|
||||||
How
Many People Can God Love? (This
sermon is also available in audio.)
Yep. This is the story of Jonah, that indigestible burp in the belly of a whale. I’m sure we’ve all heard the story before, whether we were climbing up on our grandpappy’s lap or dozing off in Sunday School years ago. But you know, there’s a funny thing about this story, because each time its told, it has a different meaning
There’s another funny thing about this story. Its….funny! It’s hard to read this and not laugh. Except we find it hard to laugh. We take our religious faith so seriously. We take the Bible so seriously. And because of that some people read Jonah as if it were solemn, straight-laced history. But it’s more than a history book. It’s a parable. Jesus told parables, and that didn’t make him a liar, you know. It’s a parable about the nation of Israel, which like Jonah had become narrow and exclusive. And maybe, just maybe, it is about us as well. So if we want to take the book of Jonah seriously, then we can’t be too serious!
Take Nineveh. (Please!) Nineveh, the city to which Jonah was sent with his message of doom, was not just any city. It was the capital of the Assyrian empire, which is now Iraq. Nineveh was just down the road from what is now Baghdad. For the Israelites, Nineveh was the axis of evil, the focus of terror in the 8th century BC. Nineveh stood for everything that was bad and foreign. Assyria had shamed and conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel, so Nineveh was a code word for “enemy,” for everything that stood against the Israelites and kept them down and prevented them from becoming a great and prosperous and peaceful nation. And the Israelites took it one step further: If Nineveh was everything that stood over against the Jews, what stood with the Jews and for them was God. It all made perfect sense: our enemies are God’s enemies. And how we enjoy hating God’s enemies---people over there in Bag…er, Nineveh, those people who don’t live like us, who don’t worship like us.
You’d think that would be pretty good news for Jonah and the Israelites. But there’s that number forty. That number forty is in the Bible a lot. Noah was on the boat for forty days and forty nights. Moses had to wait forty years before he could take up his path again at the burning bush. The whole nation of Israel had to wait forty years before they could enter the promised land. And later on Jesus was in the wilderness forty days. But there’s a funny thing about that number forty. Whenever it appears, there is a time of testing. God suspends wrath and gives humans a chance to show who they are. And the amazing thing about all of these texts is that the delay always has a favorable outcome. Noah is saved. Moses becomes the leader of God’s people. Israel enters the Promised Land, and Jesus overcomes temptation. Apparently God is slow to anger, and Jonah had an inkling of that, because
“Tell them to repent? Jonah said. “Don’t you remember that those folks wiped out ten tribes of your people?” “I’ve got an idea, Lord. Why don’t we just can this idea of saving them and just zap them with a little fire and brimstone. Surprise them! That’ll give them something to remember! Better yet, blast them back to smitherin’s. Uh, you say that’s not what you had in mind? Still want to give them a chance? Well, let my people get back to your people.” But Jonah took off in the other direction.
I have to admit sometimes I think we’re a little hard on old Jonah. I mean, who can blame him? He wasn’t particularly qualified for the job, and there wasn’t a great deal of prestige being a prophet of doom. Worse yet, if Nineveh were saved, what would that do to his standing back in Israel? Not to mention the personal dimension. Can you imagine trying to explain to a wife and family just why you have to travel 750 miles on foot to a big city, an evil one at that? “All right, Jonah, who is she?” The task was too much, and Jonah doesn’t obey. But the wind and the fish do.
That scene on the ship is really one of the more remarkable scenes in all of scripture. He’s in the midst of a violent storm, the boat is tossing to and fro, sailors are yelling and praying to their gods, and where is Jonah? Sleeping. I think if Jonah were alive today he would be able to pick up endorsements from everything from Beautyrest mattresses to Excedrin P.M. “Do you have problems sleeping during the midst of storms?” I did, until I took Seratan and slept peacefully.” Of course, it’s really not all that unusual. We sleep through storms all the time. There is something about our desire to ignore hard truths, something about the vested interests that we all have, that keeps us sheltered from dealing with the storms around us. There are any number of examples. Global warming is a scientific fact; there have been three recent studies (including one from the Pentagon, not exactly a hotbed of environmental radicalism!) that have demonstrated that our polar ice caps are melting, yet let’s study it a bit more, wait a little longer and our filters (economic and others) prohibit us from seeing that our environment is crumbling. But let’s study. Sleeping through storms. We do it all the time. Well, enough preaching. I’m getting too serious. Back to our story. The plot thickens.
Some see the fish as God’s way of punishing Jonah. Yet Jonah is certainly not worse off in the fish than he was in the ocean where he definitely would have drowned. Let’s think about this now. I said this was a parable. He had just been thrown out into the sea, where he previously thought God was not present. Israel had been ravaged by the Assyrians and sent into Babylon where they thought God was not present. Jonah, like the Israelites, found God to be very present. Maybe God isn’t confined to the places we think God is!
“Jonah?” “That you Lord?” “Jonah, remember that little chat we had about a week ago? About giving people second chances? “Right, Lord, and I guess I’ve had mine.” “Yes, Jonah, and there are about 120,000 people waiting for theirs.”
Now, as a preacher, Jonah wasn’t exactly Billy Graham. Eight words he grudgingly shouted: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” No conditions. No “if’s”, “ands” and “buts”. No word of hope or redemption. “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”
The people listen. And they believe. They dress for repentance in sackcloth and ashes. The king issues a royal proclamation for a national repentance. Even the animals repent! Now, if this isn’t funny, I don’t know what is! Picture this: cattle lowing through the streets with ashes on their foreheads; little puppy dogs dressed in sackcloth chasing little kitty cats in sackcloth. Nineveh changes. God changes. But Jonah doesn’t change. He sulks. “I knew this would happen. I knew it when it all began. It’s just like it says in the Bible: ‘Thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.’ I just knew it!” God tries to tickle Jonah into a chuckle. Jonah goes up on a hill and sits under a bush to watch Nineveh and see what will happen. God “appoints a worm to attack the plant and cause it to wither away.” “Come on, Jonah. Lighten up.” “If you can feel sorry for the plant, surely I can feel sorry for all those Ninevites who don’t even know their right hand from their left. And how about the cattle, Jonah? Did you see the cattle dressed up in sackcloth? Have you ever seen anything so funny?” The story ends there and Jonah does not laugh. What’s at stake here in this very funny story is just that: Jonah’s laughter. What’s at stake in Jonah’s soul. And ours. It’s a funny story, all right, and the joke is on Jonah. And the joke is on us. For only destruction can follow if we do not learn to laugh at our prejudices, our hates, and the smallness of our vision of God’s purposes. It’s always “those people.” Why can’t “those people” live together in peace? Why can’t “those people” do what we’d like for them to do? Those people. Those “other” people. But there is always something to prevent us from giving up our enemies. Mark Twain had some difficulty understanding the enmity among all of God’s creatures and decided to try an experiment:
Not a single living thing. That’s the price of our solemnity and seriousness. Jonah just couldn’t get it. Why was he so angry? Because God loves too many people. As God sees it, there is only one kind of people on earth: God’s people. All the rest is happenstance, for the most part accidents of our birth: our race, our nationality, our class, our gender, our sexual orientation, our wealth, our religion. We let them separate us into us and them. Maybe
we should just learn to laugh at it all, laugh at all that separates
us. Jonah
couldn’t. Jonah is still waiting for God
to come around to his way of thinking. And God is still waiting for
us to come around to God’s way of loving.
Copyright 2004 The Rev. Dr. Stephen Montgomery 1) Lyrics
based on "The Old Fish Song." Author unknown, Earliest
Recording Date: 1933 (field recording, Blind James Howard). |
|
|||
Copyright ©1999-2007
explorefaith.org
|