Hilton Head Island, SC – September 1, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Jonah 1:1-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid the fare, and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord. – Jonah 1:3 (RSV)
The four-chapter prophecy of Jonah is unlike any other prophetic book in the Bible. It is more like a fable than a prophecy, rather like Goldilocks and the Three Bears or Little Red Riding Hood. And instead of either commending or excoriating the Jews, which is what happens in most of the other prophets, the Book of Jonah commends the Assyrians. Nowhere else in holy writ do Gentiles receive such positive treatment. Biblical Jews felt about the biblical Assyrians much the same way that contemporary Israelis feel about the Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, or Egyptians. Sadly, there was then and there is now little love lost between any two of the Middle Eastern states.
Historically, there was a prophet named Jonah, but he is certainly not the man who wrote the prophecy of Jonah. The prophet is mentioned in one obscure verse in II Kings 14:25. Prior to that verse, it says that Jereboam became king of Israel, the northern kingdom. He ruled for 41 years, and like every other king of Israel, “he did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” But then, the Books of I and II Kings and I and II Chronicles were all written by people from the southern kingdom of Judah, and they lost no love for any of the kings of the northern kingdom of Israel, all of whom, they declared, “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord.” Oy veh, the animosity of biblical times! It was almost as bad as North and South in 19th century America.
The complete text of II Kings 14:25 is as follows: “He (Jereboam) restored the border of Israel from the entrance of Hamath as far as the Sea of the Arabah, according to the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, which he spoke by his servant Jonah the son of Amittai, the prophet, who was from Gath-hepher.” The first part of that verse makes no sense to me, but I won’t take time to explain why. In any case, this setting of the border of Israel was done via the prophet Jonah, who apparently told the king to establish a new border. Jonah lived during Jereboam’s reign, which is to say, in the 7th century BCE. In the historical record, however, Jonah merits only one-third of one peculiar and badly-written verse.
An unknown somebody, writing four or five centuries later, in a very different period of Middle Eastern politics, composed a strange little prophecy which has nothing whatever to do with Jonah the prophet who lived for one-third of one verse in the 7th century BCE. The Bible is a great, inspiring, and mystifying book, riddled with incandescent inconsistencies and edifying enigmas. The prophecy of Jonah is one of those enigmas.
When this four-chapter tome was written, the kingdom of Assyria had not existed for virtually four full centuries. It had been obliterated by the Babylonians just before 600 BCE. But the writer back-dated his little prophetic gem to make a major point. And about that point we shall be thinking over the next four Sundays. So come along and listen to the lullaby of Jonah.
Chapter 1 begins with these two verses: “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’” Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, and was located on the Tigris River in what now is northern Iraq. One of these days that area might become Kurdistan, although given the course of the Middle East over the past five thousand years, I doubt it. However, if we are to take these two verses at face value, they tell us that God was angered by the behavior of the Ninevites, and he wanted Jonah to tell them so in no uncertain terms.
Jonah refused to accept the divine assignment. Instead he intended to flee from God. If it was the 7th or the 3rd centuries before the birth of Jesus, where would a Palestinian Jew go to get as far away from God as he thought he could? “Tarshish!” said Jonah to himself, in a burst of geographical and prophetical fancy. Tarshish was a port city founded by the Phoenicians (or the biblical Lebanese) on the eastern coast of Spain. It was about as far away from Judah as you could readily get in those long-ago, bygone days.
So Jonah went to the only port Judah had at the time, which was Joppa. Joppa was immediately south of where Tel Aviv is now. The Israelis call it Yafo. It still exists as a quaint sleepy suburb of Israel’s largest city. But the next verse sounds so 21st century! “(Jonah) went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid the fare, and went on board.” That’s exactly what we do when we take a ship or plane or train anywhere; we pay the fare and get on board. But Jonah was doing this to flee from God. He wanted no part of warning the people of Nineveh that God was divinely annoyed with them. The Assyrians could hang by their thumbs, as far as Jonah was concerned. He wanted nothing to do with a crowd of pagan sinners.
And now we are told the ship is somewhere out on the Mediterranean, and God sends a huge storm against it. The sailors start throwing cargo into the sea, hoping to lighten the ship to withstand the high waves. They, the members of the pagan crew, find the Jew Jonah asleep down in the hold. The captain accosts him, saying, “What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call upon your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we do not perish.”
Storms like this don’t just happen, as far as ancient people are concerned. A deity must be mightily miffed for this to occur. The sailors figure some individual on board must have caused some god or other to be very angry, so they draw lots to see who it might be. Lots were sticks of varying lengths, and whoever got the shortest lot had to be the culprit. Jonah drew the shortest stick, which may be where the expression “getting the short end of the stick” comes from.
To his credit, Jonah doesn’t try to weasel out. He admits he was trying to flee from God, the God of the Hebrews. The sailors do their best to try to row the ship back to land, but they can’t. Mind you, these are Gentile sailors, pagans all, but they try to save themselves and their miscreant Jewish passenger. In either ethical altruism or a despairing death wish, Jonah tells the men to chuck him overboard, and their troubles will be over. Asking Jonah’s God to forgive them, they reluctantly oblige the pesky prophet, and into the drink he goes. Instantly the sea became calm, and the heathen crew were also instantly amazed at the power of Jonah’s God. Eternal Father, strong to save/ Whose arm doth bind the restless wave.
Then comes the only factor in the story of Jonah that most people ever remember: “And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights” (1:17). But we’re not going to talk about that today; we’re going to talk about it next week. So if you want to know what happens, you’ll have to return next Sunday.
For this Sunday we want to focus on what prompted Jonah to flee from God in the first place. That’s something we all have done at many points in our lives, and the question is this: Why? Why would anyone try to get away from God? It is inevitably fruitless --- isn’t it?
Francis Thompson was a late 19th century English poet who wrote one of the best-known religious poems ever composed. He called it The Hound of Heaven, and its opening lines are on the front page of this morning’s bulletin.
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Then, in this extraordinarily unique way Thompson had of employing words, he said,
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasm-ed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
The poem is four and a half pages long, single-spaced. But its essence is captured in the lines which follow the lines you just heard:
But with unhurrying chase,
And unpreturb-ed pace
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat, and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet –
“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.”
What it is it that Francis Thompson is trying to say? It is this: God is the Hound of Heaven! He is the eternal Shepherd of us all, the border collie, the sheltie, the Shetland sheep dog who keeps after us, making it His aim never to lose any of us! He is, as the Scots minister George Matheson so beautifully declared it, “the Love that wilt not let me go.”
It is that which Jonah discovered in the first chapter of this exquisite little four-chapter sort-of prophecy. I say “sort of,” because the prophecy of Jonah is not like any of the other sixteen prophetic books of the Bible. There was no Jonah in history, at least not this Jonah. There apparently was that other 7th century BCE Jonah, the one mentioned in one verse in II Kings, but that Jonah could not have been this Jonah. This Jonah is a literary character created by an unknown author to illustrate some important theological factors regarding God. God is not only the God of the Hebrews or Israelites or Jews; He is also the God of the Gentiles. And that means Iranians, Russians, and Chinese, and mid 20th century Germans, Japanese, and North Koreans, and later 20th century North Vietnamese and Iraqis, and 21st century Al Qaeda, Taliban, Libyans, and Syrians. There are no enemies of God we ought always to avoid, thus attempting to flee from God. There are only people, all people, every people, and they all belong to God. We can’t flee God by fleeing from our enemies, because God is the Hound of Heaven, and He is constantly trying to corral all of us. Our divisions mean nothing to Him. We are all His.
If the prophecy of Jonah was written when the biblical scholars say it was written, it was written at a time when the Jews were under the thumb of foreign rulers. They were called the Seleucids, and they were Syrians who sided with the Greeks after Alexander the Great conquered everything from Greece east to India. That obviously included the land of the Jews, whatever you might choose to call it.
The Seleucids were horrible as rulers. They were insensitive to Jewish religious practices, they governed with an iron fist, and they were exceedingly unpopular among the Jews for a whole host of reasons. The writer of Jonah wanted to say something about that, but he didn’t want to do so directly, least the Seleucids find out who wrote this book, and execute him for his impertinence. So he set his tale about a reluctant spokesman for God several centuries earlier, when the Assyrians were the Bad Guys to the Jews. It was the same kind of dodge which the writer of The Revelation used three-plus centuries later when he wrote about Babylon, but he really meant Rome. Being a prophet is hard enough without adding the possibility of getting killed for doing it. The writer of Jonah didn’t just fall off a 3rd century BCE turnip cart.
Jonah didn’t want to tell the people of Nineveh to change their ways or face the wrath of God. He wanted them to face God’s wrath straight off. So he took off for the far country, thinking he could get away from God’s demands. But, as we learned, he couldn’t.
You and I have done that. At times we have known in our heart, in our head, in our very bones, that God wanted us to do something or other, and it was something we had no intention of doing. Maybe He wanted us to make amends with someone with whom we have had bad feelings for years. Maybe He wanted us to do something of which we are uniquely capable and qualified, but also uniquely unwilling to do. Whatever it is, if we try to avert or avoid God, He will come after us, as surely as he came after that famous fugitive named Jonah.
Of all the hymns I have ever heard, our last hymn today has, to my mind, the most cogent and compelling summary of the Christian Gospel that exists in Christian hymnody. It is also a hymn almost no one else ever seems to have heard. I first heard it when I was in high school, and I have chosen it a few times throughout my ministerial career, never to resounding cheers, I might add. But I keep hoping that some day someone may approve of this hymn as enthusiastically as I do, and today may be that day. I’ll probably be told the truth about that shortly.
The text for this hymn is by an anonymous writer. It says the poetry was written in 1904. It also says the tune, called Kerr, was composed in 1932 by Calvin Laufer, a Presbyterian minister and hymn writer. I choose to believe, without any proof at all, that Mr. Laufer used the words of a poem by Hugh Thompson Kerr, which Dr. Kerr wanted to remain anonymous for some reason. Both men were pastors together in Pennsylvania for several years, and Hugh Thompson Kerr, at the Shadyside Church in Pittsburgh, was one of the best known clergy of his time. Maybe, I speculate with no documentation, Calvin Laufer decided to honor Dr. Kerr by composing a tune in his honor, giving it his name, utilizing a text which Dr. Kerr had written 32 years earlier. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.
Anyway, I sought the Lord is another telling of the first chapter of Jonah from a very different angle.
I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew
He moved my soul to seek Him, seeking me
It was not I that found, O Saviour true;
No, I was found of Thee.
Thou didst reach forth Thy hand and mine enfold
I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea;
‘Twas not so much that I on Thee took hold
As Thou, dear Lord, on me.
I find, I walk, I love, but O the whole
Of love is but my answer, Lord, to Thee!
For Thou wert long beforehand with my soul;
Always Thou lovedst me.
Try as you might to flee God, He will never let you go. That’s what Jonah found out.