"Jonah and the Ninevites"
A comedy that cuts a little close to the bone
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Ian McDonald
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Text: Jonah 3:1-5, 10
“When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.”
But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”
Everybody knows the story of Jonah and the whale. It is that famous story about the preacher Jonah, who was so reluctant to go to his new assignment in Nineveh that he hopped aboard the next ship going in the other direction. In the process of trying to make his great escape, Jonah nearly got himself and everyone else who was on board the ship that day killed in a storm, until he was tossed overboard and the storm ended.
Lost and alone on the open sea, Jonah would have surely died in the cold ocean, except that in spite of everything Jonah had done to get away, God had mercifully commissioned a great fish to come and gobble him up and ferry him to Nineveh where he was meant to be in the first place. Even then, even when he got there, he was still reluctant to preach.
It must be the day for reluctant preachers. To say that I was reluctant to come to this great old church when I heard that I was to preach here for the Churches-on-the-Hill pulpit exchange would be an understatement. “There is no way I'm going to preach at that church,” I thought. This place is huge! Like Nineveh, it takes three days to walk around it and its reputation looms even larger in my mind. I used to come here as a boy with my parents in the summertime and listen to the preachers. In seminary I remember our preaching professor used to play the great sermons that you've had in this sanctuary. To say that I was reluctant to come here doesn't even come close. I was ready to pack my bags and jump ship with Jonah.
Some of you will know that I missed the early service this morning! But Jean apparently filled in wonderfully and I thank her very much for covering for me. But it was not a lack of information or nerves or fear that had Jonah spooked as it had me spooked. There was something else that Jonah was running scared about. It could have been the Ninevites themselves, I suppose. After all, had there ever been a city more wicked than the city of Nineveh? Had there ever been a city more hostile to the Jewish people, the Jewish cause and the Jewish prophets like Jonah than the city of Nineveh? Had there ever been a city more hostile to God than the city of Nineveh?
Nineveh was capital of the Assyrian empire and it was the evil empire of its day. The Ninevites were a huge threat to Jews like Jonah. Assyria had invaded Israel and had come up with its own version of the Final Solution to the Jewish problem. They destroyed Jewish cities, they killed Jewish people and brought back those who survived as their slaves and servants. The narrator of the story this morning said that Nineveh was so huge that it took three days to walk around it. Not really. Nineveh probably wasn't that large at all, but the huge amount of wickedness and hypocrisy and lying and injustice and self-centredness that existed there made the city seem larger than life.
Nineveh was the original “sin city.” Compared to Nineveh, Sodom and Gomorrah were a picnic in the park. The city was voracious and all-consuming and it took and it took and it took. There was nothing that Nineveh would not take, steal or plunder and use up and spit out.
Jonah must have been afraid of what the Ninevites would do to him there, what they might take from him, maybe even his life. But Jonah feared something else even more than the Ninevites - Jonah feared God. If it was the case that Jonah was afraid of what the Ninevites might do to him, he was even more afraid of what God might do. Or, more to the point, Jonah was afraid of what God might not do.
The whole point of having Jonah go to Nineveh was for him to tell the people there that God had had it with them and that the writing was on the wall: God was going to do away with them and with their damned and damnable wicked ways. Jonah was there to tell them that it was over. The sermon Jonah was to give was terse, ominous and decisive: Nineveh was doomed and God would destroy it. In 40 days there would be nothing left. It would all be wiped from the face of the earth.
Jonah was apprehensive about this whole enterprise, of course. He was apprehensive about going to Nineveh to preach this sermon, because Jonah knew God better than that. Jonah suspected that God would change His mind and show mercy, act graciously and spare that city that Jonah hated with all of his heart. The prospect of seeing those faithless and disobedient Ninevites plucked from the flames at the last minute made Jonah furious. In the final analysis, the real problem with Jonah was that he feared God would not behave the way that Jonah wanted Him to. That God would be merciful and slow to be angry and filled with overflowing love, and that the people there would not get what they deserved. Jonah was right. That was exactly what God did.
No sooner had Jonah crawled up into the pulpit, cleared his throat, arranged his notes and preached the first words of his sermon than everybody believed him, fasted, beat their breasts and cried for forgiveness. They were all transformed. God forgave them and did not destroy them. Then came these great waves of repentance - everyone had a change of heart and repented. The Ninevites repented. God repented. The story says that even the herds and flocks of animals repented: cows and sheep and chickens and goats and swine, all creature great and small repented and were transformed. They all grew tall and strong in the warm light of God's grace.
Each and everyone in the story had a change of heart. Everyone, that is, except for Jonah. Jonah took one look at the reversal of fortune and the reprieve that the Ninevites had received and he was mad as hell. It offended all of Jonah's religious sensibilities to see the guilty go free and the undeserving forgiven. Jonah was so angry at seeing the worthless made worthy that he wished that he were dead, just so he couldn't see the scandal of it all and so that he would not hear the joyful songs of the Ninevites praising and worshipping for all that they had received and all that they had come to know.
So while all the people in Nineveh were inside the city gates kicking up their heels and raising a glass in celebration for being saved, Jonah was outside the city feeling sorry for himself, crying in his beer. No one would blame us if we laughed a little bit at Jonah. It's just a little funny, don't you think, that Jonah, Jonah of all people, should be so upset about people not getting what they deserve. Wasn't it Jonah, after all, who was so disobedient himself and who tried to run away from God, nearly drowning, but was plucked from the sea by a giant fish and salvaged?
So it's a little funny that Jonah is so bent out of shape because someone else was shown the same God-given grace and favour that he had received. It's just a typical case of wanting all of God's mercy for ourselves and all of God's judgement for others. It's the old story of magnifying the sliver in another's eye and then completely missing the log in our own eye.
But we are to laugh because the story of Jonah is a comedy, and we're supposed to laugh at him being so short-sighted. Except that it's a little difficult to laugh too hard, because deep down we have that sinking feeling that if we're laughing at Jonah we just might be laughing at ourselves.
Who hasn't been a little sore at seeing someone get something that we didn't think they deserved? Who among us has not begrudged someone something? We're so busy keeping track of what someone else got that we forget what we ourselves have received. We are so tempted to be distracted by the ways others have been blessed that we miss our own good fortune. We are so focussed on how someone else got off scot-free that we forget how close we came to getting caught red-handed.
God's love and God's capacity to forgive is effusive. It is relentless and it is abundant. God's grace tends towards that excess and thank God that it does, or we might not get it ourselves. So what if God is a little reckless and extravagant with forgiveness and if He extends it to people that we judge undeserving? The whole story of Jonah is like a mirror that we are to look into and see a reflection of ourselves. On the one hand, we look into the mirror of this story and see that we are a little bit like the Ninevites.
As someone has said, from God's point of view we're all a bit of a mess. Some of us clean up better than others and some of us have figured out how to manage our fear of judgement by doing good things and good words. But when you get right down to it, we're all Ninevites and ne'er do-wells - it's just that God doesn't see it that way, because those are human labels full of human judgements and assessments. From where God sits we look more like hurt, sick, lost children, all of us in deep need of mercy.
We look again in the mirror and maybe we see a little bit of Jonah. We see that we're a little to quick to point the finger of blame and a little too quick to pat ourselves on the back. A little too quick to identify our program and our values and our ideas with God's program and ideas and values. So then we find ourselves like Jonah, perhaps sitting outside of the party and counting on our fingers the seemingly unjustified good fortune of others, and we are left wondering when someone is going to throw us a party for having been so good and so filled with fidelity and so devoted.
That fact of the matter is there is already a party going on that God's throwing for the whole world, and we're the honoured guests. Isn't it time that we stopped worrying about who else has been invited and worrying about what others have done, and get in on the celebrating?
It may sound to you that I'm suggesting that questions of morality and theology are not important, but I'm not suggesting that at all. What I'm suggesting is that worship and that celebrating and giving thanks for forgiveness and for God's mercy and love and kindness is more important than judging who it is that may worship and who it is that is forgiven and made clean.
Now to the King, immortal and invisible, the only God we acknowledge who has a claim on our life, be all honour and glory forever. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.