Preaching today on a text that was the first in a series of five on Jonah. Others will do the later ones – my passage was Jonah 1.1-3. Now Jonah is one of the most purposely subversive theological documents in the entire Bible – it is also one of the most artfully crafted protest stories, couched in narrative laced with irony, and delivering one of the most persuasive correctives in all of literature. So not easy to preach meaningfully on the first three verses – the opening scene of a film is hard, even misleading, to interpret without the following plot. Still. I did enjoy rereading and reconsidering this story for our time. In fact that's the line my sermon took – today's Jonah's and today's Nineveh. Here's the first part of my thinking:
You only understand Jonah if you’ve learned to hate, if life
experience has educated you in heartfelt, instinctive, focused hostility. And
you only understand Jonah’s God if you are prepared to unlearn hatred, and by a
painful inner re-orientation accept that God is not in the hate business. Jonah
hated Nineveh – ‘the great city’ famed for terrorist atrocities, centre of a
brutal, organised, military machine – merciless, meticulous, arrogant,
conqueror and oppressor of Israel. The equivalent today is hard to imagine –
but where there is religious hatred, ancient tribal enmities and people whose
suffering and oppression have educated them into hatred, there we come near to
the same mindset – that wants to obliterate the enemy. The combination of
terror and anger, of hatred and hopelessness, produces that lethal cocktail we
call terrorism – and it flourishes in a world sold on consumerism, militarism
and polarisation of extremes, two poles arcing in the destructive blue light of violence.
those who pray that cruelty and violence will get its payback. So you’d think
that a word from the Lord to preach against the wickedness of the great city
would have Jonah book a first class overnight camel to be the first to tell
Nineveh
they’d had it. God’s prophet being sent to tell the enemy God is going to zap
you. Permission to hate, to ridicule, to gloat, to celebrate the anguish of the
enemy. So why did Jonah run in the exact opposite direction? Why miss out on
the vengeance he’d prayed for? Why not takes his hate and use it to make him an
eloquent herald of doom?
Chapter 1 Verse 3 only makes sense when you come to ch. 4 verse 2. Jonah isn’t
disobedient – he’s in denial. It isn’t that he doesn’t believe enough in God –
he believes too much, he knows too well, his theology of God is so true it’s a
liability. He runs in the opposite direction because he senses God is going to
do the opposite of what Jonah wants. There’s a million to one chance that
Nineveh
will repent – and if that happens, there isn’t one chance in a million that God
won’t be merciful – it's an absolute
certainty that God would be slow to anger and abounding in love.
And that isn’t
fair. That is theologically unacceptable. Abounding in love, slow to anger –
That would be absolutely scandalous – that a vast city built on the blood and
tears of the conquered should turn from their wickedness and find mercy shows
there is no justice in the universe. "Be it not so Lord", – it's the effectual fervent prayer of a righteously indignant man. Jonah won’t take that
million to one chance. And as this story unfolds it isn’t that Jonah will,
learn a new theology of God – he will learn how to apply that theology to the
deepest, hardest, most heartbreaking, experiences of his life. And he’ll learn
about God’s generosity and human grievances; he’ll learn that mercy is greater
than murder; that compassion not cruelty is God’s way; all that and more he’ll
learn – but as this story begins it touches on some of the most important
things we will ever need to know about ourselves, about God, about those
different others who share this planet with us
Of which more later.
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