January 22nd, 2012
Epiphany III, Year B
The Rev. Rob Fisher
St. Dunstan’s, Carmel Valley

Texts: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:6-14; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

I remember learning about Jonah as a child in Sunday school.  Remember Jonah, the man who was swallowed by a whale and eventually spit out.

I always found it a story that was a little hard to relate to.

I can’t imagine anything like being swallowed by a whale and living.

The Book of Jonah is very short, and his story is very odd, but Jonah actually has a prominent and special place among all the prophets.

In some of the very earliest Christian art that has been uncovered by archeologists, there are carvings of Jonah.  Though it may seem strange, his image is put with the Easter stories,

…because it turns out that his story is a story of being reborn.

But it’s not that simple.

***

Jonah was a very unusual prophet, and in many ways, he was a very bad prophet.

Keep in mind that most prophets wished that they could turn from their callings.  They heard the voice of God speaking to them, and it always made their lives difficult.  Whether they were happy about it or not, though, these prophets did what God directed them to do.  But Jonah, when he gets the call from God, he immediately runs and hides.  He says he’d rather die!

Perhaps we’re starting to see now that his story isn’t that hard to relate to after all.

The story begins with God telling Jonah to go and warn the great city of Nineveh, to tell them that God is displeased.  The Ninevites are in fact a hated people to the Israelites.  But even so, God wants to warn them before he destroys their city.

But the instant Jonah receives the command to warn the people of Ninevites, he flees in the opposite direction—to Tarshish—to get away from the presence of the Lord.

In order to get to Tarshish, he boards a boat and pays a fee to go across the water with a group of mariners.

A storm ensues, threatening them all on the boat.  The mariners, who are not Israelites, worship their own gods to try and calm the water.  What happens next is interesting:  The mariners, who are ecumenical to a fault, actually get angry at Jonah for not worshiping his own god.  They ask him which god he worships, and he tells him that his god is YHWH, the Lord of all, who made the sea and dry land.

Upon hearing this, the men become even more afraid, because they can tell that it is the God of Jonah who is causing the storm—and they ironically do the very thing that Jonah won’t do.  Even though they are not Israelites, they themselves begin to worship the God of Israel.  Jonah, the anti-prophet, by not praying himself, has now got these men to turn from their false gods and worship the true God!  In spite of himself, Jonah has just evangelized these people for the God of Israel.

It turns out that it makes no difference, because the sea does not calm.  Jonah of course knows why, and he tries to tell them—it is because God is after Jonah, and the only way to calm the storm is for them to throw him into the water.

The good mariners cannot bring themselves to do such a thing!  And out of a real spirit of generosity they throw everything else overboard, and try to out-row the wind and the waves to save his life.  Of course it is a futile effort.  Eventually they realize that they have to do as Jonah has asked them—and they throw him into the sea.

Here is the part that Jonah is most famous for.  A great fish comes and swallows him.  (By the way, the word whale is never used, but rather it is called a great fish.)

While it pulls him down into the deep, it is a safe place.  When Jonah is inside the belly of the fish, he prays to the Lord, and eventually, after three days, the fish spits him out onto dry land.

(The fact that he was swallowed up for three days was not lost on the early Christians who compared that to Jesus being in the tomb for three days before being resurrected.)

Jonah now gets his second chance.  God again commands him to go to the Ninevites and to warn them.  And this time Jonah does what the Lord asks.

Amazingly, the words of this reluctant prophet take hold with the people of Nineveh instantly.  From the lowliest person all the way up to the king.  All the people go into great fasting and repenting to the Lord.

As bad a prophet as he is, Jonah is ridiculously effective.  No other prophet in the entire Bible gets such a successful response.

And here comes the strangest and most poignant part.

When God sees that the people of Nineveh have turned towards him in an astonishing way, God changes his mind and decides not to destroy them after all.  Is Jonah pleased with this?

Absolutely not!

Jonah complains to God, saying: I knew it!  I knew you would do something just like this, because I knew just how awfully merciful you are.

Indeed, we learn in the story that the whole reason Jonah was running from God was not actually because he was afraid—but because he hated the Ninevites, and he knew God well enough to know that God would ultimately save them.  And he did not want to see them get saved.

It is ironic that Jonah knew of God’s true mercy, but he could not adopt that mercy into his own heart.  God’s mercy was not contagious enough, even for a prophet.  He could hear the words of the Lord, but he could not live like the Lord lives, with forgiveness in his heart.

Yet in spite of all this, Jonah was still able to be used as an instrument of God’s goodness.

It’s an incredible story.

The ending is almost humorous, as Jonah acts like a rebellious child.

He goes off in a huff, and builds a booth for himself so that he can sit outside of the city and watch what will happen.  God has a little fun with him, appointing a bush to grow and shade him, and then pulling that bush away, to leave Jonah baking in the sun.

This teasing of Jonah by God gets him angry, and that brings about a final conversation between the two.  And the book ends abruptly on a question that never gets answered, with these words:

God says to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”

“It is,” he says. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”

But the LORD says, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”

That last line is the end of the book.

The question never gets answered, which effectively puts the question in our laps.  It puts us in Jonah’s shoes.

It is hard for us to fathom how God could love our enemies just as much as God loves us.  The Ninevites were Jonah’s enemies, but because they are not ours, it is easy for us to blame Jonah for not caring about their fate, or for wishing the worst upon them.

But what if we were in his shoes?

From a God’s eye perspective, the lines that separate us from our enemies are invisible

We are getting into a time—and I fear it will only grow worse as we progress to November—when the temptation to take sides and make enemies of our fellow citizens will increase.  And this is just one example of many, of the ways we take sides against each other.

But from God’s perspective, we are all equally loved, warts and all.

And if we can only let that singular, challenging and beautiful truth seep into our hearts, we will finally find liberation.  Our hearts will be released, not from a whale, but from our own bitterness.

And if we can hear God’s call to us to go beyond that, and we can follow, it will be the rebirth of us all.

—Amen.