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Sometime around 1978, I came across this book on Jonah in the now long gone Free Church Book Shop on the Mound, in Edinburgh. It cost me £2.50. I spent the following day reading it cover to cover, and over the next few days re-reading and making notes. Alongside it I read the then new commentary on Jonah by Leslie Allen. Later that year I preached four sermons on Jonah in Partick Baptist Church, Glasgow, my first full time pastorate.

Summer of 1979 I was invited to lead the Bible studies at Kilcreggan, a residential Christian holiday centre on the Firth of Clyde. I decided to explore Jonah as a text that taught us not about mission as such, but about the nature of the God who sends, the missionary God. I wanted to test-drive Fretheim's intriguing suggestion that Jonah is about the creative fusion of mercy and mission in the nature of God.

Anger and judgement are primary colours in the weaving of the Jonah story. But, Fretheim argued, they are woven within the overall pattern of God's mission and mercy. In 1979 Leslie Allen's commentary was one of the best and most up to date around. He gave significant exegetical support for understanding Jonah as a parable about the nature of God and God's ways with a world where evil and anger, hate and violence, grievance and vengeance are realities that destroy human flourishing and frustrate God's good purposes in creation.

I remember very clearly being anxious about folk getting hung up on the historicity of the book, straining at the word parable and swallowing a whale of a story. More seriously, many evangelicals stop listening to the message of Jonah at the first questioning of its historical credentials, whale, outsized Nineveh, gourd, worm, and all. But not that week.

Over that week of teaching I tried to enthuse people with the brilliance of the story, and the theological power of mission earthed in mercy. I wanted them to discover the utter surprise that God's grace is a scandal, and our being offered that grace is itself scandalous. And so to rejoice in a God who faces humanity's worst, and comes as mercy to those who see their own worst selves, and are rescued by mercy and grace that came looking for them. Mission and Mercy.

I needn't have worried. The whale was barely spotted, and was the least of our concerns. Each day I taught for about 40 minutes, and then 20-30 minutes discussion all together or in smaller groups. Most folk wanted to talk more about grace to the undeserving, and about a God whose judgement is always provisional, and to think through the message of reconciling love urging repentance, precipitating change and giving birth to faith, – life changing faith in the grace, compassion and mercy of God. 

Jonah has been in my system ever since. Jonah 4.2 is the moment of unveiling, a denouement to which the story has been leading, and from which it will flow on into an interrogation of Jonah, and the reader, whether you, me, or whoever.

Jonah prayed to the Lord, "It is just as I feared, Lord, when I was still in my own country and it was to forestall this that I tried to escape to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, long-suffering, ever constant, always ready to relent and not inflict punishment."

This is the recurring and core truth of Israel's faith. The words 'gracious' and 'compassionate' occur repeatedly in the Old Testament, always with God as their reference. Together they capture the meaning of 'hesed', the long-suffering faithfulness and covenant loyalty of God.

But it isn't all done and dusted.

Now and then I share Jonah's perplexity.

I too have questions, hesitations, and at times a grudging Jonah heart.

There's a question of fairness in a world where evil can flourish, prosper and defy God, and then at the last minute, grace opens eyes, touches consciences, and there is genuine repentance and pardon. What's the point of being good in a world like that?

There's a question of theodicy, of how all the victims of all the Ninevehs from then to now, ever get justice, and receive recompense for suffering. How is it that evil acts and evil people don't get what they deserve, finally and fully, because there's a get out clause of repentance and mercy?

There's a question of how we find meaning in our existence if we do not live in a moral universe in which good is good, evil is evil, and each has consequences beyond themselves. Why should anyone bother about whether they are doing good or evil if, in the end, evil doesn't get its come-uppance?     

Oh there are answers to these questions, good ones. The disturbing genius of Jonah is that in one short story all our questions are reconfigured and answered by a theology which isn't about justice, vengeance, punishment and ultimate destruction.

Instead there is a revision class in theology. Mercy, gracious compassion, constant willingness to relent – God is like that – for everyone. Including us, me, you…and them, whoever 'them' happens to be. 

More has to be said. The story of Jonah isn't a Reader's Digest comfort story. But for now perhaps it is enough to allow ourselves to be interrogated by the story, and unsettled by the God who is the main protagonist of both the Jonah story, and our own story.

The God who is "a gracious and compassionate God, long-suffering, ever constant, always ready to relent and not inflict punishment."

That God, and his killer, life-giving question, "Do you do well to be angry?"

Why do we take the photos we do?

So much of what we see is accidental; it's a matter of when and where we are, whether we look closely enough, and how much attention we pay. 

After heavy rain, walking to the car, I notice one leaf, sprinkled with rainfall, framed against worn tarmac, one of thousands within eyesight scattered along the street, discarded by trees now preparing for winter. 

This particular leaf is worn and torn, even the water drops have black specks which nature has not photoshopped out, and neither will I.

What made me stop, and look more closely, and decide to take a photograph of a fallen leaf on a worn pavement?

I have no idea; except that having seen it I couldn't unsee it, and the closer I looked the more I could see.

Is it a wonderful photo? That depends how we are using the word wonder. In one sense wonder is about feelings of awe, being mystified by what is new, or beautiful, or unusual.

But used another way it is a word nearer curiosity, an interest in something for its own sake. This photo, as I pay attention to it, makes me wonder.

I wonder what have been the countless stories of the countless footsteps that have worn away the surface of the pavement? 

I wonder about the transience, fragility and ubiquity of leaves, their role in helping to keep our air filtered, and the functional beauty of their structure.

I wonder about this particular leaf, jewelled with rain or nature's tears, anticipating the autumn of its existence as part of the great cycle of creation, dying and recreation.

I wonder about the contrast between geology and biology, stone and leaf, permanence and transience, road and tree, human construct and natural product, and all the other contrasts between what this world gives us, and what we make of it.

I wonder too, about the inner processes of human perception that sees and draws us in towards such ordinary things which then touch us with extraordinary feelings of wonder.

This photo was an accident of timing, the result of momentary paying attention, pushed further I might say a moment of epiphany, seeing both what is there, and what it signifies. 

Such accidents of timing, moments of attention and gifts of epiphany I choose to believe are the attention-getting whistles of the Holy Spirit, waking us up to the world around us.

And therefore this photo is a sacrament of a particular moment, a reminder of how the gift of wonder and wondering ambushes us and jerks us out of our shoulder shrugging complacency about the miracle of the ordinary and the invasion of the everyday by the extraordinary.     

Listen to my tale, of Jonah and the whale,

Way down in the middle of the ocean.

How did he get there? Whatever did he wear?

Way down in the middle of the ocean.

Preaching he should be at Nineveh, you see! 

He disobeyed, a very foolish notion.

But God forgave his sin, salvation entered in,

Way down in the middle of the ocean. 

This is Sunday School exposition, a way of telling the story that reduces a literary masterpiece to a cartoon comic. But there's no doubt singing it fixes the outline of the story, and the didactic soteriological lessons in the memory; evidenced by my word perfect recall from over 58 years ago! There's something about Jonah the prophet I've always liked, and something about the story of Jonah that has intrigued, provoked, and often enough interrogated my own understanding of God.

I live in and look at the world around, and wonder how I'm supposed to think about my own contemporary world where empire, power and cruelty still seem to go unrestrained, and their excesses unpunished despite the cost to human lives. Nineveh stands for any kind of overwhelming, oppressive power, whether nations, economic systems, or social structures which become abusive, unjust, self-perpetuating by holding on to the levers of power – from military superiority as threat or reality, to economic control of resources, to institutional systems that marginalise and depersonalise.

The sheer variety of interpretations on offer evidence the cleverness, ingenuity and ambiguities woven throughout the story of Jonah. A quick trawl of currently available studies, from devotional and popular expositions to more scholarly commentary, reveals quite a lot about the authors' presuppositions concerning the purpose of this very short story. Jonah – a Study of Compassion; Jonah – Running From God; Jonah – Preacher on the Run; Jonah, the Parochial Prophet; The Reluctant Evangelist; The Prodigal Prophet; Man Overboard; You Can Run but You Can't Hide; Jonah, God's Scandalous Mercy; Under the Unpredictable Plant.

Recently I've come back to Jonah for a closer look. I've preached on it, taught seminars on Jonah and Mission in a Pluralist Society, over the years read commentaries and monographs, and I'm glad to say I still haven't tamed this infuriatingly recalcitrant story, nor have I lessened its uncomfortable theological ambiguities. The scholarly literature is extensive, and every bit as varied in presupposition and conclusion as the titles of current popular treatments above indicate.  

But Jonah becomes a politically charged story when I ask where Nineveh is today, and who or what are the powers in my time that do great evil, whose behaviour is "dire", and whose power seems unbreakable by those worst affected by them.

Then I ask- so who are the Jonah figures today, the doom merchants, those morally outraged at abusive power, who want justice understood as punishment to fall on oppressive regimes and systems; who are today's Jonah figures with vividly seared memories of "dire evil"? Who are the fierce critics of Nineveh who want to see it brought down, humiliated, and replaced by something better?

Then there is the God who sends Jonah, pursues Jonah, argues with Jonah, threatens Nineveh with destruction, and then shows mercy. It's not often a prophet is disappointed in God; but Jonah is seriously disaffected, in fact he is (literally) mad as hell!

Reading the story again, I follow Jonah to Tarshish and inside the whale, eventually to Nineveh and then to his little hut on the hill to watch the eschatological firework display that finally gives Nineveh exactly and precisely the justice and judgement and punishment it deserves. But instead of judgement, mercy; instead of fireworks, repentance; instead of satisfaction at justice done, sheer frustration at the audacity of God's freedom to pardon. 

So what on earth is this short short-story meant to mean? Is it a rebuke to post-exilic exclusivism as recorded in Ezra Nehemiah? Is the story really about a reluctant preacher or a generous God, or both? Does Jonah fail, or was he set up? Does God change his mind, or did God know all along the moves that Jonah would make, and checked him towards submission like the ultimate cosmic chess master? Is Jonah really about mission in the way I used it 40 years ago? Or is that a hi-jacking of a much more complex story to provide a 'biblical' warrant for evangelism, and issue an early warning about having a too narrow understanding of what God is actually about in the world?

Alongside this annoyingly provocative and intentionally ambiguous story I sometimes read some verses of this remarkable hymn by Frederick 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.

But we make God’s love too narrow
by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness
with a zeal God will not own.

For the love of God is broader
than the measure of man's mind;
and the heart of the eternal
is most wonderfully kind.

At the very least, the "tale of Jonah and the whale" leads to serious thought and re-thinking about the kind of God God is. The God of the expected and the unexpected, of judgement and mercy, consistent in divine freedom and final purpose, the God described in Jonah 4.2:  

“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."

By the way, the text says Jonah prayed these words. This is Jonah knowing and trusting God sufficiently to have an argument, to rebuke God, to complain that God is who God is! It's one of the astonishing features of Jewish thought and faith that there can be such transparency of thought and feeling, expressed in the intimacy of anger – and the patience of God in explaining, yet again Who God is. 

“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves; ensure justice for those being crushed. Yes, speak up for the poor and helpless, and see that they get justice.” Proverbs 31. 8-9.(NLT)

It's not as if this verse is out of step with the main thrust of the Bible. In the Bible 'justice' is a catch-all word that holds a variety of obligations: care for the poor, protection of the vulnerable, support for the weak, food for the hungry, hospitality for the stranger.

An entire Bible text concordance could be compiled with commands and imperatives, exhortations and incentives, stories and parables, about how to treat other people well, the importance of generosity as a lifestyle, and respect for the dignity and worth of each person whose path we cross.

So why is it that moral imperatives like those in that Proverbs text exert minimal purchase on our credit and debit cards, aren't enough to compel us to be the voice of those silenced by the powerful, and only occasionally feature at the centre and beating heart of our worship? Find a few contemporary worship songs that chime with "ensure justice for those being crushed." You might, but they are a barely audible minority report.

What would happen if a church community took these verses as their motto for 2023? We've done enough with verses about our own individual spiritual development, or renewed commitment to the disciplines of being the church community. These are often self-interested, perhaps even self-indulgent. How about a year when every agenda, from full church meetings to deacons' meetings, committees and task groups, had this verse as a specific, recurring, first item on our agendas?

First, it would force us to ask questions that dig beneath our comfort zones. Who are the people who can't speak for themselves? How can we help them find their voice? Are there times when we need to be their voice, or at least join our own voices to the chorus of the unheard to raise the volume levels? 

Second, who are those that our social systems, political policies, and our own social and political preferences and prejudices crush? 

"The poor may be defenceless against [the powerful] because they are too ignorant to counteract the obstructionist tactics of the legally savvy, too inarticulate to state their case convincingly, too poor to produce proper evidence, too lowly to command respect." (Waltke, vol 2 Commentary on Proverbs, p. 509)

These are the very people good government is there to enable, empower, and ensure that justice is available to everyone, regardless of status, wealth, power or social favour. 

Third, the imperatives are clear and uncompromising. "Speak up…ensure…speak up…see to it!" Do everything in your power to make this happen, church! What does that mean in practice? What is it the church is called to speak, to ensure, to see to, in relation to food banks, heat banks, fair and just wages, resources for adequate and humane social care, proper provisions for processing and humanely treating people seeking asylum? If the answers are not obvious, at least the questions are. And that's a start.

Fourth, in the light of this embarrassing text, what do we have to say about all of us being complicit in creating the kind of society that tolerates food banks as a growth industry? How can we better speak up for, and ensure justice for, those who now depend on food bank provisions to eat, be warm, retain some dignity? How do we "see to it" that justice and fairness can advance far enough to begin reducing the need for food banks, heat banks, and other support providers? Yes, they are hard questions, at times intransigent. But to be a follower of Jesus is already to be well down the road to loving our neighbour, questioning the status quo, and doing what is necessary for those Jesus once called, with exaggerated irony, the least of his family of brothers and sisters.

Fifth, and much more personally. I ask myself what difference it would make to my own way of living, my way of seeing the world, my responsiveness to the countless people I encounter day by day and week by week – what difference it would make if this text was printed at the top of each page in my week to view diary. A reminder that I am called to "Speak up…ensure…see to it." As a self examen at the end of a week – note down times this verse has galvanised my speech, energised my action, and so made a difference in the scales that measure out human well-being and social justice.

And thus, finally. Supposing I started my prayers by saying this text, and allowing it to question what I've been about. Use it as an intercession for those I know, or have seen in the passing – to pray for those who are indeed, without a voice, the poor, those disempowered by systems and structures, – unwanted, inconvenient, overlooked, superfluous to the requirements of a society sated in both possessions and possessiveness. To pray for justice and to speak up for it; to pray for the poor but also defend them; to pray for those seeking asylum, but also to befriend, support, be compassionate towards. That, at least.

I guess I could read those two verses from Proverbs and feel the inner slump of resignation. "I do what I can," might seem a realistic enough goal. But then I hear those imperatives of Proverbs, rephrased by Jesus and embodied repeatedly in the Gospels as his way of neighbour love and love for God in action – ""Speak up…ensure…speak up…see to it!"

Justice is what neighbour love looks like in public. Love your neighbour as yourself because you love God. Who knows, you may end up loving God even more in those very words and acts of speaking up, ensuring, and seeing to it that so long as you are in the neighbourhood, nobody is unloved.  

So Jim. Forget the complacent, "I do what I can." The text is not about shoulder-shrugging resignation. It's a yoke to be taken up with glad determination to learn and live Jesus' way. "See to it!" Do everything in your power "to ensure justice for those being crushed."

How? Well, God's grace is sufficient; God's peace guards the mind and heart; the Holy Spirit gives words to disciples under pressure; we walk every day in the love from which nothing can separate; and we serve one who came with his own manifesto of the Kingdom of God, and we buy into it with everything we are, and the living Christ walks with us on the road of the Kingdom of God:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”  (Luke 4.14-30)

 

New Year is a good time to say thank you. And don’t be too hard on the year we’ve just had. It has been difficult, unpredictable, at times infuriating, a bit scary, and a change of calendar to a new year doesn’t really solve anything. Except.

Years ago a lovely older friend remembered the family gatherings at New Year, and it was a big family. Her father used to look round the table and before giving thanks for the food would say. “Aye, isn’t it a mercy we’re all spared to be here?”

So here we are on the first day of 2023, and perhaps for all our complaints during and about the past year, our first words should be a thank you that we are still here, and ready to go again on the next part of our journey. Thankful too for all our friends out there who enrich our lives, touch us with grace, make us laugh, and help us live and love and interpret and understand something of ourselves, our world, and what matters most.

My current screen saver is this photo I took up on Brimmond Hill, with the sun rising over the horizon just ahead of me on the path. In 2023 there will be new paths to climb and follow, which is where hope points us. Every day, we walk towards the future that comes to us from the God who is always ahead of us. And as we walk towards whatever comes next, we’ll do so with our friends around us, and in the good company of God. And maybe find time to say, “Isn’t it a mercy we’re all spared to be here.”

Thought for the Day – Towards a New Year.

Monday

Luke 2.19 “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”

The day after Christmas isn’t an anti-climax. Christmas isn’t past and finished. The gift of Christ is God’s self-giving love, coming amongst us, to be with us, always, as Immanuel. Treasure that up in your heart, and ponder, and be glad and grateful. “Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift.”

Tuesday

Luke 2.20 “The shepherds returned to their fields, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.”

Like the shepherds, back to normal where nothing much has changed. Except we have changed. The world is different because of the coming of Jesus. This is a world where the feet of God walked as human feet. Shepherds who were of no social standing, stood in a floodlit field at an angel rock concert, and then stood first at the manger. Theirs were among the first eyes to see Jesus. No wonder they went away singing.

Wednesday

John 1.14 “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

Maybe we won’t sing Christmas carols again for a while – though I’ve often thought we should sing one occasionally near Easter. “"Hail the Heav'n-born Prince of Peace! Hail the Sun of Righteousness! Light and Life to all he brings, ris'n with Healing in his Wings." See. Christmas and Easter converge. We have seen his glory, full of grace and truth – in the manger, on the cross, and in that early morning sunlit garden.

Thursday

Matthew 1.23 “You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Names matter. This child’s name will describe who he is and what his life is about. It was a common and popular boys’ name. The humility of God is shown in his coming as the child of a poor family, born in an obscure village, hunted as a refugee – and yet, he was the eternal Word made flesh, Jesus who saves us from our sins. “How sweet the name of Jesus sounds in a believer’s ear; it soothes his sorrows, heals his wounds and drives away his fear.” The same writer wrote, “Amazing Grace”!

Friday

Matthew 2.11-12 “Then they opened their treasures and presented him with gifts of gold, and of incense and of myrrh. And having been warned in a dream not to go back to Herod, they returned to their country by another route.”

Like the shepherds, the three travellers go back where they came from, and to the lives they knew. They had worshipped and handed over precious gifts, and deep down they knew the world had pivoted. Our world will always have its Herods, so drunk on power they don’t care about who suffers. But power is not God, and not God’s way. Love is God’s way. Gold speaks of God’s precious gift of Christ; incense is the gift of our worship; myrrh is the sign of sacrifice. Deep down, because of the coming of Jesus, we too know the world has pivoted, Immanuel, God with us.

Saturday

Isaiah 9. “And his name shall be called Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

The loving wisdom of God the Counsellor; the redemptive purpose and power of the Mighty God; the patient persistent love of God the Father; the reconciling grace and costly love of the Prince of Peace – these are the promises which all find their YES in Jesus. “No matter how many promises God has made, they are all Yes in Christ.” These four names would be a good way of structuring our prayers – for guidance in decisions, grace and strength, comfort and assurance, and peace for us and others.

Sunday

2 Corinthians 8.9 “For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.”

This is Paul arguing with the Corinthians to get a move on and give generously to the fund to help those who were starving from famine around Jerusalem. He goes to the very heart of our faith. We have been so enriched and blessed by Jesus’ self-sacrifice; so, in turn we are called to live into and out of that grace, that generous, joyful and life changing Gift of the heart of God. “He who did not spare his own Son, will he not freely, with him, give you everything else you need?” Of course He will!

Smudge says: I have no idea what Karl Barth's Critically realistic dialectical theology is all about. 

The birth of Jesus starts the story of the New Testament. I've always felt that Christmas is a good time to reflect on the way the Old Testament starts the story of all things. Before there was a world to redeem a world was made.

Long before the birth of Jesus, God made flesh, human beings were formed and wrought by the creative impetus of a Love incapable of self-absorption. That seems to be something of what John's Gospel is saying in chapter 1.

And out of that Eternal Love came all that is made, including human beings, with all the risk and cost that would entail. And God still did it.

Whatever else we make of the omniscience of God, that strangely technical word refers to that universe of deep and eternal knowing that we call the Love of God.

Three Fibonacci Poems on Creation and Incarnation.*

Creation

Let
there
be light!
Creation,
from first to last, an
imperative fiat of love,
as Benign Being invites a universe to be.

Rest

God's
peace!
Sabbath
observance.
God's recreation.
Well done good and faithful God.
Now our harder task. Curators of God's masterpiece.

Incarnation

First
word
becomes
final word.
What else could God do,
but wrap words in flesh, be born as
God whose love exhausts whole lexicons of spelled out words?

(c) Jim Gordon

Fibonacci poems follow the mathematical fibonacci sequence, the syllables counted as follows.

• 1 syllable for first line
• 1 syllable for second line
• 2 syllables for third
• 3 syllables for fourth
• 5 syllables for fifth
• 8 syllables for sixth
• 13 syllables for seventh

You can find out more about it all over here – https://www.writersdigest.com/write-better-poetry/fibonacci-poetry-a-new-poetic-form