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 literature 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.” With these
beginnings, 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.
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 in the direction toward 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, was sent to Bethel,
Alaska, to pay off her medical school loans.
She felt a little bit like Dr. Joel Fleischman.
“Northern Exposure” told the story of Dr. Joel Fleischman and
his grouchy and grumbling attempt to make sense of Cicely, Alaska, 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. Fractured fairy tales had a way of telling the stories we grew up with with absurd, modern twists. As Callie Plunket Brown writes of Jonah’s story:
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?
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.
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.”
The Assyrian Chronicles describe horrendous acts of torture
which were employed to create fear and, thus, submission in the enemies of the
empire. 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.”
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.
This is the sign of Jonah.
And it reveals a God who is actively seeking to save all of
creation. And that love is far wider and
broader than even those who claim to be God’s chosen. The work is ours to do. And God is tracking us, to unseat the
conventional wisdom, and reveal to the world a God who is wider and broader and
longer and deeper than we could have ever imagined. Amen.
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