that, Jonah says all of eight words to the Ninevites. “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” That’s it. The sum total of what Jonah had to say after traveling halfway to the end of the earth and, with God’s help, back again. “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” You’ll notice that one of those eight words Jonah spoke is not God. Not a word about God, or about social justice, which is what prophets are supposed to be all about. Jonah is still running away from being a prophet. But, just as the sailors got religion anyway and in fact adopted the god of the Hebrews as their God, did this all in spite of the fact that Jonah didn’t even try to convert them, so the Ninevites, in spite of the fact that Jonah clearly didn’t have his heart in his preaching, the Ninevites immediately repent. They throw themselves into repenting. They fast. They don’t even drink water. They put on sack cloth and cry out to God. In fact, it’s not just the Ninevites who do this. Their animals do this too. “By the decree of king and nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock shall taste anything. They shall not feed or drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth and they shall cry out mightily to God.” I picture dogs going around with those doggie jackets made of sackcloth, howling out to God, cows and goats draped in sackcloth, mooing to God and…doing whatever goats do…to God. Who knows, the Ninevites say, this might do some good. And sure enough it does. God decides not to go through with it. Nineveh isn’t destroyed after all.
There are several possibilities I can think of as to how Jonah might have reacted to this. One is to be impressed with himself. He might have thought, hey, not bad. I hardly open my mouth and all these people, and their animals, are running around repenting all over the place. Maybe I should have gone into this prophet business a long time ago. I’d probably be famous and have a book deal by now. Or, somewhat more thoughtfully, Jonah could have realized that this wasn’t his doing at all. He could have said something like, hey, good work, God, I’m impressed. Don’t know how you did it, but you turned these people around. Thanks for letting me be a part of it. But as we know, what the story says that he actually said is: See, I knew it. I knew you didn’t mean it. I knew you wouldn’t do it. You want me to come here telling the Ninevites how awful they are and how they’re gonna be destroyed and then you change your mind, being merciful and all. Makes you look pretty good. Makes me look pretty silly. And you wonder why I didn’t want to come!
And then as you know Jonah goes off and sits down outside the city and in my read of the story pouts. Jonah’s not acting in the most mature way possible, but God has compassion for Jonah. It’s hot out there, so God causes a plant to grow up over Jonah to give him some shade. The next day the plant dies which causes Jonah to complain again. Life isn’t fair. To which God responds: So Jonah, you’re concerned for this plant because it’s useful to you. Don’t I have a right to be concerned about the Assyrians, not because they’re useful to you or to anyone, but just because they are my children, 120,000 of them who don’t know their right hand from their left, not to mention quite a few animals? End of story.
The comic touch is there right to the end. I love the last line. Shouldn’t I be concerned about the Ninevites, God says, all 120,000 of them who don’t know their right hand from the left, and their animals too? By the way for those who like to find hidden messages in the Bible, I could point out that 120,000 is about the combined population of Charlottesville and Albemarle, and there are also many animals in the area. God might be trying to tell us something. I could point that out, but I won’t.
As I say, the story is sort of light-hearted right to the end, and I have been treating it that way this morning. But as we have been finding in previous weeks, there are serious issues contained in all this. The message here is really not hidden at all. It’s a message of God’s universal love for people and creation. Unmodified universal love. We all know this message. We’ve heard it before. We haven’t heard it often or clearly enough, however, we humans, I mean. The message is not that God loves everyone but some a little more than others, like George Orwell in Animal Farm: everyone is equal but some are more equal than others. The message is that Jews are not closer to God’s heart than Muslims, and Christians are not closer to God’s heart than anyone else because we believe in Jesus. The message is that a European life is not worth more than an African life and that a North American life is not worth more than an Iraqi life. Pretty basic stuff. We humans haven’t mastered the basics yet.
The message is also about a God who is more interested in seeing her dreams for humanity come true, more interested in seeing the promise of creation fulfilled than in punishing people who have been bad, or who maybe don’t know their right hand from their left. Our need to lay down the burden of the image of an angry, punishing God is also a serious message, and a pretty basic one, and one we’re not done with. It is not gone. We are still burdened with the image of an angry punishing God, some of us maybe burdened with it even in our own hearts.
And then there is the war in Iraq. It’s not that the book of Jonah is about the war in Iraq. Of course it’s not. I’m not going to suggest that the book of Jonah tells us why our military should not be in Iraq, any more than I would put up with someone telling me that Jonah or any other part of the Bible tells us we should be there. It certainly doesn’t give us an exit strategy. But…I can’t read the book of Jonah without having the war come up inside me. And there is nothing comic about it. And so I read the light-hearted story of Jonah and I know there are some serious messages contained in it, and also at the same time in the background are images of war, bombs falling on Beirut or on Baghdad, roadside bombs, soldiers dead, not just US soldiers but US soldiers too, and civilians, roughly 40,000 Iraqi civilians dead, people who Jonah does quite clearly say God loved, and who God is therefore in mourning over. And so I put all that side by side with this little amusing story of Jonah, and I frankly don’t know what to do with it all, except to confess it—to you, and to God.
And here’s something else that was giving me trouble as I was trying to figure out how to approach this sermon. I wasn’t sure what attitude I wanted to take toward Jonah. He doesn’t come out very well in these last chapters. He wants the Assyrians, the Ninevites, to be punished, preferably destroyed. No mercy for them, not even if they repent. He wants God to be a merciful God, but only for himself and people he approves, that is people who by his standards deserve it. He is more interested in being right than in being loving—doesn’t like it at all that God proved him wrong when he said the Ninevites would be destroyed. Religion, for him, seems to have more to do with him—his own happiness, peace of mind, contentment, whatever—than with, for instance, having the Ninevites lives turned around, or making the world as a whole a better place. As I say, Jonah doesn’t come off all that well in these last chapters.
But I wasn’t quite happy with that view of Jonah. To be sure, nowhere in the book of Jonah is Jonah portrayed as a shining example we all should try to emulate in every respect, but for all his faults Jonah has also seemed very human to me throughout. In his attempt to escape from God, in his inability to see the bigger picture, and so forth, I’ve always felt myself somewhat kin to Jonah. It’s harder to do that in these last two chapters where Jonah really is not very attractive, much less so than before. But gradually I have come to a different view of Jonah, this time, one that I’m not sure I have seen before. It’s so easy to use him as a straw man, an example of what we should not do, and a contrast to God’s goodness and mercy.
What I saw more clearly and took more seriously this time as I was reflecting over Jonah is that there are four times in this very short book where Jonah says that he wants to die. In the past I have sort of skimmed over this; there goes Jonah complaining or pouting again. As I read it this time, I took Jonah more at his word. I came to understand Jonah to be, as many comic characters are, also very sad. Literally sad, as in depressed, but sad as in this is a sad story. I have come to believe that Jonah was not just a person who didn’t really think God could or should love the Assyrians. Jonah’s problem was even more that Jonah didn’t really believe that God loved Jonah. Jonah had trouble seeing himself as beloved of God. And that makes him less of a bad guy and more like kin to me after all. That Jonah is not a straw man. That Jonah is people I know and love. That Jonah has been in the past and to some extent always will be part of me.
Sadly, there is only one character in this whole book who does not repent. The sailors repent. The Ninevites repent. Even God repents, changes his mind about destroying the Ninevites. Jonah is the one person who does not repent. Or maybe repent is the wrong word because of certain connotations it may have. I’ll just say that Jonah is the one person who doesn’t come to some different view of things. The story ends with there being no clue, no indication at all, that Jonah knows himself to be beloved of God. And for that reason, though it is written in a light hearted manner, this turns out for me to be a very sad story. It is always sad when people can’t understand that they are beloved of God.
And so my final thought for the book of Jonah is that it’s up to us not to let the book of Jonah be just a sad story. It’s up to us to redeem the story of Jonah by trying to let one another know as best we are able that we are beloved of God and by trying to build a world in which everyone will know that all are beloved of God. We are a long way from that world. The story of Jonah is a sad story that needs to be redeemed by us, and it leaves us with a lot of work to do, a long road to travel, together. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 23, 2006