January 21, 2018
Jonah 3:1-5,10; 1 Cor 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20
Brookdale
We’ve all heard the memorable Bible story of Jonah. The story was never intended to be true in the sense of historical. It’s a fable, rather like one of Aesop’s fables. It’s just two pages long, but it occupies its own book of the Bible.
In chapter 1, God calls Jonah and tells him to go to Nineveh and prophesy its destruction. Can anyone tell me where Nineveh was? Nineveh was an ancient city, located roughly where Mosul is today in Iraq, and Iraqis still call part of the city Nineveh. In Jonah’s day, it was the capital of the great Assyrian empire, which destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in the 600s BCE and subjugated the southern kingdom of Judah for about 100 years. So it’s not surprising that Jonah didn’t want to go there and tell the Assyrians that the God of Israel was going to destroy their city. It would be like an American going to Pyongyang today and telling Kim Jong-Un that God is going to destroy North Korea. Even if you survived, what’s the point? Those are bad guys. They’re never going to change.
So Jonah ran away. He booked passage on a ship, but his shipmates threw him overboard during a storm because they found out that he was disobeying his god. In their view the storm was caused by God’s anger against the ship, and indeed the storm stopped after they tossed him overboard. The story goes that a big fish swallowed him and delivered him back to land—fun fact: it’s not a whale; the biblical text never mentions a whale). All this is in chapter 1. The moral of the story seems to be that you can’t run away from God.
The second chapter of the book is a prayer by Jonah in the belly of the fish, asking God for mercy. Jonah doesn’t actually promise to do what God told him to do, but he reminds God of God’s merciful kindness, and he begs God to be merciful and save him, because he’s in a terrible situation.
Today’s first reading comes from chapter 3. Jonah is back on land and God again tells him to go prophesy in Nineveh. This time Jonah obeys. His prophecy is that the God of Israel will destroy Nineveh in forty days. I can’t guarantee how President Kim Jong-Un of North Korea would respond, but in the story the Assyrian king took the message seriously. On day one, the Ninevites repented—that is, they had a change of heart. They put on sackcloth and ashes as a sign of their respect for God, and they fasted. Even the donkeys and sheep had burlap bags tied to their backs, and had to fast from food and water. This was a greater fast than the Israelites had ever undertaken. God was impressed and decided not to destroy Nineveh.
At this point the moral of the story seems to be that you can’t really predict what people—even bad guys—will do. The Ninevites, faced with destruction, repent, just as Jonah repented in the belly of the fish.
So was Jonah’s prophecy a success, because the Ninevites believed him and repented, or was it a failure, because what he prophesied didn’t happen? Chapter 4 tells us that Jonah waited forty days for God to destroy the city as promised, but nothing happened. Jonah was bitter; he felt duped, betrayed, and humiliated. I think the moral of the story here may be that God is as merciful to us as to our enemies. Or that God’s love is for everyone. Or maybe that we are here to do God’s will, and not the other way around.
The first reading on Sunday almost always complements the Gospel reading. Today’s Gospel passage is about Jesus’ message and his calling the first disciples. You might think that the common thread is fish—Jonah was swallowed by a fish and the disciples are fishermen. But it’s actually that God is calling us to repentance, to a change of heart, just as he called the Ninevites to repentance. And just as God wanted the Ninevites to believe the bad news of the danger to their city, he is asking us to believe in the good news that the kingdom of God is within our reach. And just as God called Jonah to prophesy to the Ninevites, he called the disciples. And we are the disciples.