Jonah 3 1-5, 10

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Third Sunday after Epiphany

Jonah 3: 1-5, 10

January 26, 2003

D. Groth

“I Don’t Wanna”

Introduction:  In the Bible, there's no one quite like Jonah.  He's reluctant, withdrawn, and stubborn.  He is afflicted by a slow-burning anger, which occasionally flares up.  Jonah has chips on both of his shoulders, and he cherishes them.  He doesn't want to go where God wants him to go, and he doesn't want to feel what God wants him to feel, and he doesn't want to say what God wants him to say.  And if Jonah could page through our hymnals, I suspect the last hymn that he would choose to sing is, "I love to tell the story." That's not Jonah.  He doesn't want any part of it.   Jonah is so human, and in that sense, Jonah is refreshing and believable.  We can identify with him.  

            All over the Bible, at God's command, people are getting up and going.  When God calls them to service, it's almost as if they're mesmerized, or enchanted.  They drop whatever it is they are doing, and they get up and go.  Abraham, at 75 years old, and Sarah, even older, pack up all their belongings and go out on a promise and a prayer.  Moses heads for Egypt with nothing but a shepherd's crook and Aaron to write his sermons.  James and John drop their nets, leave their father Zebedee, and follow Jesus at his invitation.  The accounts of God calling men and women to service are so short, and give us so few details, they startle us when we read them.  We are left wondering what the rest of the story was.

            Well in Jonah's case, there was more to it than simple obedience.  The Word of the LORD came to Jonah- get up and go to Nineveh.  It's a common formula in the Old Testament.  Whenever the Word of the LORD comes to a prophet and says "get up and go" we expect the next major thought to be, "and so he got up and went" to wherever the LORD told him to go.  Not so with Jonah.  "Jonah got up and ran away from the LORD."  He got on a boat and went in the opposite direction of Nineveh.  He went to the opposite end of the known world at that time.  Jonah goes as far away from Nineveh as he can. 

            What's Jonah's problem? Well for starters, Nineveh wasn't in Israel.  Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria, and Assyria was the enemy.  There were constant bloody border skirmishes between Israel and Assyria.  In 722 B.C., the northern kingdom of Israel was wiped off the map all together as a result of Assyrian conquest.  To the hearers of this story, Nineveh was repugnant and vile.  It was an abomination.  Nineveh was the capital city of the evil empire.  "Go to Nineveh" says the LORD.  Instead, Jonah stands on the dock with a one-way ticket to the other end of the world.   

            You know how the story goes.  While on his way, the LORD sends a great wind.  The sea is heaving and swelling and rolling.  Before long, the sailors are struggling desperately to keep the ship afloat, throwing precious cargo overboard to lighten the ship so that it rides higher in the water.  Meanwhile, Jonah enjoys a deep sleep below deck.  When nothing else seems to work, the sailors decide to cast lots, in order to determine whose guilt brought this storm on them.  It was a common practice at the time.  The lot fell on Jonah.  Jonah explains to them that he is running away from God, and that they should throw him into the sea in order to save themselves.  The sailors, who are not Jews, wouldn’t do it at first.  These pagans have more concern for Jonah, God's man, than Jonah has for pagans, like the ones in Nineveh.  They continue to battle the storm, trying to make their way back to land.   But the storm became wilder, and the sailors gave in to desperation and throw Jonah overboard.  The raging sea grows calm.  The ship stays afloat, but Jonah sinks.  Yahweh, God, uses a great fish, maybe a whale, to scoop Jonah up and rescue him.

            Of course, this is where the intellectuals of the 21st century begin to doubt the story.   Some choose to think of this as just a whale of a tale with theological content, but certainly not historical fact.  God can do anything he wants to do --that's what makes him God.  Creating a really big animal for his purposes is really no more difficult for God than creating a really small one.  In either case, we're not going to let it derail us.  This great sea creature takes a repentant Jonah back to where he started and with a great big hic-up, deposits him on a beach.  Only the LORD knows who is happier about it, Jonah or the whale! 

            Then the Word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, "Get up and go to the great city of Nineveh." Jonah has had a change of heart.  This time, the formula runs its course.  "So Jonah got up and went to Nineveh." Jonah is still a reluctant servant.  He's not afraid of the Ninevites.  He hates them.  He's afraid of God.  He's afraid God will have mercy on the Ninevites.  Jonah wants God to blow the city sky high.  But of course that's not what happens.  Though Jonah hated every minute of it, the people of Nineveh respond to Jonah's preaching, and everyone, even the king, turns from their evil ways, puts on sackcloth and ashes, signs of their repentance, and prays urgently that the LORD would have mercy.  Little do they know that God isn't the one that is itching to punish them.  It's Jonah.

            Abraham interceded for the innocent of Sodom and Gomorrah, but Jonah couldn't have cared less about the people of Nineveh.  They all looked alike to him.  Whether there was one or a thousand righteous ones in Nineveh made no difference to Jonah because he had already made up his mind about them.  He wants the whole city to go up in smoke.  That's Jonah, but that's not our Lord.  God has compassion on Nineveh, and does not bring about the destruction he had threatened.

            Of course, Jonah is not happy with this, not at all, and it perturbs him even more that the LORD used him ultimately as an instrument of his mercy.  His preaching, after all, led to their repentance, which allowed the Lord to forgiven them, and so Jonah slashes away with angry prayer at the graciousness of God.  In chapter 4 verse 2, He says, “O LORD.  “This is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish.  I knew that you are gracious and compassionate; slow to anger and abounding in love.  Now, O Lord, take away my life.  For it is better for me to die than to live.” Jonah doesn't want to live in a world where God has compassion even on people like the Ninevites.  God's grace is offensive to Jonah.   

            So Jonah finds himself a seat on a hill east of the city, from where he still hopes to see some lethal fireworks rain down from heaven.  The LORD prompts a vine to grow a little faster than I usual, and it provides a shade for Jonah's hot head.  Jonah is fond of that vine.  But the next day, we get a glimpse of God's ironic sense of humor.  He sends a hungry worm, a stifling wind, and a blazing sun.  Between those three, the vine doesn’t have a chance; it withers away.  Jonah throws another tantrum and asks God why he doesn't just let Jonah die.  God asks, "Jonah, do you have any right to be angry about the vine?" Jonah sticks to his guns.  "I do" he says.  I am angry enough to die." God says, "Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left." Why do you care about that plant more than all these people?  God gave Jonah a glimpse of his infinite capacity for caring and – compassion.  The people of Nineveh, by the grace of God, are spared and are allowed to start over.

            Jonah didn't want to have anything to do with Nineveh because they were the enemy.  We have enemies as well.  Sometimes our enemies have done serious wrong to us.  Sometimes we create enemies over something as silly as a neighbor who doesn't rake his leaves or pick up the mess his dog left behind.  In any event, it certainly doesn't take much for us to smolder inside like Jonah.  Like Jonah we love to clump people together based on where they are from or to what race they belong to.  We are inclined to condemn the whole lot of them to make it clean and simple, without ever getting to know them as individuals.  We too, like Jonah sulk and brood and wait for God to come around to our way of thinking.  We too harbor ill-will toward our enemies whoever they may be. 

            Jesus says we are to love our enemies and pray for them.  This love that we are called to exhibit is not emotional love.  Rather, it means that we should will good towards them and pray that they too would know the blessings of the Lord.  It's a tall order, and I imagine most of us wish

God hadn't given it.  God would have the southern black person love a white supremist.  He would have the faithful employee who is laid off just before he qualifies for retirement love the people who did this to him even as he's packing his belongings under the watchful eye of a security guard? Christ commands us to will good towards those who will us evil.  That wasn't Jonah's style, and it's not ours.  We want vengeance, not compassion.  And some of us even know what Jonah meant when he said, "I am angry enough to die." --when our mood is so foul that we don't even care anymore what happens -- when death, the last enemy, looks like welcome relief.   

            God too was angry enough to die.  The Lord himself, instead of venting his wrath on the people of Nineveh or on Jonah, or on us, has had compassion on us all.  He redirected His wrath and put it on a man on a cross outside of Jerusalem.  There, God's holy, consuming and righteous anger was allowed to burn without restraint.  Isaiah wrote, "The punishment that brought us peace was upon him" (Is.  53:5).   The righteous anger of God fell on Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  Just as Jonah calmed the storm when He was thrown into the depths of the seas, the storm of Gods anger was appeased as the Jesus gave himself to the depths of the grave.   

            One of the things that Jesus said is that "God so loved the world that he gave his Son."  There are many folks who are simply unable to believe that.  They qualify it by adding conditions to it saying, "God loves those who are decent." Some people argue with it and finally reject it.   "Can't be true" they say, in effect.  "God can't love all of it: maybe God loves part of it --our part, the good part, the American part, or the white part or the black part, the Christian part, or the Missouri Synod part, but not all of it, and certainly God doesn't, couldn't, wouldn't, shouldn't love my enemies.  But the text is clear.  God loves all of it.  Such is the depth and breadth of His love that there are no exceptions.  That's good news for us, because it means we're included.  We must come to terms with the reality, as did Jonah, that our enemies are not God's enemies.  The good news is that God not only loves our enemies, he loves us.   

            Finally, its good news that, though Jonah is a reluctant servant with plenty of liabilities, God managed to use even him, effectively, graciously.  God was always after Jonah trying to lead him in the right direction.  He kept bringing Jonah back to the fold like a Good Shepherd would, and we praise and thank him for that, because we know we need that kind of shepherding as well.  Jonah got angry and he turned his back on God, yet God still loved him and used him to save other people.   

Conclusion:  The Word of God came to Jonah and he went in the other direction.  Pagans wrestled to save his life, while Jonah slept soundly in the belly of the ship.  In his slow-burning fashion Jonah was angry to his heart's content, not at sin, but at the sinners, and at God, for his habit of being gracious and loving.  Jonah sulked and brooded in his shaded seat, and waited for God to come around to his way of thinking.  And yet God still used Jonah as a part of his plan of salvation.  God waited for Jonah and He is waiting for us.  He waits for us to come around to His way of loving.  "Love your enemies" said God, ''as I have love you." Amen.

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