Jonah, Mark 1: 14-20
With this past week’s news of the cruise ship that floundered in Italian waters, we were reminded of the dangers of turbulent seas, and the consequences of human arrogance, as the story came out about the captain wanting to sail by a friend’s house to show off his huge new ship. Seeing the pictures on the news, people were saying they’re not wanting to take a cruise anytime soon.
In our Old Testament reading for today, we find the story of Jonah, who likewise encountered the perils of the sea, and the unforeseen consequences of choosing to go his own way.
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While the story of Jonah and the whale has mostly been relegated to children's Bibles and Sunday School, his story actually holds far more than first appears. The word of the Lord comes to Jonah, an Israelite, and asks him to preach repentance to the great city of Nineveh, the capital of one of the superpowers of his day, Assyria. Assyria was “a by-word for brutality in the ancient world.”[i] It's intriguing that this part of Assyria is now modern-day Iraq, and Nineveh is likely what we now call Mosul. Then as now, their people were antagonistic toward Israel. So Jonah is asked to go and preach the need for repentance to a nation that had fought against his own people.
His message was to warn them of coming judgment, so they could change their ways and be spared. Jonah wasn’t happy about God extending forgiveness to his enemies. So he went down to the port, and got on a ship headed away from Nineveh, where God had called him, setting off to Tarshish. Scholars believe Tarshish may have been somewhere along the Italian coast, perhaps not far from where the cruise ship ran aground. Wherever it was, all Jonah wanted was to get as far away as possible from the presence of the Lord.
As we look at Jonah’s journey, there may be some parallels with the choices we face in our lives. Sometimes we have a sense of what we ought to be doing with our life, but we’re tempted, as Jonah was, to go in another direction.
A young man goes into the law hoping to help those who need an advocate. But before long, he finds himself swept up in the comforting embrace of a lucrative firm with all the luxuries, and soon he has forgotten what he wanted to be.
A mother is wanting to volunteer as a tutor for disadvantaged children, yet she fights the temptation to nest at home, rather than look beyond her own family, since life is hectic and full. So she keeps putting off that inner voice beckoning her to do the tutoring.
In my work as the Dean of a seminary in Melbourne, one of the parts of the role that I enjoyed most was doing intake interviews with new students. Some students said they knew they were called into ministry at a young age, but they’d been postponing the call as long as they could, entering seminary late in their career or for some, on the verge of retirement. Only after many years had passed and they had taken other paths did they turn and follow the call of their heart.
In Jonah's case, God went to extraordinary lengths to get Jonah's attention and to call him back to the path he was meant to take. The ship that Jonah boarded is tossed by a great storm, and the sailors throw him overboard, as they see him as the cause of the storm. To this day, sailors will say someone is "a Jonah," if they are an unlucky presence on board a boat.
From here, Jonah’s story gets even more extreme, with the whale sent as an instrument of God to carry Jonah back in the direction he was meant to be going. Jonah is swallowed, and spends three nights and days in the belly of the whale.[ii]
In a passage that delights children reading Jonah’s story, the fish spews Jonah up on the shore near Nineveh, delivering him precisely where he was meant to be. Then there is one of the great understatements in all of Scripture. The word of the Lord came a second time to Jonah, and this time, the Scripture says, Jonah got up and went--he wasn't about to take any chances of a reencounter with the whale or whatever else God might dream up for him!
There is a hopeful note in all of this; that God is a God of second chances, a God who[iii] persists with us even when we drag our feet or when we’ve gone off to a far country before turning for home. God can use extraordinary events to get our attention, a time of illness, or our being homebound in a storm, as happened to some in the valley this week with the wild weather. God can even use a time of unemployment to prompt us to reflect and to ask, are we following where God would lead in our lives? Sometimes it is in looking out from the hospital window that we begin to wonder where we are meant to be going with our life. Or we find it is in times of hiking alone that there is time to ponder where life is taking us.
Even after his encounter with the whale, Jonah was still a reluctant prophet.[iv] He was to preach to the Ninevites to urge them to repent, but his heart was not in it. The message he ended up giving them was only a few words, "But 40 days, and Nineveh will be overthrown!" (perhaps the shortest sermon ever given!) Yet, to the comfort of preachers everywhere, God was able to use even Jonah’s poor words. The king of Nineveh called his people to repent. They put on sackcloth and ashes and prayed mightily to God. So God showed mercy and spared them. [v]
There is a radical word of grace here, that even the enemies of God's people are not seen as outside the circle of God's forgiveness, once they turn to God. But while God is merciful, Jonah sulks; he's upset that his enemies are spared when he'd hoped they would be smited, or smote.[vi]
In one sense, Jonah is a negative example of a sort of spiritual curmudgeon, one we hope we will not emulate, reluctant for God's grace to reach those outside the fold. There are a number of challenging parallels to his story in our present day. Given that he preached to the enemy Ninevites, would Jonah today be called to preach repentance to the Taliban or Hamas, or Iran, extending the possibility of forgiveness to those who have embraced violence (even as Assyria had done in its day)?
Or if we look closer to home, would Jonah be like us when we feel we’ve been wronged, and we would rather hold onto our indignation than forgive someone who has done us wrong?
While we are glad of God's forgiveness for our own sins and shortcomings, sometimes we are reluctant to think of that forgiveness being offered to people who have done great harm, whether to our nation or in our family or in our own lives.
Looking at Jonah's story, we can ask ourselves, are there places where we may be sailing in the opposite direction from where God intends, where we’re going, full steam ahead to Tarshish? And where might God be using dramatic means to get our attention as he did with Jonah, to call us back to the path God has in mind for us?
It can be hard to know what to make of Jonah’s tale. Is it just a children’s story? At first, it seems to ask us to believe, as Lewis Carroll once said, “six impossible things before breakfast.”[vii] Here we have a prophet who gets swallowed by a whale, a nation whose people repent to such an extent that even their animals put on sackcloth and ashes! Here we find a servant of the Lord who is so petulant that he wishes he were dead when he sees his enemies repent and turn to God.
Yet Jonah’s story is more than these odd details. It raises some challenging questions; what do we do when God is more willing to forgive than we are ourselves? How do we move beyond anger, so that we don’t find ourselves where Jonah found himself at the end of his story, embittered by old hurts he couldn’t let go of?
In all of this, we are invited to remember that God’s willingness to extend mercy to those who least deserve it, is precisely what “opens the door to our own hope.” We are beckoned to embrace the larger character of God, whose “mercy endures forever.” This can be hard to do, to forgive and to offer God’s mercy to someone who has hurt us or those we love. Yet it is the only way that cycles of violence and blame can find an end. Sometimes when our lives are blocked by old hurts and hatreds, we find the only way forward is to show the same mercy we ourselves have been given.[viii]
So may we be ready when the Lord beckons us, not to be a procrastinating prophet or a reluctant disciple, but to respond in joy, glad for our calling to the great adventure of life in God’s kingdom of love and mercy and grace.
Let us pray: Help us with joy to arise and follow you, to celebrate your great mercy and grace, that extends to each of us and all of us. Through Christ we pray. Amen.
Endnotes:
[i] Callie Plunkett Brewton, commentary on the First Reading, part of Luther Seminary’s lectionary website, workingpreacher.org/preaching.
[ii] Christian interpreters have seen these three days as symbolizing Christ’s three days in the tomb before his resurrection.
[iii] Richard Boyce in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Vol 1, David Bartlett and Barbara Brown Taylor, eds., Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008, p. 271.
[iv] Howard Wallace, professor of Old Testament at Melbourne’s Uniting Church Theological College calls Jonah, “the most reluctant of prophets.” http://hwallace.unitingchurch.
[v] see also Eugene Peterson’s Under the Unpredictable Plant, Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns, 1992, an excellent commentary on the book of Jonah.
[vi] Some Biblical scholars read the book of Jonah as an allegory, in which Jonah stands for the nation of Israel in the days before the exile. While they were meant to be a light to the surrounding Gentile nations to help them learn of God’s ways, they were slow to take up this calling to be a light to the nations. The great storm is seen as the destruction of Jerusalem, and Jonah’s captivity in the belly of the whale represents the people’s time in exile. In this way of seeing the book, Jonah’s grumbling stands for the unwillingness of his people to see the borders of the faith extending beyond those whom they knew to be God’s people. So James D. Newsome in The Hebrew Prophets, and Mortimer J. Cohen, in Pathways through the Bible.