After two months of online-only worship services, January 23 & 24 were our first services back in the church building since early November! In today’s sermon, we’re looking at the second part of the story of Jonah, chapters three and four. (Chapter 2 is covered in my February newsletter column.) It’s a great story about a shockingly successful sermon to some really terrible people, and a powerful object lesson from God about forgiveness and grace.
I found helpful James Howell’s thoughts on Jonah 3 at Ministry Matters and Cory Driver’s commentary at Working Preacher.
Last week, we read the first chapter of the book of Jonah. If you missed it, it’s on our church website and Facebook page and you can go watch the whole sermon, but for now, here’s the short version:
A long time ago in ancient Israel, God told a guy named Jonah to travel to Nineveh, capital city of the Assyrian empire, Israel’s enemies. When he gets there, Jonah is supposed to warn them God is about to destroy them and their city.
But instead of going to Nineveh, Jonah boards a ship going to Tarshish, in the opposite direction of Nineveh.
On the way, there’s a huge storm. The ship’s about to sink, until the sailors figure out their passenger Jonah has done something to upset God, and so they throw him overboard. That solves the problem of the storm, but isn’t so great for Jonah. But instead of letting the unfaithful prophet drown, God sends a giant fish to miraculously swallow him. That covers chapter 1.
Most of chapter 2 is just Jonah praying to God from inside the belly of the whale, so for today I’m going to skip over that, and we’ll pick up the story with the last verse of chapter 2.
Then the Lord spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto the dry land.
Chapter 3.
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord.
Apparently, Jonah has learned his lesson. He tried to flee from God, but God is persistent, and as Jonah himself said back on the ship, God is the maker of the heavens and the earth.
There’s a great passage in Psalm 139, one of my favorite verses, where the Psalmist says to God, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me.”
Basically, you can’t run away from God. God will never give up on you. What a great, powerful, comforting message. It’s the same idea as that parable Jesus tells about the good shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to go look for the one who wanders away. It’s good news…Unless of course you’re Jonah, and you are trying to get away from God’s call. Anyway, Jonah seems to learn something from his time in the fish, and given a second chance, this time, he goes to Nineveh like he’s told.
Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
What’s interesting here is that there’s something missing from Jonah’s message. Prophets don’t generally just say God’s going to do something bad; they tell the people what God wants them to do to avoid the bad thing.
God will punish you…if you don’t repent, if you don’t stop worshiping idols, or making foreign alliances, or whatever their latest sins are.
And usually, this message is proclaimed to God’s people, the people of Israel. For centuries, prophets had been calling them to repent, to follow God’s law, to return to the Lord their God.
Sometimes, they listen, but then over and over, they inevitably turn away from God. They reject God’s message proclaimed through the prophets, and they turn back to sin. Instead of true repentance, instead of relying on God, they rely on just the fact that they’re part of Israel. They were born into the right group of people, they live in the great nation God loves, so that must be enough.
We’re God’s people by default; we don’t actually have to pay attention to God, right? We don’t have to actually care about that stuff like loving God with all our hearts or following the commandments, right?
And from what we know about him, this prophet Jonah seems to buy into that worldview that God is just on our side regardless. Did you know Jonah is mentioned in another place in the Bible other than the book named after him?
He shows up in 1 Kings 14, where he prophesies to the king Jeroboam about expanding Israel’s borders, increasing the nation of Israel’s standing in the world.
What Jonah doesn’t talk about to Israel is the call to repent, the call to return to God, stopping sinning, repenting, treating the poor well, all the usual topics of prophets. As scholar Cory Driver puts it, “Jonah’s prophetic career, outside of the book that bears his name, is based entirely upon prophesying national greatness for an unrepentant country. As a prophet, Jonah was an unconditional Israelite nationalist. And so it was Jonah, in God’s own sense of humor, who was picked to prophesy against Nineveh.”
This is the guy God picks to go preach to foreigners, to Israel’s enemies in Nineveh. You might think he’d be excited about this: Go tell the enemies they’ll be destroyed, especially if that’s the whole message.
But as we’ll find out shortly, as unfaithful as he is, Jonah actually does know something about God: God likes to forgive. And even though Jonah apparently leaves out any call to repent, those irritating Ninevites do it anyway.
And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water.
Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”
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.
Now, outside the book of Jonah in the Bible, there’s no historical evidence of Nineveh turning to follow Yahweh, the Creator, the one true God. Archeologically, the Ninevites appear to have kept right on worshiping their moon god and other idols.
So, either the people of Nineveh very quickly forgot they’d repented and fasted and done all this and they turned back right away to worshiping their fake gods—in which case Jonah’s mission was kind of a waste of time—or, the point of the story isn’t really about the people of Nineveh.
This is a story for God’s people, for Israel and for us. The point is not whether or not God is capable of keeping someone alive inside the belly of a fish or whale, although people for centuries have debated if this book is supposed to be an historical story or an allegory or parable or moral fable or something.
The point is about how people relate to God. The point is that God’s people have been told to repent for centuries to repent, and they never can quite bring themselves to fully do it, to fully commit to following God.
But these foreigners, these terrible Ninevites, they get one half-hearted sermon from a single lousy prophet, and they’re all in. Everyone from the king on down fasts and put on sackcloth and cries out to God.
It’s so dramatic even the animals are wearing sackcloth. For the readers, it’s intentionally humorous—the Bible can be funny—and over the top! This is how you ought to repent! And God has mercy. Even though these are terrible people, God still gives even them a second chance.
God’s forgiveness isn’t just for the insiders, who get so lazy in their faith and practice because they think they’ve got it all figured out; God’s grace extends beyond our nation’s borders, beyond our church’s walls, to everyone who repents and cries out to God. God likes to forgive. God looks for opportunities to forgive. It’s a great message of inclusion…and Jonah hates it.
Chapter 4
But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. 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. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
Now we know why Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh. He didn’t want to go to those evil foreigners and tell them to repent, not because (as you’d think) it would be dangerous to go to the enemy and tell them to shape up, but because they might do it. And if they repent, God will forgive them. And they’re the enemy! God’s supposed to be on our side, not theirs!
Jonah’s so upset about those underserving people over there getting a second chance they don’t deserve that he’s ready to die. It’s not fair. They didn’t earn anything from God. They did this one little thing, and you’re going to save them? Ridiculous! Jonah would resign his position as prophet in protest, but he’s already tried that and it didn’t work.
Jonah’s one of the more dramatic people in the Bible, but you can see his point, right? How often do we have similar frustrations? Think about how upset people get about others getting help we didn’t get, or people getting undeserved handouts, how reluctant we are to give people opportunities we didn’t get, or that we had to work for.
Think about college hazing, how people want to make others suffer the same way they did, instead of breaking the cycle. It’s interesting even to look at some of our current political debates around things like stimulus checks and loan forgiveness through that lens – and I know I do the same thing. Jonah might be overly dramatic, but he’s relatable.
So the book ends with God teaching Jonah an object lesson.
And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.
The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”
But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 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 of the book. Jonah’s right, the Ninevites don’t deserve grace, but God gives it to them anyway. The same is true for you and me. Baptism is a great example. Trevin has done nothing to deserve God’s grace, but God gives it to him anyway, as a free gift. Thank God that through Jesus, our sins are forgiven. Thank God for second chances, for God’s unwillingness to give up on us. May we rejoice at the extension of God’s grace to others who also don’t deserve it.
Let’s pray.
God of grace and mercy, you forgive all who repent. Help us to hear your call and turn from our sin, to turn back to you. By your Holy Spirit, inspire us to forgive as we have been forgiven, and to rejoice when your love is extended to those we see as unworthy, undeserving, even unforgivable. Thank you for your love revealed in Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
Amen