Hilton Head Island, SC – May 16, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Jonah 2:1-4; Jonah 2:5-10
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – The waters closed in over me, the deep was round about me; weeds were wrapped about my head at the root of the mountains. – Jonah 5-6a (RSV)
In last Sunday’s sermon, I said that the prophecy of Jonah is unlike any of the other prophetic books in the Bible. Most of the other prophets’ writings were mainly in Hebrew poetry, with the exception of Ezekiel and Daniel, which were largely composed in prose. There are four chapters in Jonah, and only the second chapter (today’s reading) is in poetry. The other three chapters are in prose.
Why that is so no one knows for sure. Either the writer of this unique little book wanted linguistically to highlight exactly how Jonah felt in the belly of the whale (which occurred only allegorically and not factually), or he thought the spiritual depths into which the fictional Jonah plunged would be more fully grasped by the reader in poetry than in prose. He also may have found a poem written by someone else for some other purpose and used it for his own purposes. Whatever may have been the intent of the writer in writing what he did, let us now reiterate the literary circumstances by which the fictional Jonah ended up in the innards of the fictional whale.
God wanted Jonah to go to the Assyrian capital city of Nineveh and rail against it for the sins of the Ninevites. Jonah refused to do it, and set sail on a ship headed for Spain. God sent a great storm against the ship, the narrative says, and in order to keep from capsizing, the sailors threw Jonah overboard. They did so at his own bidding, however, and not because of their terror. I realize these details may be as hard to swallow as it was for the whale to swallow Jonah, but we must move on to Chapter Two, which describes the situation in which Jonah found himself, after literarily being sucked into the alimentary system of the largest creature in saltwater or on land.
Our responsive reading for this morning was from Psalm 5, a psalm of David. It begins, “Give ear to my words, O Lord; give heed to my groaning.” David’s theme is the theme of this sermon. Some of the greatest novelists have also written about it. It is what St. John of the Cross described as “the dark night of the soul.” Dostoevsky and Tolstoy did too, Flannery O’Connor did and Marilynne Robinson does. So does Jonah, in the second chapter of this little gem of a book. Darkness inevitably descends when we disobey God. The poem in Jonah begins, “I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and thou didst hear my voice” (2:2).
The word Sheol in Hebrew literally means “The Pit.” The word signifies the grave more than it connotes what we conceive as “hell,” although many Christians think that Sheol is an exact synonym for hell. If any of us were to find ourselves in the stomach of a whale, and we were not yet dead, we might feel a tad unnerved to be incarcerated in such an unlikely location. But remember this: Jonah is in the fix he’s in because of his own disobedience in refusing to follow God’s command to go to Nineveh. In this made-up story, Jonah realizes it is his own folly which has thrust him into the darkest and most confining tunnel one could ever experience.
“The waters closed in over me, the deep was round about me; weeds were wrapped about my head at the root of the mountains” (2:5-6). The poetic imagery fully captures the predicament of the recalcitrant prophet. Having attempted to flee from God, God found Jonah on the foundering ship, and now Jonah is paying the price for supposing he could evade God’s command. The whale is as surprised to have ingested a reluctant prophet as the reluctant prophet is to have been ingested by the whale.
Francis Thompson wrote the famous poem The Hound of Heaven, but it could have been written by Jonah, if historically there was an actual Jonah to have written it:
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.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
O Jonah, Jonah, Jonah: You can run, but you can’t hide! When we have done wrong, and we know it was wrong, we can’t get away from the Hound of Heaven! He, watching over Israel, slumbers not nor sleeps! Not for His sake but for ours God will not allow us to escape from Him. A bad conscience doth make fugitive cowards of us all, and in the tragic and glorious poem of Jonah, Chapter Two, that is the truth that is being conveyed. But God won’t let Jonah get away.
To best understand the thrust of these four sermons, we need to keep in mind that the Book of Jonah was written to counter a huge wave of extreme Jewish nationalism which engulfed the nation of Judah in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. (It is the same phenomenon which occurs every time Israelis and Palestinians get into major armed confrontations.) Having been twice invaded and conquered by foreign armies in preceding centuries before the Book of Jonah was written, the Jews had become understandably if also unacceptably xenophobic. It was during this time that Ezra and Nehemiah lived, and there are books in the historical section of the Hebrew Bible that describe that phenomenon. Many if not most Jews came to believe that God loved only Jews and no one else. In his undisguised disdain for the Assyrians and the residents of their capital city of Nineveh, Jonah personifies that notion throughout this short book.
During the first two decades of the 21st century, wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and central Africa have created an enormous wave of refugees who have tried to enter Europe. In Mexico and Central America, continuous political and social unrest has prompted hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homelands and to seek refugee admission into the United States.
Under policies adopted by the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, unskilled refugees have no possibility of getting into the UK. A point system has been set up, and those with the highest accumulation of points are the people most likely to be admitted as documented workers. If would-be immigrants can prove they have a job offer from a government approved employer, they are granted twenty points. If they have a Ph.d. in what is deemed a particularly needed field of endeavor within Britain, they get ten points. Everyone must demonstrate that they will have an income of at least $35,000 per year to get in at all. The result of this system is that most people of color are excluded altogether, and relatively few political refugees are admitted into Britain, regardless of how dire are the conditions in the war-torn nations from which they have fled.
Boris Johnson’s attitude toward immigrants is very similar to another man who, until recently, was the leader of a major nation on the western side of the Atlantic Ocean. However, that man’s successor is not doing much to allow refugees into our country either, even though he said he would do so. It may be that he has what he considers larger issues to address at the moment. But there are literally millions of refugees at the borders of wealthy European and North American nations who are being detained at the borders because of a growing concern that there are too many refugees to be adequately and safely absorbed. That is no doubt true, but for those desperate people, their desperation continues to increase. People of faith in relatively settled and stable nations must ask themselves if they are more important to God than people from unsettled and unstable nations. Is God more partial to citizens of powerful states than He is to immigrants from weak or failed states?
“I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever, yet thou didst bring up my life from the Pit, O Lord my God” (2:6). Poetically, the writer of Jonah fantasizes Jonah in the belly of the largest type of beast that ever lived, but God rescues him. “When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord; and my prayer came to thee, into thy holy temple” (2:7). Jonah didn’t give a passing thought to God when he tried to get away from Him on the ship, but because of Jonah’s presence in the whale’s irritated innards, suddenly Jonah remembered the temple in Jerusalem, and he imagined uttering a prayer for his escape from the predicament into which he had cast himself. “’Deliverance belongs to the Lord!’ And the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah out upon the dry land” (2:9-10). Ppppyyahhh! Even a whale would have a hard time digesting a full-grown human. (To repeat: None of the contents of the Book of Jonah happened historically. But the best way to understand it is for us to imagine it did.)
One of the most dispiriting and deflating events that can happen to us is when we make a big mistake and we know we have only ourselves to blame for it. Eating crow is never tasty, but when we bring it upon ourselves, it is really humiliating. That’s what Jonah was facing.
So what did he do? He turned to God. In such a sad scenario, one could do no better. Others might tell us we deserve exactly what we get, which is probably true, but God does not do that. As the psalmist says, “A broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise” (51:17). When we have really messed up, God is more likely than anyone else to provide both the comfort we need and the tenacity we must engender to face whatever lies ahead.
In Luke, chapter 22, after Jesus was arrested, Peter was asked three times in the Roman Praetorium whether he knew Jesus. To save himself, every time he denied that he did. After the third denial, he remembered that at the Last Supper Jesus had said to Peter, “Before the cock crows, you will deny me three times. Then Luke writes, “And he went out and wept bitterly.”
In her book called Clothed in Language, Pauline Matarasso comments on that passage. “In one sense Peter’s faith did fail; like a failed harvest, it fell short, dried up. In another sense it was a felix culpa” (a happy or fortunate sin); “it was Peter’s Golgatha, for in that failing, that death, fell to earth the wheat grain from which his resurrection life grew.”
The great Danish philosopher and theologian Soren Kierkegaard wrote, “If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere.”
Jonah now has the possibility to make amends for his big mistake in trying to avoid a divine assignment that God chose for him. Having been spewed out upon terra firma somewhere on the eastern Mediterranean coast, he has the possibility to do what God wants. Will he do it?
Next week, we will find out. And the answer will surprise us.