Jonah
Jonah prayed “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful.” (4.1)
The Welsh preacher: "There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Plaintiff voice from the back: "What if we have no teeth..."
"Teeth will be provided!"
Many of us within and without the church have difficulty in understanding a God of love who wants to punish wrongdoers. But then poor God can’t win, because when it comes down to it, we also have difficulty in understanding how he can let evil men and women ‘get away with it’ – often at the expense of the good and the poor.
Jonah is a story on this theme; on what has been called ‘The Outrage of Grace’.
This enigmatic little book with its 48 verses, carefully worded and skilfully constructed, is full of surprises and amusing improbability.
Let me remind you of the story. Jonah is not a false prophet but a disobedient one, sent to pronounce judgement on the wicked city of Nineveh - a city that flayed it’s captives alive and whose atrocities are recorded in extra-biblical writings about the Babylonians.
The conversion of Nineveh was not high on the good Jew’s weekly intercessions list. So Jonah, as a good Jew, runs away from the Lord and his duty - to take a cheap Spanish holiday at the opposite end of the Med - in Tarshish.
God brings his ship near to destruction in a fierce storm. The sleeping(!) Jonah is woken, reveals all, and finally persuades the reluctant sailors to throw him overboard: for the storm is his fault. (We’re already detecting a self-destructive streak in Jonah’s personality.)
Now the enormous fish (which is all that most people remember about Jonah) swallows this unlikely servant of Yahweh and after three days vomits him up on the sea shore not a million miles away from Nineveh. That’s package holidays for you.
(The NT draws a parallel between these three days and those of Jesus in the tomb – we read about this in Matthew.)
Thus the fish, as an instrument of God’s grace and mercy, allows Jonah a second chance to obey. He takes it, probably grudgingly, although he is wise enough to realize that God has his mind set on this mercy mission to Iraq – for Nineveh was in modern day Iraq.
So he announces the fate of Nineveh to its wicked inhabitants. To a man they repent - what effective preaching! So God has compassion on them and spares them destruction. But is Jonah pleased with this magnificent story of missionary conversion? Of course not! He’s a religious bigot!
1 But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the LORD and said, “O LORD! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. 3 And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.He sits down, still hoping for a thunderbolt or two. Then the bush, then the worm (appointed - like the big fish) and the sun and the anger again...
10 Then the LORD said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”And that’s the end.
This fourth chapter now leaves the hearers puzzling over the message of the book and the future of this reluctant prophet. Where is the denouement of a chapter 5 with its resolution of the story and the moral for its listeners? There can be none, for that would defeat the purpose of the book.
Voltaire and lesser known sceptics have mocked the apparently farcical elements of the book, and some Christians, like Luther in his day, would rest easier at night if Jonah had just failed to get into the canon of Scripture.
As a prophecy (Jonah finds himself amongst the twelve minor prophets ion the Bible) it’s almost an oracle free zone. In fact in the Hebrew, there are only 4 words of prophecy in all 48 verses. “Forty - Days - Nineveh - Destroyed” (3:4) (Now that’s a short sermon!)
There is an element of parable in the story. The opening chapter allows the hearer to distance himself from this foolish and disobedient prophet of Yahweh, but as in Nathan’s parable to King David (2 Samuel 12), the closing verses of Jonah round on the hearer with that accusing “Thou art the man!”
Like Jonah you want to limit God’s loving-kindness to Israel alone. You cannot see that his compassion reaches out to all who repent and turn to him; a foreshadowing of the Messiah’s universal mission, the inclusiveness of Pentecost – the Spirit poured out on all flesh.
How just is God? This is the undercurrent of Jonah.
If in God’s world, as the Old Testament recognises it, good is rewarded and wickedness is punished, how can God forgive Nineveh and overlook their sin? To let iniquity go unpunished is as unjust as punishing the innocent.
In Jonah’s eyes it was dishonouring to God for him to show mercy to obvious wrongdoers, even after repentance. For if God is the supreme moral being he must punish or at least demand some penitential good deed or cultic sacrifice to restore the balance.
Like the psalmist, he wonders that the wicked are sleek and fat while he suffers in godly innocence (eg Psalm 73.12.13). Jonah was outraged by grace - the apparent contradiction in God’s moral nature. And he wanted to die and be free from this confusion of mind and from all his self-pity and longings for vengeance.
So finally God points out to Jonah through the incident with the bush, that Jonah’s concern for the plant was motivated by self-interest - whereas God’s concern for all that he had created sprang from the compassion which is God’s very nature.
Perhaps too Jonah was ultimately concerned to vindicate his own theological view of God, rather than to trust obediently in a God whose ways could not always be understood. How could God justify his actions on the grounds of compassion alone? The hearers (you and me) are left to wrestle in their own minds with the tension between crime and punishment: between repentance and forgiveness; and in a latter day Iraq, between Tony Blair & Clare Short.
Is there a New Testament solution? Well, not really. But there is significant further development, shedding light on God’s justice, or lack of it, and his mercy.
The tensions in Jonah’s and the narrator’s theology are partly resolved in the cross of Christ. Here justice and compassion meet as God’s absolute holiness is satisfied by his overwhelming love.
Yet the principled and God-fearing part in all of us wants Christ to come down from the cross and smite the Pharisees and scoffers; to vindicate the honour of a just God and a sinless Son. But in that sense, God is not just - if he were, there would be no hope for us.
Jonah wanted no forgiveness for Nineveh and asked that he might die. God forgave Nineveh and let Jonah live.
But Christ cried ‘Father forgive them’ and God let him die. This is not so much a resolution of the tensions in Jonah, as a call for us to live with that uneasy outrage of grace and mercy in our own lives, in our dealings with others, and in ordering our society.
I spent the New Year in Cape Town enjoying the summer sun, sea, sand and wine. I visited Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was incarcerated for many of his 27 years in prison. As I stood at the door of his cell, I wondered if I could emerge after 27 years, when comrades had been tortured and killed, to smile and forgive and demonstrate the Outrage of Grace; this radical mercy which we are called to show, whether it makes sense or not.
May God’s Holy Spirit allow you to follow Christ in living lives of outrageous grace to all you meet.
Jonah prayed “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful.” (4.1)
