This morning you’ll notice we mixed up the order of the readings a little bit. That’s because I really want to pay attention to is the Jonah reading. The lectionary only gives us the end of it but to really get the whole scope of it, I’m going to go ahead and sort of paraphrase the whole story for you.
Our story begins: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” So Jonah went…to Joppa to find a ship going to Tarshish. Now, to put this in perspective, this is would be like God saying, I want you to go to Chicago, and responding, OK, sounds good, only about four hours to the Mackinaw bridge from here, and from there it’s just a short hop across the UP into Canada and on to Nova Scotia. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, in what is modern-day Syria, east of Israel. Tarshish, however, was a seaport on the western coast of Spain, so basically as far west as one could go without falling off the edge of the known world. Now in fairness to Jonah, the Assyrians were not known for their niceness. They had a well-earned reputation for violence and conquest, and they were really the worst enemies of the Israelites. So Jonah had good reason to fear going there. But the edge of the known world seems maybe a little bit extreme.
When Jonah got to Joppa, he bought a ticket, boarded a boat, and promptly fell asleep. Running away from the presence of God is pretty exhausting work. But the ship was not too far out into the Mediterranean when a massive storm blew in, threatening to destroy the boat. The captain woke up Jonah and pleaded with him to call on God to spare them, but still the storm raged. So finally, Jonah is like, you know what, you’re going to have to just throw me into the sea, I guess. And the sailors are like, we don’t want to do that, if you’re a prophet, your God’s going to be pretty mad at us for drowning you. But Jonah’s like, nope, the only way God will spare you, is if you throw me into the sea. So, what could they do, they threw him into the sea.
But before he drown, a giant fish came and swallowed him whole. Now Jonah’s certainly having a pretty bad day here, but you know who’s having a worse day is the fish. I mean, Jonah chose to run away from God, and Jonah told the sailors to throw him overboard. But the poor fish, he’s just swimming by, minding his own business, doing whatever fish do, and suddenly he’s called upon to swallow this, rather disagreeable, human, and keep him in his stomach. Can’t digest the guy, can’t even chew him up a little bit, just this huge lump of grumpy human sitting in his belly whining about how God, who, mind you, just saved him from drowning, is picking on him. Talk about some serious indigestion!
So finally, after three days of this, God spoke to the fish, and the fish, and this is directly from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, “spewed Jonah out upon the dry land.” Spewed isn’t even really the best translation of the Hebrew here, really the fish vomited Jonah onto the shore. Seriously, if anyone tells you the Bible is boring, have them read Jonah. Especially if that person happens to be a preteen boy.
So now Jonah’s out of the water and back on the land. And for a second time, the word of the Lord came to Jonah, saying “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” And this time, Jonah goes to Nineveh, an “exceedingly large city,” literally in the Hebrew, “a great city to God.” It’s such a huge place that it took three days to walk across it, the same amount of time, remember, that Jonah was in the belly of the fish. But Jonah didn’t make it the full trip across Nineveh, he got about a day’s walk in. He was supposed to be proclaiming a message of judgment, shouting “Forty days more, and Nineveh will be over thrown.” But I wonder how enthusiastically he shouted this message. Was he really shouting? Or was he walking along, sort of unobtrusively, “nothing to see here, nothing to see, forty days, God’s going to overthrow the city, but just, you know, go about your business, don’t let me bother you…”
But even just a day’s walk into the city, the response of the Ninevites was sudden and intense. As soon as they heard the message, they instantly believed God, proclaimed a fast, and begged God for mercy. This brings us to our reading for this morning. Jonah chapter three, verse ten through chapter 4, verse eleven.
“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.
But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 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 God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. —I love this here, I knew that you were a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and somehow Jonah makes that sound like a bad thing. —And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” — Really Jonah, better for you to die then to live, because you succeeded in your mission and an entire city of people was not completely destroyed? — And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
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. — Basically, Jonah goes out of the city to pout for a while, and while he’s out there pouting—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. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. 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.” But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” 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. 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?” A Word for God’s people. Thanks be to God.
So here’s what I love about the Jonah story. First off, was there ever such an annoying, thick-headed, little twerp as Jonah? I mean, seriously, ran away to Joppa, whined for three days in the belly of a fish, really apathetically proclaimed God’s message, and then got angry when God saved an entire city full of people. And then got even more angry when the bush he was sitting under died and he had to sit in the sun for the afternoon. Except he didn’t have to sit in the sun. He could have gone into the city, gone home to Israel, really done anything other than sit pouting under a tree, hoping that God might still reign down fire, even though God is, annoyingly apparently, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
But here’s the thing, as annoying and wrong-headed as Jonah was, as many times as Jonah got it wrong, went in the wrong direction, got worked up about something silly, God was determined that Jonah would finish, and not just finish but succeed beyond his wildest dreams, at the task which God had called him to.
And that is great news for us for a lot of reasons. I think, or I hope at least, that Jonah looked back on this event and thought, wow, was I ever a bad prophet. And that’s certainly a feeling I can relate to. Jonah’s a pretty extreme example, but even when I’m actually trying to spread this message of God’s forgiveness, it’s hard to be a prophet and even my best attempts fall flat. But if Jonah, whiney, apathetic Jonah, managed to save an entire city, maybe God can, and in fact is, using my weak attempts at spreading the Gospel.
But I think the best news in this story is maybe also the most challenging. And it’s this, that only God gets to decide who is and who is not forgiven. And God is, whether we like it or not, “a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Jonah was all prepared to send the Ninevites off to damnation, he saw nothing worth saving in these people who he saw as sinners. But God wanted to rescue the Ninevites, and nothing Jonah could do or say was going to change God’s mind. The Ninevites, more than one hundred and twenty people and also many animals, mattered to God.
It’s great news for the days when we feel like the Ninevites. When it maybe feels like we’re too far gone, too broken, too outside the realm of God to be forgiven. Or if someone has told us, you don’t matter, you’re too far gone to be saved. The Jonah story tells us that it doesn’t matter what the people of God may have decided about you, God loves you. That God is always, always, always, a merciful God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. That God is always concerned about God’s people, no matter how far they have strayed.
This is good news, but there is also a challenge for us here. Because Jonah’s judgmentalness, while I’ve sort of made fun of it here, is a real temptation. So here’s the challenge. Sometimes God forgives people that we don’t necessarily think deserve God’s forgiveness. If God is truly, “a gracious God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” sometimes God is going to forgive people that we don’t want God to. This story tells us that God’s forgiveness is open to everyone, regardless of who they are or whether we like them or how they got invited to the party. Even the Ninevites, even Jonah, even us. Amen.
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