Jonah cannot find it in his heart to give Nineveh even a million to one chance. So because he believes in God, and because of
what he believes about the abounding love and mercy of God, he runs away.
Obedience is more than doing what God
asks – it is being at peace with who God is. God is scandalously generous but
we can be scandalously grudging. God doesn’t do fair, he does mercy. For ourselves,
we are glad God doesn’t give us what we deserve, but sometimes it’s hard not to
wish other people got what they deserve. In Jonah, God is the sender of well aimed storms, and fish the
size of submarines; the God of nations and empires, the God of cities and their
urban problems, of withered gourds and herds of cattle – and He is essentially and intentionally merciful and
compassionate to his creation. So how dare any of us reduce God to informal conversation
partner, or confine God to our own ideas of what a Christian God should be, as
if God’s own reality might seem a bit theologically unsound to us! When God calls us to live up to who
God is in Christ – our first thought confronted with such scandalous truth may well be flight – but the second will be
worship – of the God who is above and beyond all our limited hopes for this
world.
There is in Jewish writing and spirituality a wonderful
confidence in laughter as conduit of learning. If you get the joke, you get the insight,
you understand, you get it. This whole
book is about Jonah having to be pushed and shoved towards Nineveh, and then
pushed and shoved towards the truth of who God is, and when he says he’d rather
die than see Nineveh live he has finally to face the ultimate test of obedience
– will he allow God to be God? Slow to anger and abounding in love.
And maybe, like Jonah, we so want
to have a comfortable, predictable and theologically safe God. C S Lewis unforgettably said of Aslan, 'He is not not safe, but he is good'. In Jonah God's goodness is the counterpoint to the
spirit of exclusion, the grudging heart, the narrow-minded faith. So all of us Jonah's can stop thinking of God as our divine resource centre, a kind of holy
transcendent megastore of blessings accessible only to a privileged clientele. God
does not belong to us – we belong to God. And theology is not so much our thinking about
God, but a perilous, precarious way of coming to know something of what God
thinks of us, and this our problematic world filled to overflowing with those we call 'other'. What is revealed in Jonah, and comes to its apotheosis in Christ, is that God's worldview rests on a nature that is … slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
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