Jonah 3:1-5, 10
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth…
… 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.
Sermon Text
Jonah is a prophet I used to feel like I could relate to. He is reluctant to follow God’s call and his entire adventure, briefly explored across only a few chapters of scripture, is about the consequences of his choice to run. By the end of the story, he has given into God, goes where he was asked to, and as our story tells us, saves the people of Nineveh through his preaching. It is a story that someone like me, someone who ran from ministry as long as I could, can relate to. However, the reasoning between my reluctance to go into ministry and Jonah’s were very different.
When I first thought I might be interested in going into ministry, I was on fire. I was willing to talk to anyone about my faith, I was willing to make brave declarations of what God was doing in the world, and the potential of what I could become was overwhelming. Like many people new to their faith, however, the intensity of that burning passion was too much, and it quickly flickered out. It became clear that I did not have the knowledge, the skills, and especially the tact, to be a minister and that early floundering pushed me into a place where I believed that the feeling I had been called was a mistake. I developed, and immediately gave into, a major case of imposter syndrome… The result was a major setback in my pursuit of my call.
This is a different kind of issue than what Jonah faces. Jonah, as a prophet, was already living into the life that God had given him. While many of us fail to pursue our call because of our perceived failings or lack of experience, Jonah refused to listen to God for another reason. The word of the Lord came to Jonah, and he knew that he could do all that was asked of him. His refusal to follow through was motivated, not by a feeling he could not do God’s work but by a refusal to do it. Jonah knew who God was and did not want to see God do what God wanted to. Jonah knew that God was good, and Jonah knew deep in his heart that he was not.
Jonah did not flee from God’s call out of fear or out of inadequacy, but out of pride and bigotry. When God said that there was enough compassion for a city like Nineveh, Jonah refused to accept that. Nineveh was one of the capitals of the Assyrian empire. Within a few generations of Jonah’s visit to the city, Assyria would form a new empire which would sweep across the Levant. Israel would be destroyed by the armies of Nineveh and Assur, and Judah would become a vassal of the same. Few nations had more of an impact on the history of God’s people than Assyria.
God knew this was in the future and still offered a chance for the people of Nineveh to be spared. In the divine mystery of mercy, even people who would cause harm to God’s people were worth preserving. Maybe the future where Israel fell to Assyria was not written in stone, the people of Israel and Assyria both had time to change. God, throughout the Hebrew Bible, despite being written off by modern readers as “wrathful,” is always extending mercy beyond the people of Israel, to people who have committed legitimate crimes of imperial might, and who would be easy to write off without a second thought.
There are legitimately harmful people in this world, legitimately evil people as well. Though the latter are rare, the existence of genuinely hurtful and genuinely reprehensible people cannot be denied. We are a culture that thrives off of stories of villains, and the surge in popularity of True Crime over the past few decades only serves to prove that something in us craves identifying monsters. I think something about obvious evil comforts us, it reminds us of the relative goodness of the people we know. It also allows us to focus our broad feelings of distrust into focus, a single person can take the load of all our anxieties and angers. Sometimes it is not just one person though – sometimes entire people groups can be scapegoats for our anger. What kind of people? That depends on the circumstance.
Following the 9/11 attacks, our nation found a major source of people to offload our anxieties upon. For most of my childhood, anyone who even looked middle eastern was treated with suspicion. People advocated for bombings of entire countries, to let the leveling of cities go uncommented upon – there was a war on after all. Whatever legitimate military engagements did occur, a national bloodlust was created – one that sought to destroy the “enemies,” of our nation. There have been shifts in this mindset over the past few decades, but to this day Muslims, Sikhs, and anyone who looks like they might have ancestry East of the Mediterranean still face discrimination. Gaza continues to burn, and people continue to excuse the deaths of innocents as a necessary causality.
In other eras, other peoples suffered. In the early days of the United States, Native Americans were maligned for the threat they posed to our Manifest Destiny. Chinese Immigrants were seen as an existential threat during the 1800s, followed by Germans during the World Wars, as well as countless Japanese-Americans forced into camps during WWII. Focal points of hate, sometimes foreign and sometimes domestic, give us someone we can blame for the troubles of this world. We rejoice in the pain of others, as long as their pain can give us an out for our general anxieties.
It does not have to be a nation either. The person you get frustrated with for seeming to fulfill what you hate about the world is also a focus of your general problems onto one person. The person you see paying with food stamps for a cart full of groceries you don’t approve of. The person with “too many,” kids trailing behind them. The person twitching in the parking lot. When we look at someone with contempt, write them off as too far gone, turn them over to suffer because we think they’ve earned it… When we do that, we have done an abominable thing. God is willing to embrace the entire world, why are we unwilling to do the same?
The sin of Jonah, that had him thrown into the sea and eaten by a whale, was that he had no regard for life. When he finally relented to God, when he went through the city of Nineveh and wound his way through the streets – he did so under duress. He refused to believe that the people he hated so much could ever do something his God would approve of. He sat up on a hill outside the city and waited to see the city burn under God’s wrath. Days passed by… And the city still stood.
Jonah realized that he was wrong, that God loved even the people he hated. These foreigners, these pagans, they were people God was willing to preserve – despite their sins. The genuine wrongdoings of the people may have been egregious, but clearly they were not so far gone that there was no hope. One of the problems of dehumanizing people is that we erase any real characteristics from them. They are cartoonishly evil or else so idealized as to be impossible. Human beings are human beings, there are no borders or genetics behind it, no separation of class or circumstance. All people are beloved of God, and all are capable of finding their place in God’s kingdom.
At the close of Jonah, silence is held for us to make our own conclusions about who we support – God or Jonah.[1] Jonah complains that Nineveh lived and that God dared to kill a plant that gave him shade. God complains that Jonah would have compassion for a plant that sheltered him, but not for the people and animals of Nineveh. Were some evil? Oh yes. Were some innocent? They must have been. Were some middle of the road? Absolutely. Yet, Jonah was willing to see them all burn – so long as his hatred was satisfied by God’s approval of his bigotry. We, God’s people, today must make the same choice. Do we believe that God is still extending forgiveness, freely offering it to all people? Or do we think it is only for us, here, and people like us? Grace extends beyond this door, into every aspect of our life. Let grace reign. – amen.
[1] Tzvi Abusch. “Jonah and God: Plants, Beasts, and Humans in the Book ofJonah” in Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 13 (2013) 146-152
Teach us to Number our Days 