Jonah 1:1-3; 3:1-5, 10; 4:1
January 24, 2021
The
Bible has echoes of other stories that always tell us how we should read the
next story. For example, God calls to
the prophet, and the prophet responds by saying, “Here I am,” as a way of
saying I am fully present, I will show up, and it is time to get to work. This statement always comes with the
prophet’s disqualifying characteristic--the prophet is not a good speaker, is
too young, or too young and too female.
God is unconcerned by these disqualifications. God is a non-anxious presence in the heart of
what will be inevitable conflict for the prophet and their mission. This
happens with Moses in the Exodus story.
This happens with Mary of Nazareth in the Gospel of Luke story.
As
the celebrated teacher, Joseph Campbell might tell us, myth constructs
worldview. And within myth are verbal,
visual, or auditory clues that open us up to a wider story of values, implicit
understandings, and behaviors. The cues
also develop expectations. Like a joke
might begin with, “A priest, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar,” or “Knock,
knock” we have a hint how things are going to go when we hear or read certain
words. We hear or read the words, “Here
I am” and we know that we are in the midst of a story about the call of a
prophet.
Parable,
on the other hand, subverts worldview.
It takes the common story and upends expectations. Jesus of Nazareth would teach with parables
to upend worldview with the hope that space might open up in the heart of the
listener and transform what the listener thought they already knew.
For
example, a son leaves a father with his inheritance and squanders it in loose
living. He returns home hoping to just
receive what is given to the hired hands.
Dad is not going to be happy. The
expectation is, the son will return with bowed head and broken spirit, and
receive the chastisement of his father, and maybe, just maybe the son will be
taken back into the familial fold.
Instead, the parable helps us to imagine the broad and wide heart of
God. The father runs from the house to
embrace him. He puts a ring on his son’s
finger and throws a party for him.
Wait. What? Dad? A
party? That’s what the oldest son said.
Within
parables are these absurdities, comedies that help us see the world wholly
different. Today we have before us the
call of the prophet parable. God calls
the prophet Jonah, and Jonah does not show up.
Instead, Jonah hops on a boat that takes him away from the furthest
known point away from the holy land. Certainly,
Jonah must reason, God’s presence and activity will not be known in Tarshish.
In
Jewish mythology, the sea and the sea monster are part of the chaos that fall
outside the purview of God’s love, grace, and salvation. But here they are, the sea and the sea
monster, smack dab in the middle of this parable, as agents of God’s mercy and
salvation.
The
prophet, the one who is supposed to be the faithful messenger of God’s broad
and wide love and compassion, is the one who chooses not to show up, not to be
present, and not to do the work given. God’s
will is not done through the prophet.
God’s will is done through the agents of chaos, the sea and the sea
monster.
I
think Biblical stories seep into our culture in ways that we do not often see in
the modern world because we rarely engage the Bible like we once did. For good or ill, though, I see them
undergirding the stories we still tell in modern culture.
You may remember the TV show from the early
90s, “Northern Exposure.” The show was
about a Jewish doctor from New York who was sent, unwillingly, to the wilds of
Cicely, Alaska, to pay off his accumulated student loans. Ironically, my sister, Dr. Elizabeth
Mulberry, by traveling off to rural Alaska to pay off her student loans.
“Northern
Exposure” told the story of Dr. Joel Fleischman and his grouchy and grumbling
attempt to make sense of a place where he was exposed to an uncounted number of
quirky personalities and cultural clashes.
The show won almost every award possible for the way it loved all of its
characters, their diverse personalities and habits, and the resulting humor
from their interaction. Salvation could
be found in Cicely, Alaska—just not through Dr. Fleishcman, who came to Alaska
thinking he had a corner on salvation and healing. In the
show, he was often the one being taught and saved. In his critique of the personalities and
settings found in Alaska, the learned Dr. Fleischman was also often the subject
of satire.
That
is where comedy is often found. Not
because someone can tell a good joke, but because they take themselves so
seriously that they cannot see the panoply of color and beauty and goodness
found within their reach. In his
inability to know that beauty and goodness, Dr. Fleischman always seemed to be
the most miserable, god-forsaken person on the show.
Much
to my Biblically geeky delight, in one of the episodes the writers placed the
Jewish Dr. Fleischman in the belly of a great whale, contemplating the meaning
of his life. Here he was, a doctor ready
to offer the small town of Cicely salvation with his gifts, and almost nobody
seemed beholden to the salvation he was offering.
Jesus
says in the gospels that the only sign this evil and adulterous nation shall
receive is the sign of Jonah. So we best
be figuring out what that sign is to know the meaning of Jesus.
I
love the story of Jonah because it reminds me of the fractured fairy tales I
would watch on Saturday morning TV when I was growing up. As Callie Plunket Brown writes:
There is much that is absurd in the book of Jonah: a man gets swallowed by a fish; animals don
sackcloth, and a prophet gets so angry over the death of a bush that he wishes
he were dead. But the questions the
story provokes are quite serious. Is God
clueless or just terribly irresponsible?
How can justice be served in the face of such mercy? How on earth can human beings hope to make
sense of such a deity.[1]
It
is easy to make fun of Jonah in a context so far removed from the big fish
story. For the Jewish people, however,
there would have been a strong identification with his plight—the fear and
anger that had built over the years of the Exile and toward Nineveh, the
capital city of the Assyrian Empire. In
historical context, the humor of Jonah had an edge.
Scholars
date the book of Jonah to the 6th or 5th Century BCE when
the people of Israel were still smarting from the real pain of the Exile and
its aftermath. In relating a metaphor for
the Jewish experience of Exile, the prophet Ezekiel has us envision a killing
field full of the dry bones of the Jewish people, a people laid waste, an image
of genocide. In Exile many of the Jewish
touchstones for faith were violently stripped from them. The Temple—the habitation for God and place
for pilgrimage—razed to the ground.
Their leaders—the representative for God on earth—had been murdered or
carted off in chains to serve a foreign ruler.
The land—the place of covenantal promise and ancestral heritage—was no
longer their own and had become wasteland or desert. One of the responses to the Exile was to
circle the Jewish wagon of identity and close ranks around Jewish tradition so
that outside threats could not, would not eradicate all of what it meant to be
Jewish from the earth. In some quarters,
this gave rise to a nationalism that condemned close contact with people who
were not Jews, punched up part of the Jewish moral code that prohibited
intermarriage, and offered strong critique of anyone or anything that saw God
outside of Judaism. The book of Jonah
then is a parable, a satirical story, which unseats insular nationalism, an
ethnocentrism that believes our people have the market on truth and God’s
blessing and mercy.
While
the call of the prophet story is certainly true, we also know this story of
Jonah to be true. Jonah may run from God
to avoid his call, but there are times in our lives when God tracks us down, is
on the hunt for us.
Representative
John Lewis was one of our terrible losses in 2020. You may remember him as one of the people who
made pilgrimage without Dr. King on the first march to Selma and was the first
person beaten unconscious on the bridge leading into town. Lewis related that Dr. King would talk about
the feeling that God was tracking us down to do the necessary work. Lewis said,
You have been caught up. You have been led.
You have been not necessarily forced, but something caught up with you and
said, "John Lewis, you too can do something, you too can make a
contribution, you too can get in the way, but if you're going to do it, do it
full and with love, peace, nonviolence, and that element of faith.[2]
There
are times when we are the prophet that says, reluctantly, “Here I am,” but
there are other times when we try to run, seek to get away from the necessary
work that has to be done, and God tracks us, catches up with us, to let us know
it is ours to do in full love.
Not
only does the Jonah story diverge from the faithful story of the prophet but
also from what happens when the prophet speaks truth to power. Jesus gives voice to it when he says to his
own holy city, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who murder the prophets . . .” This is the usual plight of the prophet—they
are scoffed at, ridiculed, thrown in prison, or murdered. In the book of Jonah, miraculously, the
prophet succeeds and the people of Nineveh repent.
Again,
we might think Jonah without compassion to not want to go and preach a word of
repentance to the capital of the Assyrian Empire, Nineveh. Think about what the Exile must have done to
the Jewish psyche, how the violence caused them to with withdraw as a
people. And Assyria was a byword for
brutality in the ancient world. Hebrew
Scripture scholar, Beth Tanner, states that Assyria was, “[T]he nation that
destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and held the southern kingdom of Judah
as a vassal for almost one hundred years.
Assyria was more than an enemy; it was a brutal occupying force that
forever changed Israel’s fortunes.”[3]
The
Assyrian Chronicles describe horrendous acts of torture which were employed to
create fear and, thus, submission in the enemies of the empire.[4] The text says that its pagan sinfulness was
legendary, as was its cruelty. “It was
the people which scorched its enemies alive to decorate its walls and pyramids
with their skin.”[5]
Here
is the thing though. It is a part of
every people that they seem to be able to recount the horrors and cruelty of
their enemy but are seemingly unable to see even worse horror and cruelty among
the citizens of their own nation, among their friends, and among their
family. It is one kind of love to wish
love and mercy for your own people and kin.
It is a strange and unusual kind of love that says love and mercy should
be extended to your enemies.
Dr. King said, "At times, life is
hard, as hard as crucible steel. … In spite of the darkness of this hour, we
must not lose faith in our white [sisters and] brothers."[6] National historian, satirist, and NPR
contributor Sarah Vowell, once wrote in the New York Times about this kind of
love and Dr. King.
On Nov. 17, 1957, in Montgomery’s Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church, King concluded the learned discourse that came to be known
as the “loving your enemies” sermon this way: “So this morning, as I look into
your eyes and into the eyes of all of my brothers [and sisters] in Alabama and
all over America and over the world, I say to you: ‘I love you. I would rather
die than hate you.’ ”
Go ahead and re-read that, [Vowell
writes.] That is hands down the most
beautiful, strange, impossible, but most of all radical thing a human being can
say. And it comes from reading the most beautiful, strange, impossible, but
most of all radical civics lesson ever taught, when Jesus of Nazareth went to a
hill in Galilee and told his disciples, “Love your enemies, bless them that
curse you, do good to them that hate you.”[7]
That is
the character of the God who calls Jonah.
That even when we might be the enemies of God or the enemies of God’s
people, God still has faith in us.
Jonah
does not want to go, and the first half of the book is a humorous account of
his attempt to run away from his task.
After arranging for Jonah to set up his cot in the belly of the sea
monster, God gives Jonah a second chance as a way of relating God’s character
of love and mercy. Does Jonah understand
this? Does he get that as love and mercy are extended to him why would God not
extend love and mercy to the people of Nineveh?
Appearances can be deceiving.
Initially,
Jonah gives his message to the people of Nineveh, and, again, unlike most
prophets, he is heard and the people repent.
Lord livin’, the people of Nineveh repent so that God decides not to destroy
them. Happy ending, right?
Not
so. Jonah rails against God for
forgiving the Ninevites. Jonah sees
God’s gracious and merciful nature, the extended width and breadth of God’s
love, as a character flaw. Probably
echoing the sentiment of the vast majority of Jewish people in his time, Jonah
does not want God’s grace and love to extend beyond Israel’s borders. Jonah turns to God after the people of
Nineveh repent and says, “I knew this is who you were. I knew you were too full of compassion. I would rather die than have
compassion.”
God,
in turn, challenges Jonah’s limited understanding. The book ends with God’s question, “Is it not
in my nature to be kind to all creatures?
Is it not in my nature? My
character?”
The
book of Jonah unseats the conventional wisdom, the myth of its time, with a
parable that challenges a nationalism seeking to limit God’s love to one’s
countryfolk and kin. It is still a
challenge to those who would define God’s grace by their own parochial
boundaries.
An
interesting footnote? The ancient city
of Nineveh is just across from the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. My hope is that that footnote gives us all a
little pause, makes us ask whether the kindness and mercy and love of God stops
only at our borders or extends beyond to include even our worst enemy, no
matter how brutal they are or how brutal we make them out to be. In a blessed and fortunate way, Dr. King had
faith in white people as many of them ignored, or hurled epithets, or
brutalized the African American community.
Do
we have a faith that shares in the broad and wide expanse of God’s love and
mercy? Do we have faith in the Muslim
community? In the evangelical Christian
community? God is tracking us. And the sign of Jonah is that God’s love is
far broader and wider than even the prophet can imagine. When Jesus says the only sign I will give
this evil and sinful generation is the sign of Jonah, do you think that’s the
kind of Christianity we see on display?
Maybe
the Bible is this antiquated book that really holds nothing for us. But maybe, just maybe in a story like this,
we can see the struggle of communities to figure out a God who was tracking
them. In each age, would we rather die
than hate or die than have compassion?
The choice is sometimes that stark and sometimes being asked of us by a
God who is still on the move.
Forever
there are those who are trying to limit the love of God and suggest that
anything that contradicts our love for our country and our country alone,
should be seen as taking side and limiting our patriotic fervor. Or that we are the only people of faith who
have the right and good answers and so certainly God is on our side. Whether a fractured fairy tale or “Northern
Exposure”, maybe the story of Jonah recognizes that there are those in each age
who will try to chain God to their particular people. And the wild and free God, the God full of
compassion, in each age, will be tracking us, catching up with us, leading us
to something bigger and wider. Thanks be
to God. Amen.
[3] Beth Tanner, Assistant Professor of Old Testament, New Brunswick Theological Seminary, “Third Sunday after Epiphany: First Reading: Lectionary for January 25, 2009,” WorkingPreacher.org http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.saspx?lect_date=1/25/2009&tab=1.
[4] Plunket-Brewton, “Third Sunday.”
[5] Russell Rathbun, “Prophet and Loss: The Ninevites Repent, but Jonah does not, what is the point of this story?” the hardest question http://thehardestquestion.org/uncategorized/epiphany3ot.
[6] “Transcript for John Lewis.”
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