Hilton Head Island, SC – September 15, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Jonah 2:10-3:10
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God repented of the evil he said he would do to them, and he did not do it. – Jonah 3:10 (RSV)
Have you ever done something you didn’t want to do, and it turned out very well, and you were both amazed and appalled? Have you?
Maybe your boss gave you an assignment you would do anything to avoid, but you couldn’t, because she was the boss. But you did it, and it was a resounding success, much to everyone’s astonishment, but most of all to your own. Things like that happen occasionally. Go figure.
Or maybe there was something you had been avoiding like the plague, because doing it would be a real pain in the neck. But finally you summoned up the courage and fortitude to do it, and lo and behold, you did a bang-up job with it. People stopped you on the street to congratulate you. You congratulated yourself, because you thought it would be a colossal failure, and it became a colossal success.
Last week Jonah was in the belly of the beast. You can decide for yourself if the beast was “a great fish,” as Jonah 1:17 says, or a whale, as everybody else says, and has always said. He was in the sea creature’s innards for three days and three nights, we are told, which amounts to the sum and substance of all of Chapter Two.
Chapter Two ends with a prosaic statement, and then a rather revolting comment. “And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon dry land.” You might expect God to be able to communicate with fish, since it is He who created them, but you don’t expect the Bible to talk about vomiting. It doesn’t seem quite kosher, shall we say. But since this is intended to be understood as a story, and not as the actual historical record of a particular prophet named Jonah, somehow this ingested fugitive has to get out of the whale’s stomach. So the whale comes into a deep bay where he can swim right up to the shore, and “Bwwwtt,” he spews the petrified prophet out onto dry land. I imagine it being somewhere on the Syrian coast. But since it never actually occurred, I only imagine it. One strong spew, and there is Jonah, once again on terra firma.
Then God gives the same instructions to his reluctant spokesman which He had given him before, and which Jonah chose to ignore, fleeing from God in the process. “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city,” said God, “and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” Oh all right, says Jonah to himself. I don’t want to go, but I’ll go. It is unhealthful, and potentially lethal, to refuse God’s demands. So off Jonah goes to Nineveh.
Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire. In its day, the Assyrian Empire was the most powerful nation-state in the entire Middle East. And presumably it is when it was its strongest that Jonah was sent there by God. The unknown writer of this story tells us Nineveh was “three days’ journey in breadth” (3:3). In those days most people walked to get where they wanted to go. There was no public transportation, and few people had horses or chariots. The average person could probably walk fifteen to twenty miles in a day, which means Nineveh was 45 to 60 miles wide. It wasn’t metropolitan Los Angeles or New York, but it was Chicago or Philadelphia or Atlanta. (Actually it wasn’t. Biblical writers often inflated their numbers, and the writer of this little prophecy shall do so again in the next chapter, as we shall see next week. Nineveh would have been much larger than Jerusalem, but when the prophecy of Jonah was written, Jerusalem would have been 50,000 people at most.)
The point is this: God wants Jonah to go to Neneveh to give the Assyrians holy hell. So Jonah goes to the city square, and climbing up on a huge statue of a lion (I made that up), he hollers, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” (3:4) “Holy cats!” say the Ninevites in unison. (They said that because Jonah was standing on the lion statue, and it was the first thought that came into their minds.) Then comes an almost incredible verse, chapter 3, verse 5: “And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them.”
We need to remember the circumstances behind this story, folks. This is a Jewish prophet who is commissioned by God to go to the capital city of Assyria, the most impressive urban center in the entire Middle East at the time, and he is to tell them God, the God of Israel, is about to smite them into smithereens. Nobody wants to be smitten into smithereens. Jonah doesn’t mind if it happens, however, because these people are Gentiles, and he doesn’t like Gentiles. From the historical standpoint of the Jews, Gentiles have always been a grave threat to Jews. The Egyptians, the Canaanites, the Moabites, the Ammonites, the Syrians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians: all of them from time to time tried to pound the Jews into oblivion. It wasn’t only in the ghettoes of Europe and during the pogroms in western Russia and Poland in the 19th century or during the Holocaust of the mid-20th century that Jews were threatened by Gentiles. They have regularly been threatened all down through history, because the Jews were and are a small people, and therefore easily attacked and defeated.
Thus it is not surprising that Jonah was reluctant to accept his divine assignment. He didn’t mind telling the Ninevites that in effect God was telling them they were going to hell. He was only too happy to convey that terrifying message. On the other hand, he feared he might be lynched on the spot for his brazen effrontery in telling them such a thing. Keep in mind, dear hearts, this is only a story, but in order to grasp its main point, we need to put ourselves into the mind of the story’s main character.
Incredibly, the Ninevites instantly repented of their sins, whatever sins they may have needed to repent of, and they put on sackcloth and ashes. And here I give you a cultural custom whose origins come from before there were any historical records to explain it. Sackcloth is like burlap. When those of us who are old were young, they sold potatoes or apples or even coal in burlap bags. Sackcloth is a very strong, but also a very rough, material. That’s why the tradition is that monks wore sackcloth robes and underclothes. It was to remind them constantly of their sins. And by pouring ashes over their heads, the ancients apparently believed God or the gods might not be able to locate them in the midst of their sins, and they would avert His (or their) wrath. I know this sounds very bizarre to us, but then, kissing sounds odd to the Inuit, who used to be called Eskimos. The Inuit allegedly prefer to rub noses to show affection. And when you consider where Aleuts live, nose rubbing makes far more sense.
According to the story, the Assyrian king was not in the central square of Nineveh when Jonah made his proclamation. However, when he heard about it, the king was shaken to his core. He too put on sackcloth, and threw ashes all over his royal person. He sent out a proclamation that everyone in Assyria was to repent. Every person, and even every animal, was also to put on sackcloth. (Forcing the critters to do this seems a bit excessive, but hey, I’m only telling you what the biblical story says.) “Who knows,” the mighty monarch said, “God may yet repent and turn from his fierce anger, so that we perish not?”
This is a pagan king paying very close attention to the God of the Jews, for heaven’s sake! This is a Gentile who pays homage to the Jewish God, additionally implying that God is the only God! This is amazing, astonishing, incredible! Things like this don’t happen!
Then we hear the even more astonishing words of our sermon text, the last verse of chapter 3: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God repented of the evil which he said he would do to them; and he did not do it.” Not only did the Assyrians repent, but God also repented. He was going to obliterate the Ninevites, but He changed His mind when they changed their mind.
About thirty or forty years ago, a branch of theology came into existence which was called “process theology.” To give an exceedingly brief explanation of this idea, it was proposed that the nature of God has changed and improved as time has gone on. Nobody stated it this way, but the notion was that God has been maturing through the centuries. One of the results of that idea, said the process theologians, is that God has become less vindictive.
The prophecy of Jonah is process theology 2300 years before process theology was invented. It postulates the notion that God did not favor only Jews (as He seems to do in most parts of the Hebrew Bible) or only Christians (as in the Greek Bible), but that instead God favors everyone. God doesn’t play favorites. If people do what they should do, which means to be righteous and to repent of doing wrong, God pours out blessings upon such folks. And that includes Assyrians, whom Israelites detested as their enemies for three or four hundred years in the first half of the first millennium before the time of Jesus, which is the period in which the prophecy of Jonah is set.
This four-chapter storybook prophecy was meant to proclaim that God loves everyone, and not just the people who follow what any biblical followers think are the biblical rules. If individual Syrian Alawites, who are the primary support for Bashar Assad, do what is right, God smiles on them. If Afghan Taliban, who have been fighting US soldiers for the past twelve years, do what is right, God smiles on them. If members of Al Qaeda do what is right, God smiles on them.
“Now just you hold on one little minute here, preacher!” you say. “Nobody from Al Qaeda does what is right!” Who, other than God, can possibly knows that to be correct? And what if they truly believe what they are doing is right, even if it’s wrong; what then? Who of us, in an ultimate sense, is in any position to judge?
The prophecy of Jonah is a gentle, if also deliberately frontal, attack on the long-held notions of many people among the Jews. And it is an attack on our attitudes if we imagine that God loves only those who have the same kind of religious ideas we have. Who but God can fairly and adequately judge the convictions or the behavior of anyone?
The first church I served as pastor was a small congregation of Presbyterians in a village on the shores of Lake Superior in northern Wisconsin. There were four churches in our town: a Roman Catholic parish, which had probably two-thirds of all the people who attended any kind of church; our congregation, which had two hundred members and should have been much smaller, except that the Presbyterians got to Bayfield before any other Protestants and that gave them a sizeable head start; a Lutheran church, which should have been bigger than the Presbyterian church, with the droves of Scandinavians who lived there, but wasn’t; and a very small General Conference Baptist church, whose denomination had originated among disaffected Scandinavian Lutherans in Minnesota, and was theologically very conservative.
There was an old reprobate in town who had lived there all his life. Everything you shouldn’t do he did, and everything you should do he didn’t do. Then one night, when he was perhaps fifty years old, he happened to wander into the Baptist church when they were having a revival, and instantaneously he “got religion,” big time. He changed overnight from being a happy heathen to being a committed, card-carrying Christian. This happened years before I arrived in Bayfield. Everyone in town, including all the people in the Baptist church, had taken to calling him Praise-the-Lord Olson, because from the night he got converted, he would frequently blurt out in the Baptist services, “Praise the Lord!” We Catholics and Lutherans and Presbyterians were pleased that Praise-the-Lord Olson was a Baptist, because such outbursts in our services would have plunged all of us into apoplexy in a heartbeat.
Praise-the-Lord Olson represented a genuine conversion, however. No one could deny that the man changed immediately on that long-ago revival night. In that respect, everyone was glad. But still, he made the rest of us nervous, including the General Conference Baptists, because he was so enthusiastic and zealous about what he believed. A frequent conversation in Bayfield among many residents was whether folks liked Praise-the-Lord Olson better before he changed or afterward, when he had become so dramatically altered.
So the Assyrian king put on sackcloth and ashes, and he ordered all the other Assyrians to put on sackcloth and ashes, including the Assyrian animals, which probably were mystified by what was going on inside the heads of all these odd people, that they even covered the creatures with burlap and gray dust.
In the kingdom of God, there is no “Us,” nor is there a “Them.” We are all “Us” to God, even when we fail to do what God wants, which all of us do fail to do. Jonah told the Ninevites to get with the program, and lo and behold, in a flash they got with the program. And Jonah was angry; oh, how he was angry! But that we hear about only in Chapter Four. So if you want to find out how this ends, including the most gloriously bizarre final verse in any book of the Bible, you’ll just have to come next week.
For today, the message is this: If anyone gets on board with God, however they get there, God welcomes them aboard. Often we are not like that. We hold grudges against people we don’t like, even after they straighten up and fly right. But God doesn’t hold grudges the way we do - - - thank God!