Hilton Head Island, SC – May 9, 2021
The Chapel Without Walls
Jonah 1:1-10; Jonah 1:11-17
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. – Jonah 1:3a
There is nothing else in the entire Bible that is like the prophecy of Jonah. It is simply a whale of a tale. It is short, consisting of only four chapters. Old Testament scholars speculate that it was written sometime after the Babylonian Captivity of the Jews, which occurred in the sixth century BCE. It is a fictional story, not intended to be perceived as factual, although countless biblical literalists believe it to be factual. It would be like supposing that Gulliver’s Travels or Pilgrim’s Progress are historical accounts.
The book of Jonah was composed as a literary opposition to the rampant Jewish nationalism which was then being exhibited during the time of Ezra and Nehemiah, both of whom had books written about them. They also are in the Bible, along with the Prophecy of Jonah. We naively assume that everything in the Bible agrees with everything else in the Bible, but that is not so, and Jonah is an example of why it is not so. It is a stinging criticism of nationalistic impulses.
The Book of II Kings has one verse, half of which refers to a prophet named Jonah who lived in the ninth century BCE. II Kings 14:25 doesn’t say anything that Jonah said or did. All it says is that he lived during the reign of Jereboam, king of the northern kingdom of Israel, and that his father was named Amittai. The main enemy of Israel at that time was Assyria. Assyria was located in what now is northwestern Iraq. Its capital city was Nineveh. So whoever wrote this little book set his short story back in time three or four centuries.
The book of Jonah begins by telling us this: “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.’” This is not a divine request. It’s a command.
So what does Jonah do? He goes to Joppa to find a ship which would be headed as far away from Nineveh as Jonah could get. Joppa was one of the main ports of Israel in those days, and it still is today. There happened to be a ship that was leaving right then for Tarshish. Some scholars claim that Tarshish was in Spain. If so, Jonah was trying to flee as far away from God and Nineveh as possible. The text says he wanted to get “away from the presence of the Lord” (1:3). Nobody ever went farther west than Spain. It was the location for the Pillars of Hercules, the Rock of Gibraltar, and the western end of the Mediterranean Sea. Beyond it was the Atlantic Ocean, into which no sane sailor in the 8th century BCE would ever venture.
Jonah thought he had staged a clean getaway, but God “hurled a great wind upon the sea, and there was a mighty tempest on the sea” (1:4). It looked and felt as though the ship might sink. The crew was apparently an international crew, and each sailor prayed to his own god, hoping for any divine assistance which might keep all of them from drowning. Any god in a storm, as they said in those days. The captain went down into the lower deck of the ship, and he demanded that Jonah also pray to his god.
The story is told with pathos, but also with humor. It is as though Rodney Dangerfield or Henny Youngman is telling it. So the captain says to Jonah, “Speak a word to your god, and maybe he’ll give a thought to us, to save us!” The sailors figure someone on board is the cause of this mini-hurricane, so they insist they cast lots to find out who is the culprit. We should not be surprised to learn that it was Jonah who got the losing lot. The plot thickens.
Amazingly, Jonah admits that he indeed is the cause of the storm, and he says the only way for them to keep from capsizing is to chuck him into the raging waters. This is a very magnanimous gesture on his part. They are only too happy to oblige. When they do that, the storm instantly stops: presto, change-o; deed done.
Now comes the part of the book of Jonah which almost everyone remembers. Sadly most people remember nothing else. “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.” Jesus remembered that verse too. He repeated it not long before he was in his tomb for three days and three nights. Well actually, less than two full days and nights, but who’s counting?
There are zoological problems here. It says “a great fish.” Nevertheless it is universally assumed that it was a whale. However, a whale is not a great fish. It isn’t even a fish at all. It’s a mammal. But the person who wrote Jonah didn’t know that. And anyway, it’s a story, it’s not history, so what does it matter? Play along, would you please?
Then what, in this story, does matter? Here’s what: God gave Jonah a divinely-directed assignment, and he disobeyed it. He fled from it. He treated God’s command with disdain.
Sometimes we’re like that too. Many times we’re like that. We know what God wants us to do, but we don’t do it. We consider it a nuisance, an imposition. Turning the other cheek or walking the extra mile may require more of us than we are willing to give. To follow God’s commands may be more than we think we bargained for.
What was it that Jonah objected to about God’s command? It was this: he didn’t like Ninevites! He abhorred Assyrians! The only people he liked were Jews, people such as himself, and maybe not even all of them.
Assyrians had conquered the kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE. It never recovered. Other nations occupied the northern half of the Promised Land from the eighth century BCE until the middle of the twentieth century CE. Gentiles have been the bane of the existence of the Jews for most of their existence. Objectively, no observer can deny that.
And yet God told Jonah to cry against Nineveh for their sins. Who was Jonah to reject that divine assignment?
I have almost a dozen foreign-language dictionaries at home. Every now and then, when writing a sermon or an essay, I take one of them out to check on the meaning of a foreign word. My favorite among those dictionaries is The Joys of Yiddish, by Leo Rosten. It is like other dictionaries, in that it explains something of the derivation of Yiddish words or parts of words. The word Yiddish itself linguisically means “Jewish.” Yiddish was the language of the Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe for several centuries. Its basic roots are from Hebrew and German, with a little Russian, Polish, and English, or “Yinglish,” thrown in. But The Joys of Yiddish is like no other dictionary, because in every word’s definition, it talks about languages, many languages, and it contains many jokes which have the words Leo Rosten describes in his unique tome.
In Yiddish, the word mazel means “luck.” Mazel tov means “good luck.” Schlimm in German means “bad.” Schlimazel in Yiddish means “bad luck,” but it can also means “bad-luck person.” A schlimazel is someone who has bad luck, not all of the time, but some of the time. Thus all of us are, to some extent, schlimazels, as well as inept schlemiels.
Jonah was a schlimazel because he would not do what God wanted him to do. He was Rodney Dangerfield, fiddling with his tie and talking through the side of his mouth, saying, “I don’t get no respect!” That might not always cause anyone in those circumstances to experience bad luck, but that’s certainly what happened to poor old Jonah. He thought he could escape God’s wrath, but he couldn’t. Did he get it? Oy vey, did he get it!
Does life really work like that? Is it ever as clear cut as that? Run away from God; get hit by a typhoon; get thrown overboard; end up in the belly of a whale? No, but the story is meant to help us understand what happens when we resist God’s plans for us. It can get dicey. It gets messy. We will pay a price, because God doesn’t want us to resist Him. It isn’t good for us. It brings us schlimazel.
From its earliest days before its inception as an independent nation, the United States of America has been a nation of immigrants. Everybody came here from somewhere else. For the first century or so, most immigrants came from the British Isles --- the vast majority from England, a much smaller number from Scotland, and smaller numbers still from Northern Ireland and Wales. Then others came from other parts of Europe: Germany, Holland, France, Scandinavia, and elsewhere. Then large numbers came from Central and South America, then from Asia. And always there was that huge statue welcoming everybody. She declared, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Native-born or naturalized American citizens might not we so welcoming, but Lady Liberty was always there in the New York Harbor to extend her torch to the new arrivals at Ellis Island.
You’d think that everybody living in a nation like the USA would know that either their forebears or they themselves came from somewhere else, and that therefore they should not be xenophobic. They should never have a fear of other people from other nations, since they and/or theirs came from other nations. And you’d think that Jews, who have always been hassled by other peoples, would not hassle anybody. Nonetheless, Jonah had a xenophobic revulsion toward Ninevites, and he wanted nothing to do with them. So he hopped on the first ship out of Joppa and he thought it would take him to Spain, but it didn’t. It took him to the belly of a whale.
God doesn’t like anybody to detest anybody, but He especially doesn’t like it when people who have been detested by other people detest other people. Such behavior offends the divine nature. God did not create us to treat other people like that. That is part of what the story of Jonah is about. Treat everyone nicely. God does that for us, so we should do it for others.
One of humanity’s biggest problems, maybe even the biggest, is that most of us focus too much on “me,” and too little on “us.” That is a particular weakness of Americans. We think that we are us, and they are them, and we have a bias toward anyone who is a them. None of us is the center of the universe, although we often act as though that is the case. Even all of us together are not the center of the universe. The God who created the universe and everything in it is and ought to be the focal point of His creation. It is our task as Christians constantly to remind ourselves of that, and to try to convince others of it as well. All of us are too human-centered and not enough God-centered.
The Jew who wrote the book of Jonah was trying to show his fellow Jews that they must have love and compassion for everybody in the world, not just for Jews, or worse, only for themselves as individuals. In order to make his point, the writer said God gave Jonah the responsibility to go to Nineveh, the capital city of one of the greatest enemy nations of the Jews, and to prophesy against them because of their wickedness.
Jonah had no doubt the Assyrians were wicked. For that very reason he wanted nothing to do with those god-forsaken foreigners, and he bolted from God like a rabbit running from a wolf.
Millions of Americans feel that exact same way about immigrants who want to enter our country and to become citizens here. They especially resent refugees and others who come from south of our southern border.
Currently, most people trying to enter the US from the south are coming from three small Central American countries: Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. It isn’t just because they think that life here is better than life there. It is because life there has become utterly intolerable. Those states are in political, economic, and legal chaos and collapse. They fear that if they stay in the land of their birth, they will get killed, or die of starvation or become victims of horrible crimes. It is desperation, not inspiration, which propels them toward the United States of America. Americans who are familiar with the news know that’s what happening, but the kind of people who hate immigrants are the kind who don’t know what is going on in the world, or who are getting a very skewed picture of what’s going on, and therefore they are repelled by immigrants.
So Jonah was on a ship sailing west on the Mediterranean, and only a few nautical miles out of Joppa the ship got hit with a shrieking squall, and it looked like the great ship might go down.
What are we to do? For now, all we can do is to sing the Navy Hymn and hope for the best.