Lead Minister
“Jonah”
Scripture Reading: Jonah 1-4
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I’ve always thought that the story of Jonah was primarily about God’s call and the way we so often run away from it. God comes close to Jonah and gives him a mission. Jonah is told to go to Ninevah. Jonah runs as far away as he can in the opposite direction.
I myself can relate to this aversion Jonah has to God’s call on his life because when I first heard God calling me into ministry, I thought that if I didn’t tell anyone about what I was hearing God say to me in my heart, I wouldn’t have to respond. I could just go on my merry way living my life the way I wanted to live it which didn’t have anything to do with becoming a minister. Even if you haven’t heard a call to become a prophet like Jonah or an ordained minister like me, perhaps you can still relate to Jonah’s aversion to God’s call. Lots of us have experiences in our lives when we have a sense that we are being called to say or do something but the thought of following through with it scares us or we think it’s going to demand too much from us. So we run away and hide.
It’s not just the call part of this story I can relate to, I can also relate to the part in which a big storm blows up eventually resulting in Jonah being tossed out of a ship and swallowed up by a big fish. When I was wrestling with my call to ministry, to leave behind everything that was safe and familiar in my life, I was consumed by my fear and swallowed up by my anxiety for quite a long time until I was finally spit up on the shores of the Vancouver School of Theology. I don’t remember if I smelled of fish guts and sea water when that happened but I may as well have. When we are trying to avoid doing or saying a hard thing there’s lots of emotions that can sink us and swallow us whole.
For those of us who delight in a good metaphor, the fact that Jonah spends three days and three nights in the belly of the whale probably won’t escape us. It’s no small coincidence that it’s the same number of days Jesus spent in the tomb.
So the story of Jonah definitely reflects back to us our own reluctance at times to respond to God’s call and the process we often go to when we die to our own desires on the way to being resurrected into God’s work and the fullness of life as it was intended. You probably noticed how many times in the story Jonah wanted to get his own way and most of us are no different in our own lives.
But there’s a sharper edge in this story that can easily be overlooked when we forget about the reason Jonah didn’t want to deliver God’s message to the Ninevites. It wasn’t just because he was afraid to be God’s spokesperson because he didn’t feel equal to the task that he didn’t want to go to Ninevah. And it wasn’t just because he didn’t want his plans to be upended. Jonah didn’t want to go to Ninevah because he despised the Ninevites. And there was actually a good reason for that.
The Ninevites were a brutal people or at least their leadership was brutal. Ninevah was the capitol of the Assyrian Empire whose treatment of the Jewish people included the kind of atrocities we associate with modern day regimes like the Taliban or the barbarity of the Rwandan genocide.
So it’s no wonder that Jonah, a Jew, who saw the Ninevites as the enemy didn’t want to go and tell them there was even the hint of a possibility of God’s grace for them. He wanted them to be destroyed and wiped off the face of the earth. He didn’t want to warn them that if they were to turn away from their violent ways and embrace a way of love, grace and justice they would be saved. In Jonah’s mind there was only one form of justice for the Ninevites and it didn’t involve an iota of forgiveness and grace.
This is like a parent of one of the young adults on the kibbutz who was kidnapped and has been held hostage since October 7th being called to go and preach a message of repentance and forgiveness to the head of Hamas. It’s akin to a Palestinian whose home has been destroyed and family members killed in Gaza being called to go speak God’s grace to Benjamin Netanyahu.
If I were Jonah receiving this kind of a challenging call from God, I might be getting on the first ship heading out of town too. Don’t send me. Send someone else. I am done with “them.”
I don’t know who the equivalent to the Ninevites would be in your life. But I do know that most of us at one time or another harbour anger and even spite towards others, especially towards people who have behaved badly. Sometimes, it’s because someone has done us wrong and we’ve become embittered because of it. Sometimes it’s because someone else has been done wrong and we feel defiant and incensed on their behalf. Sometimes our anger is very personal. We feel resentment towards a family member or an ex-partner or someone we work with who has hurt us. Sometimes it’s political. Our hearts become hardened towards certain leaders or even entire nations because of their bad behaviour. We all have Ninevites in our lives.
When we do get caught up in our judgement and our anger towards others, even when that judgement is warranted, sometimes we end up being the people ourselves who need to repent of our thoughts and actions towards them, as much as they need to repent of their thoughts and actions.
I don’t know how aware you are of the controversy that has unfolded around the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games. Apparently, some Christians have been offended by the inclusion of a performance by a group of drag queens because they thought they were mocking Da Vinci’s depiction of The Last Supper. Apparently the performance was meant to be a depiction of the Feast of Dionysus the Greek god of fertility, wine, pleasure and merriment and of course, the Olympics originated in Greece. Regardless, the performance has unleashed a maelstrom of commentary on social media. I love what my friend, Curt Allison posted on Facebook about the outrage. “Art reveals less about the art itself, and more about the one observing the art. If someone gets riled up and/or a nerve is hit, the nerve has struck an uncomfortable truth. So instead of clutching pearls and pointing to “the other” the invitation is to turn that finger around, point it at ourselves, and ask some difficult questions. Repentance and self-examination are important.”
One of the many truths in the story of Jonah is that in one way or another we are all Ninevites. Our behaviour may not be as brutal as the Assyrian Empire, but we are all in need of change, repentance, forgiveness and grace at one time or another in our lives. Some of us more than others.
As the story of Jonah reaches its conclusion with the Ninevites changing their ways and receiving God’s grace, while Jonah continues to wallow in his anger, it’s clear that Jonah is the only one left who needs to change his ways. All the people of Nineveh have listened to God’s warning. The king and queen were sorry and became good. Even the creatures in the field were sorry and became good. The story ends and we never know if Jonah changes his way or if he remains angry at the Ninevites and God’s compassion for them for the rest of his life. What a horrible way to live, full of anger and resentment when God’s grace and compassion for Jonah is surely as strong as it is for anyone else.
God is never done with us.
One of the things that I have always found perplexing about Jonah is why God would even choose him to deliver the message to the Ninevites in the first place. If a prophet is someone who is close to God then Jonah doesn’t really seem to fit the bill does he? And it’s only after he’s had his own wake up call in the belly of the whale that he reluctantly does what God has asked him to do. But maybe that’s the point. In this series we’ve been talking about the way we are all the face of God and maybe Jonah’s message to us is that even when we seem far away from God, God is still close to us, shining in us for all the world to see. How we respond to God’s call does matter. It can save sailors who get caught in storms at sea and entire nations who are on a pathway to destruction and it can save us from being swallowed up by anger, resentment and fear and deliver us into the grace and goodness for which we were all intended.