Living Wittily

Author: admin

  • “the grace that for so long has kept this world”: The Wisdom of Wendell Berry,

    Wendell_with_Nip___Jed_2_copy.0I've always considered Wendell Berry a prophet, in both senses of the word. Like a number of other writers, throughout a long life he has expressed a foreboding of, and argued resistance to human ingenuity, especially in the sciences of exploitation, technological cleverness, ruthless growth economics, and the impact of all of these on a planet that is finite, fragile and requiring care.
     
    Except the care that the planet now requires is emergency treatment, its wounds deep and increasingly resistant to healing, its health compromised to the point of requiring oxygen. Rachel Carson warned us about The Silent Spring. E F Schumacher tried to convince us Small is Beautiful. In No Logo, Naomi Klein alerted us to the banal and baleful power of the logo, the consumer dreams and the resulting economic and ecological nightmare – her more recent book This Changes Everything. Climate vs Capitalism, polarises the issues, but does so because current trajectories suggest we are entering a zero-sum game with climate, ecology and the future of humanity and our planetary home at stake. 
     
    51M4uQj-V-L._SY291_BO1 204 203 200_QL40_ML2_Wendell Berry foresaw and foretold much of this, in essays, poems, novels, lectures  and any other medium that allowed him to communicate the deep concerns of a man in love with the world, and witnessing its suffering. He is a prophet in the second sense too.
     
    His own agrarian practices, his getting his hands dirty approach to the land and its birds and animals, domestic and wild, his awareness of the crucial role of trees, forests and rivers – all of these are major themes in his writing, and primary values of his way of life. He tries to tell it as it is. His critique is not mere condemnation but persuasion to change. 
     
    It's with an amazed sadness that we are reading below, 35 years after it was written, a poem that speaks with mature precision to our current 2023 condition. Our self-destructive drives, our rapacious milking of the earth for all its worth, the long, slow and inexorable strangling of the world's breathing systems – it's madness. In our greed to live as we please, we plot our own death.
     
    Berry is a careful poet, and a gentle man. He doesn't use exaggeration for rhetorical effect. When he uses a word like 'wantonly', he means it, and as exactly as its dictionary definition. Such definitions as "unprovoked and gratuitous malice", "unrestrained excess"; these are exactly and precisely what he means about human activity devoted to profit, growth, wealth, resource exploitation and all the other terminologies of markets, money and "growing an economy" on a global scale, and to hell with the consequences.
     
    "1988 Sabbath Poem II." 
     
    It is the destruction of the world
    In our own lives that drives us
    Half insane, and more than half.
    To destroy that which we were given
    In trust: how will we bear it?
    It is our own bodies that we give
    To be broken, our bodies
    Existing before and after us
    In clod and cloud, worm and tree,
    That we, driving or driv'n, despise
    In our greed to live, our haste
    To die. To have lost, wantonly,
    The ancient forest, the vast grasslands
    Is our madness, the presence
    In our very bodies of our grief.
    (Wendell Berry)
     
    The prophet Wendell Berry is no friend of religion in its more conservative Christian guises. One of his earliest and now a classic essay, 'A Native Hill', he explains why; and he has American Evangelical individualism clearly in his sights. 
     
    “I am uneasy with the term,” he writes, “for such religion as has been openly practiced in this part of the world has promoted and fed upon a destructive schism between body and soul, Heaven and earth… And so people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere – to a pursuit of 'salvation' that was really only another form of gluttony and self-love, the desire to perpetuate their lives beyond the life of the world. The Heaven-bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately. Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions.”
     
    God as a power weapon, theology as justification for the violation of nature. And all this under the guise of a doctrine that reads Genesis as a seven day creation, and an interpretation of "rule the earth and subdue it" as a licence for human rule as domination and exploitation rather than 69477337_1256288501206463_2083923835735769088_nstewardship and conservation. Such a destructive mindset, underpinned by religious zeal and a belief in the nation as exceptional, and chosen as blessed, is for Berry the aviation fuel that jet propels the lust to possess, unlimited extraction, mass production, ruthless pursuit of profit, wealth creation, and mega-industries in whose eyes the planet is both raw material up for grabs and 24/7 factory.  
     
    But Berry has never given up hope, never surrendered to the plundering of the world as either inevitable or invincible. Deeply resistant to self-concerned piety and material greed as the two primary drivers corporate business endeavour, he is still familiar with the mystery of grace, the gift that is life, and the precious trust the Creator has placed in humans to "not to destroy that which we were given in trust."
     
    So I finish with an extract from another of his poems, in which grace is both gift and demand, a covenant mutual obligation between humanity, nature and God. This is the true human vocation – "we must be stirring to keep this gift dwelling among us, eternally alive in time."
     
    "Sabbath Poem 2005 XVII."   

    …In the lengthening shadow he has climbed

    again to the ridgetop and across

    to the westward slope to see the ripe

    light of autumn in the turning trees,

    the twilight he must go by now

    that only grace can give. Thus far

    he keeps the old sectarian piety:

    By grace we live. But he can go

    no further. Having known the grace

    that for so long has kept this world,

    haggard as it is, as we have made it,

    we cannot rest, we must be stirring

    to keep this gift dwelling among us,

    eternally alive in time. This

    is the great work, no other, none harder,

    none nearer rest, or more beautiful.

     

  • Jonah and the Whale 8 Women Commentators

    There's been a recent resurgence of scholarly publications on Jonah. What I find intriguing and heartening is the growing number of such publications by women biblical scholars.

    Jonah TribleOne of the first major contributions on Jonah was Phyllis Trible, whose Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method and the Book of Jonah was published in 1995. This dual purpose work was and remains a substantial contribution to rhetorical criticism as a key hermeneutical approach to the biblical text. Literary critical, and rhetorical analysis, open new avenues to understanding the author's care and craft in composition, and how such skill becomes a vehicle for the art of persuasion. Jonah is then used by Trible as an example to test drive many of her proposals. As the publishers explained to prospective readers:

    "In this book Trible's formulated guidelines are applied to a detailed study of the book of Jonah. A close reading with respect to structure, syntax, style, and substance elicits a host of meanings embedded in the text, enabling the relationship between artistry and theology to emerge with clarity."

    The result is an enlightening and innovative approach to Jonah that is multi-disciplinary, and avoids a far too swift foreclosing on the text with settled conclusions as to what it means, and what the writer is trying to persuade the reader to think, or do. 

    A couple of years later Trible followed up with a commentary on Jonah for the New Interpreter's Bible. Like several first class commentaries in this series, it is embedded in a composite volume that contains the full Book of the Twelve Prophets and Daniel, which makes it expensive and hard to source. That seriously limits the audience for her commentary – and that's a shame, because Trible on Jonah is one of the most stimulating treatments available. Find it in a library if you can. 

    P1000526A Biblical Text and Its Afterlives. The Survival of Jonah in Western Culture, (Cambridge 2000), by Yvonne Sherwood, is a tour de force, a definitive example of listening to a text by listening to how others have heard it. The result is a book packed with information about how Jonah has been represented in painting, sculpture, stained glass, novels, poetry, film, music, slave songs, sermons and so many other human cultural and linguistic ways of telling the story, and sadly, not always telling it well.

    Sherwood illumines several major issues, including anti-Judaism in biblical studies (itself now a major field of both study and required redress), and the secularisation of the Bible whose stories are now popularly divorced from the numinous and transcendent as understood in the Bible itself. This book is hard to describe adequately as to its range and importance; it is required reading for any and all serious study of Jonah that post dates its publication. It's that good.

    By far the most substantial commentary on Jonah so far is now Amy Erickson's magnum opus, the Illuminations Commentary on Jonah, published by Eerdmans in 2021. This is a major critical commentary but written to be read as well as consulted. This series of commentaries has two main sections for each volume, giving them a particular niche as exegetical resources.

    P1000519Part One is 'A History of Consequences', and this accounts for around 170 pages. Not unlike Sherwood, Erickson has carefully excavated the history of interpretation but used that information to examine the consequences, impact and after effects of certain interpretations. Like Sherwood, Erickson unearths surprising, at times shocking ways the text of Jonah has been preached, received, interpreted and shaped (at times misshaped), cultural norms and theological conclusions, for good or ill.

    Part Two is the Interpretation section, of around 200 pages. This is in the more traditional form of a commentary. I intend to write a full review of this commentary later – for now, with Trible, Sherwood and Erickson, Jonah scholars are well set up for future studies. Of which there are even more in the pipeline, and also by leading women scholars!

    61UrLnC63mL._AC_UY218_A third major study of reception history, or history of interpretation has just been published by Blackwell, Jonah Through the Centuries, by Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer. The approach is different in this series, however. The commentary works through the text verse by verse, and brings the history of interpretation to bear on the meaning of each passage. This is done chronologically through early Jewish and Rabbinic, to Christian Fathers, Medieval and Reformation periods, Enlightenment and into the contemporary era. Film and art, fiction and poetry, music and theatre are quoted alongside sermons, commentary and other literary studies.

    This is the most user friendly format of the three volumes that major on the after-life of the story of Jonah; and Tiemeyer knows the field as thoroughly as Sherwood and Erickson. The format of this series is much more accessible for those who will be teaching and preaching the Jonah text. But Sherwood and Erickson add so much more, so that for those specially interested in reception history and history of consequences, all three are required reading.

    April will see the publication of yet another premier league commentary, this time in the Hermeneia Series, by Susan Niditch, a veteran scholar of the Hebrew Bible.

    517qh596-dL._AC_UY218_I think the publishers description gives an indication of the approach and value of this commentary which brings yet another perspective on the puzzles of Jonah:

    "Jonah's story is treated as a complex reflection upon the heavy matters of life and death, good and evil, and human and divine relations. The narrative probes an individual's relationship with a demanding deity, considers vexing cultural issues of "us versus them," and examines the role of Israel's God in a universal and international context. The author examines the ways in which Jonah prods readers to contemplate these fundamental issues concerning group- and self-definition."

    71zXH+2Am8L._AC_UY218_And to complete the set, Elaine Philips has just published a composite volume in yet another series, this time on Obadiah, Jonah and Micah. This is a more conservative series than those reviewed above, but it is conservative scholarship at its best. Evidenced argument, consideration of alternative viewpoints, careful exegetical study in conversation with critical scholarship, and in most of the volumes I have used, readable commentary that seeks to understand original meaning and contemporary interpretation for the church.

    The publisher's description is understandably positive, but Phillips' previous work suggests this is a worthwhile option for plunging with Jonah into the depths of what God is about. 

    "Comprehensive and compelling, Elaine Phillips' commentary on Obadiah, Jonah and Micah is a thorough study that will give you an appreciation of the struggles these prophets faced as they answered God's call to speak into difficult geo-political contexts, and the lessons that they can teach Christians today."

  • The Prophets, A J Heschel.

    P1000540I've spent a while in good company today. This is one of very few of my books that I think irreplaceable.
    It's a First Edition, bought in Kiefer's Book Store in Chicago, in 1962. The front edges are untrimmed, and the binding and boards, the paper and fonts result in a book it's a delight to handle and read.
     
    It also happens to be the magnum opus of my favourite Jewish writer, exploring the experience of the Hebrew Prophets in a book alight with passion, many passages reading like prose poems, freighted with immense learning and profound sympathy for his subject – Jewish prophetic faith as a conduit of Divine pathos, faithfulness and mercy.
     
    I love this book as an object, for its subject, and for the mind and soul of its author.

  • R S Thomas: Mysticism and Meeting God on the Moor

    CurlewWe all meet God in our own way. There are moments of recognition that, brief as they are, touch those deepest longings we find it hard to name. In the encounter with God it is seldom clear whether we meet God, or God meets us, and in any case, to make such a distinction risks missing the mystery that challenges all such certainties.

    Years ago, I sat at coffee with a man who was recovering from a stroke. He was as unmystical as anyone I ever met. Down to earth, a man of good humoured shrewdness, lived for his family and worked hard all his life to make things happen for them, his own unapologetic self-description, a working man.  He spoke of his time as a telephone engineer in Orkney, laying cables across the moorland. One day, unbidden, unexpected and unexplained, he was aware of the presence of God. And he knew. He knew he was known, and by Whom. His life, he said, was never the same after that. He remembered the cold wind, the cry of curlews, the unthreatening loneliness, and most of all – the space.

    We talked a while about God, moorland, the cry of moorland birds, and the way such emptiness can suddenly be filled with presence. We agreed that the cry of the curlew is one of the most beautiful sounds in Scotland, a combination of longing and the cry of the heart that opens us up to the incredible, sometimes the ineffable.

    At such moments of opening, I believe in the democratisation of mysticism, and the need to stop categorising and defining what in the end is the interruption of our lives by the God who invests those rare moments with transcendent significance. So in  one sense, my friend was unmystical – in another sense this most practical of men was alert to the invasion of gift, responsive to the call of God, and spoke only in quiet humility of what had happened to him. God had happened to him – and it is the sharing of such spiritual reality that is one of the most persuasive encouragements for the rest of us. We too have had our moments.  

    The Moor

    It was like a church to me.
    I entered it on soft foot,
    Breath held like a cap in the hand.
    It was quiet.
    What God there was made himself felt,
    Not listened to, in clean colours
    That brought a moistening of the eye,
    In a movement of the wind over grass.
     
    There were no prayers said. But stillness
    Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
    Enough; and the mind’s cession
    Of its kingdom. I walked on,
    Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
    And broke on me generously as bread.

  • Why I read Rowan Williams.

    P1000537Why I read Rowan Williams.
    He is brilliant, sometimes obscure, often a hard read, but always worth the effort. I share the view of Neil Dickson, "He’s a difficult read at times but you always feel even the crumbs from his table are worth devouring."
     
    He is a living example of a true theologian, "a true theologian is one who prays, and one who prays in Spirit and in truth is a true theologian." (Evagrius Ponticus)
     
    I read The Truce of God in the mid 1980's and discovered a Christian thinker for whom peace, nuclear disarmament, and facing up to the dangerous fantasies of power, is a theological task as well as a moral priority for followers of Jesus.
     
    He is ridiculously clever and keeping up with him is a form of mental and spiritual aerobics. Good for you, but not to be overdone.
     
    To use an older Scottish saying, "he is far ben with God", meaning he is one who knows God deeply and with that mixture of familiarity and distance, love and reverence that not only allows for mystery, but knows that on holy ground you take off your shoes. .
     
    What he writes can stand re-reading and with recurring reward.
     
    In the light of all of that, I'm reading two or three pages a day of this book – all the above qualities and qualifications are on show.

  • John le Carré’s Final Novel: “Crisp Prose and a Precision-Tooled Plot.”

    P1000534Vintage John le Carré in his last book. A Christmas gift, a story well told, – a good read, if you like John le Carré, who I think is an acquired taste.

    It's quite a short novel, but the plot is intricately woven, written with a gentle humour that teases the reader, and slowly reveals the lives and motivations of the characters. The plot is only gradually disentangled, as we come to know, begin to like, or start to suspect, the various characters whose story this is.

    Readers of Le Carré will recognise his precise examination and exploration of secrets, subterfuge, betrayal, hidden loyalties and other nefarious human failings that are the working tools of espionage, and the shadowy worlds inhabited by those for whom mistrust is a way of life. I found the conclusion deeply satisfying, entirely plausible, and a more hopeful view of human emotion, motivation and what the existentialists would call authentic commitments.

    The Observer review describes it as "crisp prose, a precision-tooled plot." Exactly so.

  • Dragged out of my comfort zone to gaze at the morning sky.

    Wild gooseIt was 7.30 in the morning when Dorothy rang my doorbell. She was dressed as always, immaculate hair, mohair cardigan, blue chiffon scarf and her favourite brightly coloured long skirt. She tugged my arm, urged me to come outside and look up.

    And there flying over the West End of Aberdeen, against a frost blue sky, a long skein of geese, honking their way north. “Would it not be fine to be able to do that” she asked, her eyes bright with the thought of such wild freedom. I hope I’m as alive as her when I start pushing eighty!

    The wild goose is a Celtic symbol of the Holy Spirit, expressing the freedom and urgency of God, and the homing instinct of the human heart. “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in You”, said Saint Augustine. His words, a millennium and half later, still speak to the restlessness and God embarrassment of people not sure what we want, but full of wanting.

    The American poet, Mary Oliver understood the frustration and desire that give our hearts colour, edge and the rich texture of emotional and spiritual longing.  

    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

    are heading home again.

    Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

    the world offers itself to your imagination,

    calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

    over and over announcing your place

    in the family of things.

    About that restlessness, Jesus said, “I have come that you might have life, life in all its fullness.” Two thousand years later Jesus still dares us to take flight, and fly, and live, and find our home in God.

  • Jonah and the Whale 7. Book Review: Jonah the Conflicted Prophet

    6a00d8341c6bd853ef02af148d421a200c-320wiSix prophets in just under 500 pages of commentary, only forty of them on Jonah. But this is vintage Goldingay. It may be history told as a parable, or a parable linked with history and memory – either way for Goldingay it's the theological message that matters, and the freight that the narrative is created to carry.

    The interactions between a violent city, a resistant prophet and a merciful God enable the storyteller to set up powerful tensions in the narrative and plot. The narrator then develops larger than life characters of city, prophet and God, and then pushes the story towards a conclusion which is intentionally inconclusive. Like a good post-modern novel the reader is left with unanswered questions about what happens to the protagonist Jonah.

    Goldingay's take on Jonah is that of a conflicted prophet who expects mercy for himself, but punishment for Nineveh; Jonah who believes in a predictable God who brings judgement on evil and injustice, and shows mercy to the penitent; Jonah, whose expectations are conflicted when he encounters a city of pagans whose repentance forces a theological collision between who Jonah believes God to be (righteous punisher of sin), and who God chooses to be (gracious in mercy and pardon), and to a city overwhelmingly guilty of great evil. 

    All of this is worked out in a commentary that combines first class exegesis with sympathetic, even compassionate reflection on the inner psychological and theological worlds of Jonah. It's clear that Goldingay likes conflicted prophets! Yet on the other hand, as a commentator he refuses to jump to safe conclusions about who God is and what God is about. "God's election is not for the sake of the chosen, but for the sake of God's purpose." And that purpose is formed out of who God is – "a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity."

    But what exactly is God's purpose in this frustratingly inconclusive story? It is justice…and mercy! It is to bring about repentance of the so far impenitent. It is to use Jonah to give the violent city a chance, but a chance Jonah doesn't want them to be offered. But which Nineveh takes and God honours.

    Goldingay's commentary is readable and engaged with the text and its commentators. His tone is both playful and serious, as is the book of Jonah itself. His theological reflections are profound and uncomfortably searching for those who think they have God sussed. The commentary exploits the playfulness of the story, pointing out the ironies, the practical jokes and the serious questions posed throughout this intriguing text. His own comments are, as he believes the text to be, theologically subversive of the lazy certainties of those who have become complacent of grace, and grudging to the point of jealousy of God's abounding steadfast love. Jonah is, quite literally, a wake-up call to its readers, then and now, to see the world as God sees it – all those people, and many cattle.

    JonahliteThroughout Goldingay is in conversation with the best exegetical literature, and with other important conversation partners, including: Leslie Allen, Karl Barth, Jacques Ellul, Ann Lamott, Martin Luther, Elie Wiesel, and H W Wolff. The commentary is also strong on intertextual references, the exegesis constantly linked to the wider biblical witness either for comparison or contrast. The Subject Index and Scripture Index are thorough, user-friendly, and enable the reader to follow up such inter-connections within and beyond Jonah. 

    The commentary on Jonah represents only 10% of this volume. I bought it because I know Goldingay's work, and have profited constantly from his fresh, at times provocative, but always thorough and reverent treatment of the biblical text. I'm happy to have this composite volume. I think it's worth the investment, dealing as it does with three of the "major minor prophets", along with Joel, Obadiah and the recalcitrant Jonah. 

  • Act of Oblivion: A Good Book for Dreich Days.

    41kucby28bLI recently finished Robert Harris, Act of Oblivion, and thoroughly enjoyed it – read it in three days. (well two of them were dreich and wet). In Scotland 'dreich' is the word we reserve for days that are dull, damp, cold and relentlessly demotivating!
     
    Robert Harris excels in the historical novel, this one based in the English Civil War period and its immediate aftermath. Following the execution of Charles I, and 12 years later the Restoration under Charles II, it's the story of the manhunt for those who signed the death warrant of the King.
     
    Harris tells a great story of embellished fact and convincing fiction. You can smell 17th C London, and its reek of political corruption and public suspicion in a divided country. The period includes the Plague Year and the Great Fire of London, and without overplaying the details, it's obvious Harris has done his research and imagined well some of these great historic events. The precarious life of the colonies, the minimum three months for first class mail across the Atlantic, the secret networks of Puritans, spies, the Court and Europe, these are each woven into a narrative which never loses momentum.
     
    The story includes Thomas Goodwin the puritan, the early days of Harvard, Cotton Mather, and a helpful list of the main dramatis personae in the various locations of London, New Haven, Massachusetts, London and Europe. Puritanism is a tricky movement to define, and was much more diverse and fluid than the caricatures of bad history writing. That said, Harris steers a middle course in his imaginative reconstruction of Puritan political, theological and social motivation, and is particularly subtle when he explores the moral and spiritual inner life of Puritan piety. The Puritans are both villains and saints, their motivations complex, and their individual convictions and ambitions as varied as any other radical religious and political community.
     
    On a League table of Robert Harris novels Act of Oblivion is in the top five for me. The Cicero Trilogy (Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator) is as good as any historical fiction I know on the transformation of Rome from Republic to Empire. Conclave is a remarkable account of another religiously intense community, this time the Vatican and the 72 hours of a papal election – not usually the stuff of thrillers, but this is just that. Munich I think is one of the most perceptive attempts to understand Neville Chamberlain, and the fear and dread in Europe as Nazi ambitions and war aims became increasingly clear. Act of Oblivion easily resides on the top shelf of Harris's books. Aye. A good read for dreich days.

     

  • Jonah and the Whale 6. Customer Service Complaints About God’s Compassion.

    6a00d8341c6bd853ef026bde93c363200c-320wiYou only understand Jonah if you’ve learned to hate, if life experience has educated you in heartfelt, instinctive, focused and justified hostility.

    And so 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 the polarisation of extremes, two poles arcing in violence

    Jonah stands for those who want to see power get what it deserves; 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 “You’ve had it!” God’s call could be understood as permission to hate, time to ridicule and gloat, and celebrate the anguish of the enemy.

    Jonah-before-Nineveh-Abraham-Van-Linge-1631-Cambridge Christ College CathedralSo 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? Instead, “But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. (1.)

    Jonah’s bizarre behaviour only makes sense when you come to Jonah’s angry and exasperated prayer once Nineveh repents and the Lord relents! “Jonah prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”

     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, with Nineveh? That is 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. Jonah prays his anger. The very thing he believes most about God (compassion) is getting in the way of the very thing he wants most from God (punishment). His faith, The God he believes in, is frustrating his sense of justice. So Jonah won’t take that million to one chance. God, of course, has other plans.

    And as the story unfolds it isn’t that Jonah will, learn a new theology of God – he will learn the hard way that a theology of grace and mercy forces a re-think about the deepest, hardest, most heart-breaking, experiences of his life.

    Jonah chagallHe’ll learn about God’s generosity and legitimate 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. As we read this story today it also touches on some of the most important things we will ever need to know – about ourselves, about God, about all those different others, human and animal, planetary and elemental, who share this planet with us – and about whom we should be concerned.

    The story about Jonah doesn't set out to give us the right answers to our questions; it does something far more subversive. It givers us new questions that show us how little we understand the scandal of grace, how hard it is to have sympathy with the creative strategies of divine mercy, and how outrageously different is God's compassion from our expectations.

    One further thought. When you have time, read the whole story – then these verses from a much longer hymn by F. W. Faber.

    There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
    Like the wideness of the sea;
    There’s a kindness in His justice,
    Which is more than liberty.

    There is grace enough for thousands
    Of new worlds as great as this;
    There is room for fresh creations
    In that upper home of bliss.

    For the love of God is broader
    Than the measure of our mind;
    And the heart of the Eternal
    Is most wonderfully kind.

    It is God: His love looks mighty,
    But is mightier than it seems;
    ’Tis our Father: and His fondness
    Goes far out beyond our dreams.

    But we make His love too narrow
    By false limits of our own;
    And we magnify His strictness
    With a zeal He will not own.