The small god of Jonah

April 11, 1999

Douglas S. Long

North Raleigh United Church

Jonah 1:1- 2: 10-4:3

(Introduction to the reading of the text.)

The Bible… in a strict sense, is not 'A' book. It's several books.. 66 actually, written by various authors over the course of several centuries. In most cases, these individual books, or at least parts of them, began as oral tradition. Stories were passed down from generation to generation… elders taught future elders… parents taught children. I suspect many of the stories were heard by fireside.

Sometimes centuries passed, in this oral maintenance of the story, before, finally, a scribe or prophet or priest was inspired to place the word on parchment or papyri, locking it down, if you will, for future generations to come.

So, for our reading this morning, … I invite you to sit at the feet of an wise and learned elder and hear a most curious story… one that we call 'Jonah.'

[The reading from the Book of Jonah, by Judi Fenoglio.]

Will Willimon, minister at Duke Chapel, tells how he received a phone call (... actually I think he borrowed this story from Andrew Young, but that’s O.K. I’ve heard that there are three types of lies: harmless lies, malicious lies, and sermon illustrations.) ... Anyway, Willimon tells how he received a phone call from a very upset parent, upset because his graduate school bound daughter had just told him she was going to ‘throw it all away’, as he put it, and go and do mission work in Haiti.

‘Isn’t that absurd!’ shouted the father. ‘A degree in mechanical engineering from Duke and she’s going to dig ditches in Haiti. I hold you personally responsible for this.’

‘Me?’ the chapel minister asked. ‘What have I done?’

‘Well, you filled her head with all that religious stuff. She thinks a lot of you. That’s why she’s doing this foolishness,’ the father responded.

‘Now look, mister,' the minister said, ‘didn’t you read her Bible stories and take her to Sunday School and didn’t you let her go on all those youth retreats and ski trips?’

‘Well, yes...’

‘Then it’s your fault she believed all that stuff,’ the chaplain said. ‘You’re the one that really introduced her to Jesus, not me.’

‘But we never expected it to come to this,’ the parent bemoaned. ‘We never dreamed she would go to Haiti. We just wanted her to grow up to be a good Presbyterian.’

...God’s call.

There is a book in the O.T. that wrestles with the idea of God’s call as clearly as anything we could hope for.... and it is so clear that we ignore the book almost completely.

It is the book of Jonah.

‘What?’ you exclaim... ‘We ignore Jonah?... Why Doug, everybody knows the story of Jonah and the big fish... Tarshish and Ninevah. We tell it to our youngest children in Church School as a staple.’

...And that is both true and false. We tell a version of the story to our children but seldom wrestle with the story as adults. Let me take a step out on the proverbial limb with this statement: Outside of the person of Jesus, there is not a more important character in the Bible for the Church to unveil and proclaim today than Jonah.

Now, I asked Judi to read a bit from each chapter to try to capture the flow of the book. I could have asked her to read the book to you in its entirety but I wasn’t sure you had the patience or we had the time... In truth she read approximately 2/3^rd's of the book. The entire thing is comprised of no more than 48 verses. That’s it... and in those 48 verses is a engaging story to specifically answer the most frequently asked question in the Bible. You know what that question is? ...‘Who is God?’

It’s not a new question. People ask all the time about God. ...and they’ve been doing so for millennia. I’ll give you three examples that I’ve heard this month:

1) I was recently approached by a young person. "What does God think about other people who don’t believe in God the way we do?"

Not an unusual question at all. We hear it in one form or another all the time.

How does God treat people outside our belief system? That’s a ‘who is God’ question.

2) Not too long afterwards an adult raised another often asked version... "How do you reconcile many of the stories of God in the OT as a vengeful, often angry God with the concept of God we hear Jesus talking about.... a God of mercy and love?"

Is God wrathful or loving?... another ‘who is God’ question.

3) A similar, and very straight-forward 'who is God' question was raised recently by someone who e-mailed me in response to the brochure we sent out for North Raleigh United. (Believe it or not, I received several interesting e-mail messages.)

"What do you believe," they asked, "to be the central nature of God? Some say God is just, some say God is love, others say God is so beyond us that we can only call God a great mystery. God is …God. What do you think?" (I told them I liked the 'God is God' answer.)

"What is the central nature of God?" Yet another ‘who is God’ question.

How does God treat people outside our belief system?

Is God wrathful or loving?

What is the central nature of God?

…all 'who is God?' questions… and, believe it or not, the debate is all right in front of us in the Bible. That's what the Bible is… a dialogue about who God is.

And one of the clearest sources of the dialogue is the little book in the O.T. we call Jonah.

Jonah? Jonah.... sandwiched obscurely between Obadiah and Micah, a single page, front and back, in my RSV. Too bad we don’t read the story of Jonah as adults. Here’s what most of us remember about Jonah.

(This is what Mrs. Perry taught me in Sunday school. I suspect it will be familiar to many of you.)

Jonah was a prophet and a coward. He was a prophet because he had been given the words of God but he was a coward because he was afraid to obey God. His fear hinged on reasoning that if he went to the evil city of Ninevah (the biggest city in the world) he'd be ridiculed or, worse, killed. So he ran from God... actually tried to escape by boat. In the process a great storm comes up and Jonah's ship mates decide to offer him as an appeasement to God. He gets thrown overboard, swallowed by a whale... and for three days does some serious reconsideration. While in the belly of the whale, Jonah decides he'd better follow God after all and promptly gets spit up on the beach ... whereupon he then obediently goes to Ninevah and the city is saved.

The moral of this version of the story told by Mrs. Perry is... 'When God gives you something to say... you better say it, if you know what's good for you. '

That's how I learned the story. And that's O.K., sort of, I guess, for a children's version. There are elements of the real story in there. Do any of you find that version familiar? … but what I've since learned is that that version entirely misses the point of the book of Jonah.

Aside from the fact that I was quite shocked to find later in life that the text makes no mention of an actual whale (I know it may be picky, but gosh, a 'big fish' just doesn't sound as exciting...

…And oh, by the way, if the idea of being swallowed by a whale makes you wonder if this is a literal story or not, I should point out that one commentator remarks, a bit tongue in cheek , that the feat of being swallowed is not so incredulous when you remember that Jonah was, after all... a minor prophet. It's clear to many who have actually read this story that it is a wonderful parable.)... what really cuts to the heart in reading this as an adult though, is that the fish has almost nothing to do with the central theme of the story. Hey, go home 9after the picnic) and read it for yourselves!

First of all, Jonah is never described as a coward... ...far from it. He's ready to defy God. Jonah jumps on a ship that is being rocked by waves... goes down in the hold and takes a nap. Up on deck there is chaos. Jonah's asleep. When, in fact, the sailors on the storm-tossed ship are completely panicked, Jonah, realizing he is the source of the turbulence, offers himself to be thrown over to the restless waves. Quite valiant is it not? Take me so others may be saved.

No, Jonah is anything but a coward.... what Jonah is though is angry. Very angry.... enraged at the prospect of going to preach the judgment of God to Ninevah.

But why? A prophet does not mind saying the hard words. That's part of the prophet job... and Jonah was an exceptional prophet. Consider his name. Jonah means 'dove'... and the dove was a common Biblical image for Israel... hmmm.... Why, if Jonah will not speak God's message, you might as well be saying Israel refuses to speak God's message. Hmmm…

Now why would that be suggested?

Ninevah, the place, the evil city Jonah refused to travel to, prior to his close encounter with the intestines of a whale…. Ninevah, you understand, was the capital of Assyria, ...and you may remember, Jonah, and many of his people (the Israelites) hated the Assyrians. (Don't misunderstand me... they didn't ‘dislike’ the Assyrians, they didn't ignore the Assyrians, they hated them... real hate... obsessive hate.) The Hebrew people had been sacked by the Assyrians repeatedly. (We're talking deep hate here… a Serbian-Albanian kind of hate. Really.)

In fact, come to find out, the story of Jonah most probably originated during the Babylonian exile, when the people of Israel had been ‘swallowed up’ by an invading army and kept against their will in the belly of Babylon. (.... Hmmmmm.)

This being the case, you’d think a prophet would jump at the chance to preach the coming destruction to the Assyrian people.

Didn’t I say God told Jonah to go to Ninevah and cry against it... to let them know they were going to be destroyed?

Well then the obvious question is, "Why would someone filled with hatred for a people, someone who is obviously not a coward, ...why wouldn't Jonah confidently march into the evil city and proclaim the impending destruction of God? Why wouldn't that be exactly what Jonah would run to do, not run away from?"

Some of you have read the book and know the answer. In fact, if you listened carefully enough to the reading a few minutes earlier you heard it.

Jonah is afraid that if he pronounces the impending judgment of God that the Ninevites might repent. Ninevites might repent. That is what the whole book hinges on.

You see, if the Ninevites repent...

then God might have mercy upon them...

and they might be saved from the holocaust....

and not be destroyed at all....

which is the last thing Jonah wants.

What Jonah wants is vengeance, the destruction of his enemies. After all, his enemies must be God’s enemies.

...and what Jonah fears is mercy for the Ninevites.

Therefore, Jonah represents, in essence, the accepted God of retribution and vengeance attempting to ignore the radical God of love and mercy .

You see there was a raging debate going on among the scholars and priests of Israel about who God really was/is. One popular conception?… "God is our God, and ours alone!" Another… "God will help us destroy all other peoples."

The book of Jonah is not about the God of the Hebrews vs. the god of the neighboring peoples. It is about the accepted God of the Hebrews vs. another understanding of that same God. The book of Jonah is about internal God wars.

That's the central theme of the story and this is the Book of Jonah's bottom line:

...no Ninevah, no nation, no place, no person... is beyond the mercy and grace of God.

You see, once Jonah was resigned to the fact that he couldn't escape the mission God had called him to, he went to Ninevah and preached eight words... only eight (in English, RSV.)

Here they are:

'Yet 40 days, and Ninevah shall be overthrown.'

That was it... and the inhabitants of the whole town repented... from the King and his courts to the children in the marketplace... they put on ashes and sackclothes (even on the animals) and threw themselves on the mercy of God.... and God was merciful.

Ernest Angely would have claimed it his greatest revival ever... eight words and a kingdom repents. Thousands walking the aisles of confession.

...But Jonah, in nothing less than a hilarious caricature of the mighty prophets of God... Jonah was enraged! He was so angry at God for being merciful that he stomped outside the city gates and sulked and pouted like a child.

Think about it for a moment. Jonah is sulking because God doesn't blow away the whole city! He shouts at God... 'I told you this was what was going to happen! I knew you'd give them another chance! That's why I didn’t want to come here in the first place!’

When the book of Jonah first came out they weren't sure whether to put in the fiction or non-fiction, comedy or tragedy sections of the libraries. My guess is the folks who heard it howled with laughter and then said 'Ooh, he's talking about us! We're the ones who hate the Ninevites. Does this mercy stuff go that far?' Let me clue you to what you already know... He’s talking about us too.

Jonah, the prophet, demands justice/vengeance for the evil city... and God doles out mercy. How dare God!

In nothing short of pure comedy, Jonah runs from God because, in the words of Robert Frost, …Jonah runs from God because he 'can't trust God to be unmerciful.'

This little book of Jonah steals some of the thunder from the Gospels. It's message?

In the end, God is more merciful than just. ‘Mercy is mine!’ saith the Lord.

Jonah didn't run from God because he didn't believe God... Jonah ran from God because he couldn't acknowledge the real God, the God of love and mercy, and continue hating.

So here is the real story of Jonah:

A righteous man of God rejects the call of God to preach in Ninevah, the world's biggest, most powerful city, the city of his adversary, because he thinks swift justice is more appropriate than the possibility of mercy. To escape God he takes the first ticket to Tarshish ... the outermost edge of the world. But that's not far enough to escape. God doesn't let him off. …So after being thrown into the sea and tasting first hand God's mercy, he continues, still silently kicking and screaming and protesting, Jonah goes to Ninevah... where the word is delivered, repentance takes place, and mercy prevails.

And Jonah?... at the end of the story he's still sitting outside the gates of the forgiven city... sitting outside the gates, pouting that the Ninevites didn’t burn,... Jonah sits there being chided by God... 'who is slow to anger and abundant in loving kindness and truth.'

You can almost hear the loving words of God outside the gates:

'Jonah, my child, let your anger go.'

And you... and I...??

We ‘Jonah's’ need to hear those same words when we fall into the absurdity of limiting God's mercy, when we find ourselves too willing to be the prophets of doom but not the agents of redemption.

And that’s the story of Jonah.

It is not unlike many other stories contained in this wonderful book, …full of rich treasures to be mined by those willing to ponder the stories anew.

Amen.

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