Sermon: “Who Knows?”

Text: Jonah 3:1-10

3^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

January 25, 2009

Scripture introduction.  Our second reading this morning is the third chapter of the Old Testament book of Jonah.  Unlike other works of prophecy, the author of Jonah gives us absolutely no hint about the historical setting of this book.  The king of Nineveh is not named, and the only reference to Jonah is a brief one in Second Kings.[1]  Moreover, there is no agreement among scholars about when the book was written, with suggested dates ranging over 600 years from the 8^th to the 2^nd century before Christ. 

But there certainly was a Nineveh.  Located just across the Tigris River from current-day Mosul in northern Iraq, Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire.  The Assyrians were the ones whose armies destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and subjugated the southern kingdom of Judah.  They were the first ancient people in the historical record who sought to create and maintain an empire of world domination.  They had a standing army, well trained and well equipped.  In order to keep conquered nations off balance and unable to rebel, the Assyrians had a practice of breaking them up, moving their populations from one place to another.  This was exactly what they did to the northern kingdom of Israel.  Due to Assyrian mixing and deportation, the tribes of the north—sometimes called the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel—lost their identity as Jews.  Only through the southern kingdom of Judah and its tribes did the Judaism survive.

Thus, when we read about Ninevites in the book of Jonah, we should understand the epitome of fearsome and evil power. 

Sermon.  The book of Jonah appears only today in the three-year cycle of the Sunday lectionary.  You may be wondering why it is that the story we know best from Jonah—the one about the great fish swallowing the prophet—is not the chosen selection, but rather chapter three, which deals with the repentance of the Ninevites and with God’s forgiveness.  This is one time that I agree with the lectionary editors, although ten years ago I might not have.

For a long time I read the book of Jonah thinking that it was about missionaries.  As I saw it, Jonah was called to be a missionary, but Jonah disobeyed God.  I was raised on stories about missionaries who went to very dangerous places.  My Sunday school teacher had a relative who preached the gospel to a tribe of head-hunters in the Amazon jungle.  My great aunt and uncle were missionaries to China before and during the Japanese invasion, which resulted in his being interned as a prisoner for much of the war.[2]  I knew I would be afraid to be a missionary to a dangerous place, so when I heard the story of Jonah, I assumed that the reason he ran away from God’s call was fear.  Of course it’s true that God calls missionaries—and sometimes to very unsafe places.  But I now understand that this book is about something else.

The ancient Israelites did not have a strong tradition of exporting their faith to other nations.  If anything, it was the opposite: they had a tendency to see themselves as different from other nations, and they attempted to maintain their differentness.  They understood that they were to be gracious to the foreigners who lived among them, and some considered that they had been called as God’s chosen people in order to set an example for the other nations.  Even so, there was no real missionary movement in ancient Israel.  And if we read the entire short book of Jonah, it comes through pretty clearly that Jonah was courageous.  The ancient Israelites were not a seagoing people.  He probably would not even have left his home if he had been afraid.  And, of course, when he finally did arrive in Nineveh, he bravely spoke the word of the Lord to them.

No, I think it was something else about God’s call that troubled Jonah.  Remember what the Ninevites represented in this story.  They were the most fearsome nation of their day.  They planned world domination.  They destroyed and relocated entire peoples, dividing family groups and all other significant social units.  They were without question the greatest threat to the kingdoms of Israel and Judah.  God, too, acknowledged the evil of Nineveh, as is clear from God’s first call to Jonah: “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.”

We don’t find out what was really going on in Jonah’s mind until the last chapter, just after the conclusion of our reading for this morning.  Jonah did not want to preach repentance to the Ninevites because he was well acquainted with the merciful ways of God.  The last thing he wanted was to help the enemy escape the wrath of God.  After the Ninevites did, in fact, repent, we can hear the notes of anger and disappointment in Jonah’s complaint to God: “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.”  In other words, “I just knew it.  I knew you would do it: you have forgiven the most despicable people on the earth, those who are the greatest enemies of our country.”

Much of Hebrew prophecy consists of warnings that if the people do not change their ways, God will punish them.  And some of the prophecies on their face do not appear to be conditional: the prophet simply announces God’s coming destruction.  However, my Old Testament teacher, Johanna Bos, insists that implicit in each prophecy of punishment is a call for repentance and a change of heart.  The Hebrew word is shuv, “to turn.”  The nature of prophecy—its entire purpose—is to call the people to shuv, to turn from the direction they are going and to reverse their direction before it is too late.  Often this is explicit in the text, as it is in Jonah, where the king of Nineveh, after decreeing repentance in sackcloth and ashes, asks aloud, “Who knows?  God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”  In Hebrew, “Who knows?  God may shuv; God may shuv from his fierce anger.”  In studying for this sermon, I was surprised and delighted by a point made by Mary Joan Winn Leith[3] in her notes to the New Oxford Annotated Bible.[4]  She writes that there is only one prophecy in the entire book of Jonah and that it can have two meanings.  Jonah prophesies, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”  The Hebrew verb for “overthrown” is not shuv, but it also can mean “to overturn” or “to turn.”  Thus, while we can read Jonah’s prophecy as one of destruction, it is also possible to read it as a prediction, or at least an acknowledgement, that Nineveh would (or could) turn, repent, and be forgiven.  

While we often mistakenly think of the Old Testament as being filled only with law and judgment and punishment, it actually contains some of the most eloquent expressions of God’s grace and mercy.  The editors of the lectionary definitely got it right:  if we can have only one Sunday reading each three years from the book of Jonah, it should not be about the great fish, but rather about the extraordinary scope of God’s forgiveness and love—extending even to people and nations and cultures who we may think are outside the family of God.

And surely Jonah is a message of hope and grace in our own lives, too.  If God can love the Ninevites, if God can forgive them, then God also can and does forgive us when we repent.  A feeling of guilt and remorse often accompanies true repentance, but God is not looking for a feeling.  God wants a change of behavior, a change of direction.  That is what is meant by the Hebrew verb shuv.  We are to turn from the behavior that displeases God and begin to act in ways that honor and delight God.  And God means for us to repent now.  The people of Nineveh got only forty days.  As Jesus himself noted, Jonah and the Ninevites were a sign that repentance must happen right away.[5]

Scholars continue to debate what kind of literature the book of Jonah represents.  It has some similarity with other prophetic books, but contains only one prophecy.  It concerns Nineveh, a well-known and well-documented historical city, but the details are so sketchy that we cannot place the story in history.  Indeed, there are elements of the story that seem rather fantastic.  Nineveh was said in our text today to be so large that it took three days to walk across, yet we know from archeology that the whole circumference of the city was no more than eight miles.  And isn’t it odd that the king of Nineveh would dress even the animals in sackcloth and ashes?  And then there’s that fish in chapter one—the fish that swallowed Jonah and kept him alive for the three-day journey back to Nineveh.  That seems rather fantastic, too.  But the most fantastic thing of all, the hardest part of Jonah for us to accept, may be its central message: God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.  That’s the real miracle in the story of Jonah.  Two thousand years ago, this miracle took flesh in the person of Jesus Christ.  And by the power of the Holy Spirit, that miracle continues to call to us today: turn, turn from the ways that displease God.  The king of Nineveh, not knowing the God of Israel, may ask, “Who knows what God may do?”, but in Jesus Christ we already know the answer.  God will forgive, and we can be changed.  This was Jesus’ first sermon, which Bob read earlier:  “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”[6]