"When God Wasn't Mean Enough"

by Revd Bruce Waldron - 19th October 2008

From the book of Jonah in the Hebrew Bible, 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. 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!" 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. But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry.

The story of Jonah holds a pivotal role in Israel’s understanding of it’s faith in God. It symbolizes a shift in it’s image of God and, as a result, a shift in it’s understanding of itself. The two are always related. This story is here, not because of the story of the sea monster that swallowed him, or his escape, but because this story represents the beginnings of Israel’s understanding that God isn’t just God of the “chosen race.” God is the God of all people, even the enemy.

Jonah starts out with the clear understanding that his job is to warn the people of Nineveh of the judgement of God so that they’ll be properly terrified and sorry when the destruction comes upon them. His job is to leave them with no excuse. When the judgement comes upon them, they’ll know they’ve brought it on themselves, and it will serve them right.

He goes to Nineveh with this typical understanding, that his job is to pronounce judgement on them, his enemies, and although he’s scared to do it, and tries to run away from the job because he thinks they’ll kill him, when finally he does come back to the job, he believes that their doom is inevitable. That’s his job, to let them know it, to rub it in. These are bad people. He doesn’t want God to save them.

Jonah comes here to Nineveh to do God’s will, but he doesn’t understand fully what he’s doing. It’s only in the aftermath of his faithfulness, when they repent and God doesn’t destroy them, that he begins to understand what it is that God has called him to do, and when he finds out, he doesn’t like it.

“That’s not what I came here for! I came to bring judgement on them. They are the enemy. They deserve to be condemned God. I thought you understood this. You’ve brought me here under false pretences!”

The writer of this story has got an ironic sense of humour I think. First, Jonah runs away because he doesn’t want to die and in running away he nearly dies. Then he repents of his cowardice and lack of faith, and goes back to face his job, and his probable death, and when he’s done what God has asked and he doesn’t get martyred, and God doesn’t do what he thought God should do, he does want to die.

You see what God has to deal with in us human beings. But God still loves Jonah too. Because that’s the other double irony. What Jonah has experienced from God, forgiveness, renewal, love, is also true for his enemies. When Jonah repents, God saves him. When the Assyrians repent, God saves them. And Jonah is not happy. He does not reckon that God’s grace should apply for them as it has for him.

That’s the point isn’t it. We think about the people who have done things that irk us, that hurt us, that are wrong, that are painful and damaging to people we love, and we are angry with them.

We think of people who are a thorn in our flesh, who are parasites on our society, who are destructive and threatening to what we hold dear, and our grace and tolerance to them can get a bit thin. We want God’s grace for ourselves, we want forgiveness. Then we have to accept that the forgiveness of God, the restorative possibility is just as great for them over there, the people who really tick us off. They too, their lives, are just as precious to God as ours.

Henri Nouwen, in his reflections on a 7 month stint in a Trappist Monastery, writes this.

“The measure of your awareness of God’s transcendent call to each person is the measure of your capacity for intimacy with others. If you do not realise that the persons to whom you are relating are each called to an eternal transcendent relationship that transcends every thing else, how can you relate intimately to another at his centre from your centre?”

That was the lesson Israel was learning with the story of Jonah.

If Nouwen is right, then it starts to make sense of the way that Jesus was able to transcend the barriers of race and class and religion that seemed to imprison so many of his contemporaries. It starts to make sense of the way great people like Mandela and Tutu and Ghandi and King and Mother Theresa, were able to do the same. It also confronts us with a reality.

Our own lack of consciousness of this prevents us from doing God’s work with so many people, because we are driven not by a divine agenda but by a very human agenda. We cannot touch some people because we don’t see them with Christ’s eyes.

There is some hope for us. Like Jonah, we are often doing God’s work without really understanding it. God can work through us without our full understanding. Thank God for that Grace, because if it wasn’t so God’s sovereignty would be thwarted by my lack of vision.

But Jonah was, also willing to learn. This story is here in the scriptures, because it happened that the story was heard, and retold. The people who compiled the Hebrew Bible understood its significance. These Assyrians of Nineveh, these enemies also have an eternal transcendent relationship with God.

So have you, and I, and so has each person we meet. Muslim, black or white, felon, immigrant, traveller, neighbour, children, parents, husband/wife, boss, employee.

And if we understand that, then we begin to understand the love of God for them, and we begin to comprehend our role as God’s people to make that reality known through who we are, what we say, what we do. That, I think, is the heart of Henri Nouwen’s reference to our capacity for intimacy when we understand that every person is called to an eternal transcendent relationship that transcends everything else.

That, I think, is the concept that lies behind Paul's words, From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has entrusted us with the ministry of reconciliation.

Thanks be to God. Amen