Jonah

If I was playing a word association game as a young boy, my response to the word “Jonah” would undoubtedly have been “whale.”  That’s what I knew about Jonah, that he was swallowed by a whale.  But the story of Jonah is much more than a simple fish story.  For in many ways, strange as it may seem, we re-live Jonah’s story most every day of our lives.

Jonah was a prophet, and, of course, each one of us is also a prophet.  By our baptism, we are joined with Christ’s ministry as priest, prophet and king.  But our re-living of Jonah’s life goes beyond this simple comparison.

Just looking at today’s reading (Jon 3:1-10), Jonah seems to be an obedient and very successful prophet.  The Lord tells him to warn Ninevah about their evil ways, but also tell them that God is ready to have mercy of them if they reform their lives.  Jonah hops right to it, Ninevah reforms and is converted to the way of the Lord, and God’s mercy rains down on them.  But we came in this morning in the middle of the story.

The first time the Lord called Jonah to preach at Ninevah, his reaction was quite different.  He promptly booked passage on a boat for Tarshish, literally as far from Ninevah as he could possibly go.  He probably felt that God couldn’t possibly want him to go to Ninevah.  After all, Ninevah wasn’t even Hebrew; it was the capital of the Assyrian empire, enemies of the chosen people.  Why waste time, not to mention risking life and limb, to keep your enemies from destroying themselves with their evil ways?  It took God -- and a large fish -- to turn Jonah back to where we find him this morning, ready to preach God’s universal mercy.

We, too, frequently find ourselves questioning our call from God, our call to live God’s law, to show God’s love and mercy to everyone, and most especially, to those who may have hurt us, those who have offended us, the Ninevites in our lives.  We try to avoid our mission, to jump a ship for Tarshish or perhaps simply to cross to the other side of the street.

There have been times when a neighbor, a co-worker, perhaps a fellow student when I was in school, has done or said something which offended me.  How many times have I then shut that person out from my life, avoided that person?  When forced to be near the person, how many times did I just give the cold shoulder, assuming that this person was not worthy of my love, not worthy of God’s love?  How many times has the phrase “go to hell” gone through my mind?

At those times, I become Jonah, a prophet running from his calling, a selective prophet, one who has put human limits on God’s limitless mercy.

And this is only the start.  For if I can exclude these acquaintances from my love, then certainly people I’ve never even met, people guilty of much more heinous acts, are even more likely to be excluded.  As a society, we routinely execute criminals whom, I suppose we’ve assumed, are beyond reconciliation with God, beyond reconciliation with you and with me.  Aren’t these people simply the Ninevites in our lives, the people we’d just as soon see go to hell? 

It wasn’t so long ago, ironically enough, that we looked to the land of modern day Ninevah and saw an enemy who, we believed – and probably rightly so -- had offended us mightily, hated us mightily, and harbored most evil designs against us.  How did we treat Saddam Hussein, the king of our Ninevites? 

Jonah’s story today lives today in each one of us, in our response to personal insult, in our response to crime, our response to evil around the world.

During Lent, we make a special effort to reform our lives and believe in the good news – the good news that Jesus comes to save all sinners, not just us, not just those who we happen to like, not just those who happen to like us, but all sinners.  By our baptism, we are charged to spread this good news, to be prophets of the good news, most especially – like Jonah – to be prophets to the Ninevites in our lives.