Something About Jonah
Jonah 3:10-4:11
Rev. Dr. Mary Alice Mulligan
Jonah is listed as one of the 12 minor prophets, those small texts lumped together at the back of the First Testament. What makes Jonah distinct is that it is not written as if it were straight reporting of history. The author has constructed it as a short story, with stock characters, a main character we identify with, and Yahweh God as the central actor. Scholars put the writing of Jonah somewhere in the 6th to the 4th centuries BCE, which is post-exilic. Some of them label the Book of Jonah as perhaps the most theologically adept of the prophetic texts. It asks lots of theological questions then leaves us to answer them ourselves from what we learn about humans and God. An important Hebrew text underlies the Book of Jonah. In Exodus 34, Moses pleads with Yahweh God to spare the Hebrew people after they worship the golden calf, then begs God to go with them and as an assurance, to let Moses see Godself. God places Moses in the cleft of the rock. After standing by Moses, God passes by, saying:
The Lord passed before him, and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.
Our first image of Jonah is probably something about a whale, but the book does not have a whale in it. God appoints Jonah to take a warning to Nineveh, which he does not want to do, so he goes down onto a ship and flees toward another city, which is far away – perhaps hoping to get far enough away that God will not find him. But of course, that isn’t possible. God causes a hurricane, the sailors cast lots to determine who is to blame. No surprise, it’s Jonah, who admits he is running from God. He suggests they can be saved if they throw him overboard. When they do, rather than drown, God ordains a great fish to swallow him. After a three-day swim, the fish vomits Jonah onto the shore, where he reluctantly makes his way to Nineveh. Without much fanfare, Jonah calls out they will be destroyed in 40 days. However, all of Nineveh repents. Every common person, the king, and even the cattle, put on sackcloth and ashes, mourning their sinful ways with a total fast. Listen for the word of God from the 3rd and 4th chapters which end the book of Jonah.
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. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” 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. 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?”
Although the scene is set a long time ago, there is something familiar about Jonah. Many of us may sense a kindred spirit with this character, at moments almost like looking in a mirror. He knows exactly what God wants him to do and yet he decides not to do it.
The great city of Nineveh is gentile, not part of Israel, so Jonah might be wondering why Yahweh God would want to warn them. Jonah acts as if he somehow understands life on Earth better than God does, so he runs in the opposite direction from Nineveh, as if he can somehow get beyond God’s reach. Jonah is petulantly opposed to the idea of God’s showing mercy to that sinful group. When running away doesn’t work, when the hurricane threatens the ship and everyone on it, Jonah reluctantly becomes the prophet God called him to be. Having been miraculously saved, even then he merely goes into the city and blurts out the message: “God is going to destroy you.”
When God then saves Nineveh because of their repentance, the reluctant prophet says, “I knew this evil thing might happen.” (Notice Jonah calls God’s changing God’s mind and saving Nineveh “evil”) Then Jonah goes and pouts under what my friend Jane Ferguson called a snit bush.
What is particularly familiar is how we too can see when someone is going to get in trouble, or when someone is primed to mess up big time, and a little voice inside us gets ready to celebrate. But then if they don’t fail; if some gracious thing happens to them, then our face falls into a pout and we hunt around for the nearest snit bush to sit under, because we secretly wanted to see the great destruction, which makes us pretty much like Jonah. Although we may not like him much, there is certainly something familiar about him. That’s what we know about Jonah.
But we know something about God, too. The story shows the predictability of God’s behavior. Jonah knew God is merciful. He tells the sailors he is trying to escape from God’s call. When the hurricane comes, he admits God is master of the sea. Most importantly, when Jonah is figuratively sitting under the snit bush (before he even built the shelter), pouting over the salvation of Nineveh, he quotes Exodus 34 to God. “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” Jonah asks to die, since he would rather die than live with a saved Nineveh. But he shouldn’t have been surprised at God’s changed mind when Nineveh repents. If God is “abounding in steadfast love” of course God wants to relent.
Which brings you to the theological key of Jonah. The whole book of Jonah is asking for theological clarity of one big question. Namely, what takes priority? God’s justice or God’s mercy? Jonah wants it to be justice. Nineveh deserves destruction for their horrendous evil ways. But you learn here that God’s mercy will always override justice, which Jonah should notice as a good thing, because Jonah is fortunate that God is gracious and merciful, since divine forgiveness even extends to disobedient, pouty Jonah. He who lectures God and calls God’s mercy “evil” should be ecstatic that sinfulness can be forgiven – and apparently even without repentance. Jonah, like Nineveh, is forgiven.
This means of course, no matter what you have done, no matter what you deserve, you get God’s unconditional mercy. Choosing between divine mercy or divine justice? Mercy will always win. That’s how predictable God is. Because the Creator cares for everyone. No matter what. As far as God is concerned, none of us is beyond divine mercy. The image the writer gives of God’s limitless grace is wrapped up in the explanation that each person in Nineveh was created by God, so each person matters. If it is as if all 120 thousand inhabitants don’t know one hand from the other, so of course they receive divine compassion. How could anyone punish their own children for not knowing what they are doing?
Our humanness tries to understand God, but we quickly learn our limits. God is too vast. It’s as if we could understand the ocean by drinking a glass of tap water. Our little finite brains cannot wrap themselves around God’s fullness. Just when we think we understand something of God, we realize there is an infinite amount we will never know. And I’m pretty sure that’s how even the biblical writers were. They struggled to understand God, but still they got stumped. However when we step back from trying to decipher everything about God and pay attention to the big ideas, the basics, we hear a sacred promise. God’s grace will always pour out on flawed and sinful us, no matter what we’ve done.
A traveling evangelist once preached an effervescent sermon calling people to witness far and wide to the love of Jesus. He ended the sermon with the instruction: “Go where Jesus is not and take him with you!” People burst into applause. But a high school girl whispered, “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. There isn’t any place Jesus is not.” She had it right. The presence of Jesus Christ is everywhere, spreading the mercy of God, because each of us is loved infinitely by the Creator. So God will do whatever it takes to grant us grace. And if we are not sure whether we should receive mercy, we can expand the final verse in the book of Jonah, where God asks, “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, and Sarasota, Bradenton, Venice, Englewood, and every other city throughout the world? And should I not be concerned about every single person whom I created on purpose in love?”