Today’s first reading comes from the end of the Book of Jonah. Many of you already know that Jonal is one of my absolute favorite stories in all of Scripture. Although, I confess to you that has not always been the case. I didn’t care about this story when I was a kid. Jonah is a story like that of Noah, because there are animals in it and there are lots of kids books about that, even if they are not kid’s stories. But as a little kid, Jonah did not resonate with me, and when I got older I thought of it as a kid’s story and I didn’t care for it. But when I was in Seminary, I took a class on short stories in the Hebrew Bible. Jonah was one of those stories, and by the end of the semester I was in love with the story of Jonah.
There are many reasons I love this book. One is the humor. It is a very funny story. When we let go of the idea that Scripture has to be really serious, we can see this is a hilarious story. It is funny like Chris Farley is funny—really over the top and trying to go over the top as much as possible. It is also funny like Andy Kaufman. If it’s not funny the first time, surely 40 minutes in we will find the schtick funny. Jonah has the same repeating joke, which by the last chapter is hilarious.
But the more important reason I love the story of Jonah is because it is one of the most profound parables about the nature of God, of who God is, and who we are in relationship to God. Each of the four chapters reveal something really important about who God is. Don’t worry, I’m not going to unpack the entire book. We’re just going to stick with the section we have today.
But I do think it would be valuable for us to quickly review this story of Jonah. Jonah is an 8th century prophet. He shows up in Second Kings. He is the subclause in one sentence, and that’s all we know historically about Jonah. Nonetheless, there is a great story built from him. In this story, God comes to Jonah and tells him to go to Nineveh, but Jonah decides to go the opposite direction. Jonah is not only ignoring God and refusing to do what God wants, he’s going the exact opposite and trying to escape from what God wants.
At this point, most people are unsympathetic to Jonah. God told you to do something, so just go and do it. But I have a lot of sympathy for Jonah, because what God is asking Jonah to do is very dangerous and scary. I don’t think we grasp the depth of this. The Ninevites are the enemies of Jonah and his people. For God to ask Jonah to go to Nineveh and cry out over them because of the great evil they have done, is the equivalent of God coming to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1940, and telling him to go to Berlin and preach to the people there about all the evil they are doing. Is that going to go well? Probably not. At best, it will be ineffective, and more likely he would be arrested and executed. This is a very dangerous thing that Jonah is being asked to do, and so Jonah runs away.
There are a series of twists and turns with a great big wind and a great big fish, and finally God is able to get Jonah back on the right track. Jonah goes to Nineveh, he cries out over them and says that in forty days this city will be overturned. Jonah is thinking that God is going to destroy this city.
But instead, there is a different kind of overturning. The people realize they have been doing evil things, and they repent. This is one of those elements of humor, because everyone starts repenting and fasting and putting on sackcloth and ashes. Word gets to the King, and he issues a decree that everyone needs to repent, not just the adults, but the children and the animals. Even the cattle, the King said, must put on sackcloth and ashes to show the huge repentance of the city. Can you imagine that sight? God sees all this and He is pleased, and decides not to destroy the inhabitants of Nineveh.
This is where our story picks up today. When God saw what the people of Nineveh did, how they turned from their evil ways, God relented from the calamity that he was going to bring upon them. Then it says this was very displeasing to Jonah. This is a great example of how translation can obscure what the text says. The words evil, calamity, and displeasing are all the same word in Hebrew, and the best translation is evil. I think most translators don’t have the courage to say that God was about to do something evil, so they use the word calamity. The people of Nineveh stopped doing this evil thing, so God did not do the evil thing he was going to do, and Jonah thought that was very evil. Jonah wanted revenge. There are people who think revenge is moral, and Jonah is one of them. He thinks God’s forgiveness is evil.
I like to put it this way: the people of Nineveh were holding a big ball of evil and they dropped it on the floor. God took the evil he was going to do and dropped it. And Jonah looks down at the evil and say, what pretty evil, and picks it up and makes a nice shawl of all the evil. He puts it around him and cozies up in this evil displeasure and sits down to mope because God is not destroying them. “Are you envious because I am generous?,” Jesus quotes the landowner in today’s parable. That phrase could be used to respond to Jonah right now. He is upset, and the rest of the chapter is God trying to help Jonah see God’s perspective. To forgive was actually the right thing for God to do. God uses some object lessons, again more humor. It finally ends with a question: should I not be concerned about all these people who are rather ignorant, who don’t know their right hand from their left, and all the animals? I love that it ends with “all the animals.” They matter, too.
God is saying, remember the first Creation story in Genesis? What did God say at the end of each day? And it was good. God created all those land animals and said it was good. Then God created humanity and it was good. But God added something more: they are made in God’s image. Not just some people, not just your crew, not just those who do the right thing are made in God’s image, but all people are made in God’s image. The people of Nineveh, your enemies, Jonah, are made in God’s image. We don’t know how Jonah responds to this question. It is just left hanging.
I think this part of the story reveals at least two important things about God and God’s nature. The first is that it reveals to us the breadth and the depth, the height and the width of God’s love, which is a love that extends to everyone, made so profoundly clear in choosing the people that Jonah and the readers and listeners of this story would see as the worst kind of people. It says that God’s love extends to them, even the people Jonah thinks is the least deserving of it.
Which, by the way, also means God’s love extends to you. I find that is harder for some people to accept. You are loved. You might say you are not worthy of love. We could get into a long argument about why you are worthy, but it’s much easier to say you are right. But that doesn’t matter. God doesn’t love you because you deserve it, because you earned it. God loves you because of who God is. There is nothing that you can do to escape that love. Jonah tried. God’s love is for everyone.
Secondly, God doesn’t give up on anybody. God didn’t give up on Jonah. Throughout this whole book, Jonah kept doing the wrong thing. He did the opposite, he got upset, he acted like a petulant little kid, but God didn’t give up on him.
I think this question at the end is meant to show us that God doesn’t give up, because there is not an ending to the story. We have to fill it in. We might say Jonah finally gets it. But another ending to the story, another response to the question, is that Jonah says, no, you still should not care for them, God. But God doesn’t give up on Jonah, God doesn’t give up on you, God doesn’t give up on me. God doesn’t give up, even if we give up on God. God doesn’t give up on us.
Why? See point #1: God’s love extends to everyone, including our enemies, including our neighbors, including our friends, including our family members, including you. God love extends to all.
This morning at the 9:30 service we baptized the newest member of the Body of Christ, a little baby named Ella. During that ceremony, we all made some promises to Ella. We promised we would be there for her, that we would support her, that we would help raise her in this faith. Which faith? The faith of a God whose love and fidelity and persistence is so expansive that there is nothing that Ella can do to lose it or fully escape it. To show Ella that this love is so enormous that it extends to the evil enemy, the Ninevites and every person that might annoy her in life, that this love extends to Jonah and all of his petulance and all of his obstinance. God’s love, we can only assume therefore, extends to her, and to you, and to me. Plus all the animals.
AMEN
