I most often don’t like tour guides. It’s not because I don’t value information or think that I don’t need help learning about something. It’s because they tend to get in the way – they stand in front of the beautiful thing I wish to look at, or make a dumb joke when all I want is silence, to pay attention, to listen to the voice inside of myself which has something to say. And yet here I am again, like every Sunday, acting as your lumbering tour guide, requiring you to follow me, and listen to me ramble. I have important things to say, I think, but don’t let me get in the way. Don’t let me get in the way between you, Jonah, and God, don’t fail to hear the open question that only you can answer for yourself. To honor this Biblical book which offers us such questions, I too will pause at times to ask questions of you. You can answer or not, that’s between you and God.
4 But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry.
This is rather free translation “seemed very wrong.” The Hebrew actually has Jonah thinking this was a “great evil” rather than very wrong. (NOTE: the NIV, which is most often the translation that I read, has unfortunate habit of sanitizing text to make them PG or G. The translators obviously struggle having the prophet refer to God’s activity as a “great evil” but, as we shall see, much is missed by softening his critique.) Why? Why would Jonah be so upset at a God who offers compassion and forgiveness, let alone account for such a response as “evil.” Here are some suggestions:
1. Character flaw – “a mean and nasty prophet”
2. Fear. This view has two parts which may or may not be connected: 1. That Jonah flees initially because he’s worried about being killed for preaching doom in Nineveh and lies about knowing what God was going to do (we do that all the time when we don’t know something). 2. Jonah worries that God’s compassion will make him look like a false prophet and thus place him in mortal jeopardy. Here’s riddle for you? If a prophet preaches “destruction” and the people repent and escape judgment, was the prophet wrong? According to Deuteronomy 18:22, we can tell a prophet is from God by whether or not what they say comes true. And the punishment for being found to be a false prophet is death. So some posit that what makes Jonah angry was that God’s compassion put his own life in jeopardy.
3. Collective victim of trauma – currently this book is read every year on the festival of Yom Kippur, the festival of atonement. What’s it like to read this book in post-Holocaust world? Remember who the Assyrians are! Around 740 BC, the Assyrians defeated Israel and deported many of its citizens. In 701, it set its sights on Judah, hoping to take Jerusalem captive. This campaign was documented by the Assyrians in stone relief, called the Lachish relief, named after the town in Judah, which was set in the throne room of the Assyrian king. In it we get to see first-hand depictions of what the Assyrians did to their enemies. Etched in stone are pictures of people being flayed alive, their skin ripped from their legs, and then being hung in public. We see victims being impaled and left to die slowly out in the open. People are buried alive up to their necks and wasting away. They would cut off limbs, gouge out eyes, crucify people (they invented it). They were even known to have conquered peoples dig up their dead ancestors and then grind the bones into dust in order to effectively erase a people and their history from existence. These are the people that God is showing mercy to.
So yeah, Jonah is angry. It’s his wrath that we confront. I meet so many people who fear God’s wrath when perhaps what they should truly fear is the wrath of human beings who supposedly speak for God. It’s human beings who often long for death and destruction, not God. Or is it justice? I wonder, what’s the difference? (Pause)
2 He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. 3 Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
Some prayer. I love it that the Bible keeps it. Jonah essentially prays his complaint and anger. Perhaps you should pray yours. Let’s stop and consider the power of this for a moment. In this chapter we have the prophet calling the actions of God a “great evil,” complaining to God, and asking to die BECAUSE of God’s display of mercy toward enemies. And God in response doesn’t censor him, harm him, but with a surprising gentleness asks him open-ended questions. The writer of Jonah is trying to reveal the love of grace in an interesting way by giving both Jonah and God the same amount of words – each character is given 47 words: Jonah has the first 39 words. YHWH replies with 3 words. Jonah has 3 words. YHWH uses 5 words. Jonah offers 5 words. YHWH ends with 39 words. And in those words, God never pulls rank, doesn’t tell Jonah to shut up, and doesn’t play the “I’m God” card. But he does asks troubling questions. Are you willing to be troubled? Are you willing to be troubled in church about God?
I also love it that Jonah complains about Scripture, particularly Exodus 34:6, and God’s supposed graciousness. Notice that a grace-filled, redeeming God IS the God of the Old Testament. The God who forgives wicked empires, which know neither his law nor his name, is the Father who sends the Son, Jesus, and that Jesus does nothing but what the God of Jonah has sent him to do. Notice also that Jonah’s quoting of Ex. 34:6 leaves off one word, “truth,” which follows immediately after loving-kindness. Perhaps this is because he feels cheated. His announcement of destruction didn’t come true. How can God be true if enemies don’t suffer? What he failed to notice, however, is that the word most often paired with hesed or loving-kindness in scripture is the word “truth.” This is so often the case in the Psalms that it becomes a cliché (see Ps. 25:10; 40:10-11; 85:10; 89:14; 115:1). In two Psalms (57:10 & 108:4) we find the amazing couplet: “Your loving-kindness is higher than the heavens, your truth reaches to the clouds.” What if, friends, the loving-kindness of God is what is most true about God, the world, our enemies?
4 But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?” 5 Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. 6 Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant[a] and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. 7 But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.” 9 But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” “It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”
I want to make an exegetical point right off the bat that the NIV’s choice of “right” in vs., 4 is perfectly acceptable but mutes the powerful reality that the word is actually “good.” [In the same way that it translated the Hebrew word “evil” as “wrong” and “calamity”] God wants Jonah to wrestle with his goodness and wants to leave that word “good” echoing in our minds in sharp contrast to the word “evil” which Jonah has used for God (vs. 1 – “a great evil”; vs. 2 calamity/evil). Jonah’s anger places him outside of the city. His own anger and certitude of what God should do and who the Ninevites are becomes a self-imposed exile “east of the city.”
The use of the word “shelter” in vs. 4 would also have been picked up by any Jewish reader because it directly related to the festival of booths spoken of in Deut. 16:16. The festival was to be a renewal of the knowledge and obedience to the law of God but also a time when Israel was commanded to welcome, Gentiles, strangers, and foreigners within their gates (Deut. 16:14). This festival will gain a profound eschatological point later when Zechariah announces that the festival of booths will be the time when all of Israel’s enemies will “worship the King, the LORD Almighty” (14:16). In the sustained ironic fashion of the entire book – Jonah sits in exile, outside of the city, participating in a ritualized ceremony of law-keeping and welcome while he refuses to welcome. Who are you refusing to welcome, to believe that God loves, that currently places you in exile, outside of the city?
But even in that exile, Jonah finds deliverance. Shade, for all the reasons that should be obvious, means protection and functions as a symbol for deliverance (Isaiah 25:4-5) and the “shelter,” “shade,” and “plant” aim to point to obedience to the law, deliverance, and God’s promise to reestablish Jerusalem with a coming messiah (“the shelter of David,” (Amos 9:11) in order to save Israel and defeat her enemies. There is so much going on here I was tempted to either write another sermon or just start going bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb (finger on my lips.) All this talk about shelters, shade, plants aim to speak about Israel’s past and her destiny as God’s elect and her current political misfortunes that felt overwhelming, and mind-boggling, and cruel. And the last thing I would say is that that is seen by the fact that the worm didn’t chew the plant. Yep, that’s right. No, the Hebrew is very particular and once again falls prey to translators who choose to make things harmonize rather than catch the deep symbolism of the writer’s word choice. The actual word used for what the worm does to the plant is “struck.” It’s the word for a military attack which often gets translated by the King James version as “smite.” What dream, deep belief, core value, have you felt smited? What deliverance have you failed to experience? What loss has left you wanting to die?
10 But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. 11 And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”
The book ends with a question that is left open for all of us to answer as the story continues beyond the text. It opens to a mountain top view where each of us will stand at some point and be asked, “Who is God and what does God want?”
The Lord’s gentle critique of Jonah’s anger and desire for death is that he fails to fully extend “pity,” which is the better translation for “concerned” or “concern” in vss. 10 and 11. This is even more important when one recognizes that throughout the law the Israelites are repeatedly commanded not to pity anyone who has acted unjustly (Deut. 7:16, 13:8, 19:13, 21, 25:12). Pity is presented as that which keeps justice from coming about. But God doesn’t rebuke Jonah for pitying Israel’s and Judah’s losses, though such losses occurred because they themselves acted unjustly repeatedly. No, God’s gentle rebuke is that Jonah’s pity doesn’t go far enough.
The God who is compassionate is the God who makes and tends, vs. 10. Why “animals”? Because it once again asserts that there is one created community that needs redemption and that God cares for all that God has made.
And it’s fascinating to hear God define Nineveh’s wickedness as ignorance – “people who cannot tell their right hand from their left.” The LORD gave the law to his people so that they might the way of life and not turn from it “either to the right hand or to the left” Deut. 5:32, 28:14).But the people of Nineveh don’t know the way and therefore wander far from it, destroying all that is around them, including themselves.
There is a sense of deep intimacy in which God has numbered the people of Nineveh. Almost every time God numbers anything it aims to speak of a deep compassion and knowing. It’s the intimacy of seeing in which he watches a father in Nineveh pick up his young daughter and gently place her on his shoulders while he walks to the market. It’s the intimacy of seeing where God spies a middle-aged daughter, weeping, kissing her mother good-bye as she passes a way. It’s the deep knowing where a family cries over a beloved cow – a pet – that gave them milk and companionship. That’s what God sees – the God who creates fathers, and holds weeping daughters, and even tends to cows or chickens or cats.
There is a sense of deep longing and pain in Jonah. All he can see is blood. It’s the trauma of seeing Ninevite soldiers peel the skin off of young men who will never be fathers. It’s the horror of hearing of a young woman be abused by soldiers, forced to watch as her elderly mother is slaughtered. It’s the pain of watching animals, crops, grain, and comforts destroyed leaving nothing to eat. That’s what Jonah sees –people who were horribly, terribly, mercilessly harmed and the people who did it, with mere repentance, discovering mercy.
Last week I asked you how you might respond to Jonah given all that transpires, and the fact that God loves the very killers who sought to wipe his people off of the map – who would actually try and erase people groups by making them grind the bones of their ancestors into dust. And while God ends stating unequivocally that he loves such people, he neither commands nor condemns Jonah for his refusal. I talked to my wife about this and she told me that she would have responded to Jonah in a number of ways. But, even more dramatically, she shared with me that she felt as if God’s open ended question to Jonah was God saying to the traumatized prophet, “I love them. You don’t have to love them, not yet - not yet.” Who is it, that you are unwilling to love yet?
No comments:
Post a Comment