By the Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
When you think of the biblical Book of Jonah, what’s the very first image that comes to mind? I’m guessing that for the vast majority of us, it’s got to be the whale, right? Even people with minimal Biblical literacy probably know that Jonah got swallowed up by a big fish, or maybe a whale, and spent three nights in the belly of the beast before it vomited him back up onto dry land. I mean, it’s a story that’s pretty hard to forget.
Just in case the rest of the story is a little hazy, let me fill in a few more details. The whole thing begins when Jonah is called by God to go to Nineveh. For reasons I’ll explain in a minute, Jonah has no intention of doing what God has told him to do, so instead he hops on a boat to Tarshish, basically going in exactly the opposite direction from Nineveh.
His mad dash to freedom is interrupted by a massive storm that threatens to break apart his ship. Jonah correctly interprets the storm as a sign that God is “unhappy” with him and so, for the first and arguably only time in the story, he does the right thing. He throws himself into the sea in order to spare the lives of the innocent sailors who are not, after all, the target of God’s wrath. At this point it’s clear that Jonah would literally rather die than go to Nineveh.
Of course, (spoiler alert) he doesn’t die, but is instead swallowed up and spit out by a big fish sent by God for that very purpose. Now you can understand why today’s passage begins, “The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time.” The first time Jonah heard God’s command he ran away, or at least he tried his best.
Because the fishy part of the tale has so caught most people’s imaginations, we may miss out entirely on the actual point of the story of Jonah. The real punchline has nothing to do with Jonah being swallowed by a big fish. The real punchline is about the people of Nineveh and how fully and faithfully they respond to Jonah’s pronouncement of divine judgment. To understand that, we have to go back to why Jonah was so dead-set against going there in the first place.
The fact is that going to Nineveh was a really bad idea for Jew. It was enemy territory. It was where the worst of the worst resided. One commentary calls it a “fantastically vile” place. Going to Nineveh for any reason was foolhardy, but going there to preach repentance would have been both foolhardy and dangerous. If you’re a Star Wars fan, imagine going to the Death Star to preach repentance to Darth Vader and his stormtroopers. Nobody wants that assignment! Nevertheless, that is exactly what God asks of Jonah. His efforts to run away from God might be comical, but his reasons for doing so made perfect sense, once you know the context.
That is what makes it all so ludicrous, and so funny, that the people of Nineveh respond the way they do to Jonah’s—well, let’s face it—to Jonah’s terrible sermon. I imagine early audiences would have guffawed that after one half-hearted sentence from Jonah not only did the people repent with sackcloth and ashes, but so did the king and even the cattle! This is ridiculous overkill, the stuff of satire or parody. It is also the kind of reversal of expectations, the trading places between insiders and outsider, the faithful and the foreigner, that is beloved by writers of Scripture.
It might help to understand the humor, and the deeper theological meaning, if we put this in contemporary terms. We might say that it would be like Bernie Sanders going to a Trump rally and converting everyone there to socialism with one grumpy utterance. Or maybe like me going to a Kansas City barbeque joint and turning the crowd into vegetarians just because I said they should try being nice to animals. You get the idea. The change of heart and of mind on display in the kingdom of Nineveh was utterly preposterous. And yet, thanks be to God, it happened.
And once it happened, God was far too gracious to follow through on his threats to destroy Nineveh. As it says in the text, “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”
So, to sum it up, after a rocky start, Jonah preached, the people repented, God relented, and now we should be able to wrap it up with a nice tidy bow, with everyone living happily ever after. But alas, no. The story takes one more bizarre turn.
It would make sense, wouldn’t it, for Jonah to rejoice with the people of Nineveh, to give thanks to God for his merciful loving-kindness, and maybe even to pat himself on the back for a job well done. Instead, Jonah throws an enormous hissy fit. He basically yells at God for being “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love,” traits that are normally cause for praising Yahweh. He is so angry that these terrible, terrible people have been forgiven that he tells God that he might as well just put him out of his misery.
Now, there is plenty of evidence in this strange, comical tale that Jonah is not a great person. He’s disobedient, he bargains with God, he’s a terrible preacher, and now here he is, he sulking and whining like a toddler with a toothache. He’s not upset that he didn’t get his way, or that God didn’t behave like God. He’s upset that the people he is determined to see as the bad guys have been let off the hook. This is pretty hypocritical, given that just a few days before this he had himself experienced God’s life-saving mercy! If, however, we walk away shaking our heads at his recalcitrance and egotism, we’ll have once again missed the point.
Jonah, as one commentary puts it, “embodies our own grudges.” Perhaps even more troubling, Jonah exemplifies our tendency to believe that our enemies must be God’s enemies as well. After all, Jonah wasn’t entirely wrong to think that justice would have been served by the Ninevites being punished for their wickedness. We can probably think of some pretty wicked people in the world today, and maybe they do deserve punishment, or at least to be held to account.
But how far are we willing to go in holding onto our sense of moral superiority? How do we know when our righteous anger has hardened into hatred? What makes us different than the people we think are so judgmental and wrong? There is sometimes a razor-thin line between our thirst for justice and our desire for revenge.
We’re in a precarious place in our civic life, and in our culture more broadly. It’s so easy to think that we know who is right and who is wrong, and to be convinced that we’re on the right side of every argument. But that kind of thinking so easily moves from the political realm to the personal, so that every one of our communities and even our families become divided into us and them, the good guys and the bad guys. This is poisonous for our society and for our souls.
It might also be idolatrous. Anne Lamott once said, ““You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
Of course we should want the people who are perpetuating systems of oppression and injustice to change their hearts and minds and behavior. We should also have the humility to be mindful of when our own hearts and minds and behavior need to change. Repentance is for everyone, not only for those other guys. Now is the time, Jesus tells us. Now is the time for us to listen to the call on our hearts to be agents of repentance and reconciliation, even if that means heading straight to Nineveh, straight into those places we would rather avoid. Who knows? We might end up on a grand adventure, with our own tall tales to tell to future generations. Let’s find out. Amen.
Works cited: The commentary I quoted (twice) is by Lawrence Wood and is found in Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 1 (Westminster John Knox Press, 2008). All of the commentaries for Jonah in that volume were helpful in the creation of this sermon, as was the Working Preacher podcast for this Sunday.
