Sermon: "The Real Miracle" (Jonah part 4), January 31, 2021
"Jonah Preaching before Nineveh," John Martin, 1840. Halton Gallery, UK
Preacher: Rev. Ryan Slifka
Scripture: Jonah 3
This is the fourth sermon in our 6 week series on the Book of Jonah.
Here we are in week 4 of our sermon series on the book of Jonah.
In chapter 1 Jonah was called by God to tell the wicked city of Nineveh to change their ways and he hopped on an escape boat in the other direction. But he couldn’t run away from God. God sent a hurricane, and he was thrown overboard. Then God sent a “great fish” to swallow him up. And just when he thought he was destined for digestion, the big fish spat him—spewed him, barfed him—out on the shore. And there it was, off on the horizon—Nineveh, the city he ran away from—just waiting for him to come and preach. Jonah ran away from Nineveh. But God eventually got him there the hard way.
This week Jonah gives in. God repeats the same call he made to Jonah in the first place, and Jonah finally goes to Nineveh. He finally does what he’s told. And the remarkable thing is that it works. Like a charm, actually.
He shouts out that the city’s gonna be overturned in 40 days, carrying this message from one end of the city to the other. And soon enough, the King of Nineveh hears the message, and he passes an executive order instructing the whole city to change their minds and mend their wicked ways. They’re to fast, to abstain from food and water. And they’re to put on sackcloth, and cover themselves in ashes as signs of this transformed life. They even deck their animals out in the same gear.
The King orders the city to repent in the hopes that the God who sent Jonah will repent to, and will change his mind by not levelling the city on account of its sins.
And it works.
They repent.
They change their minds, and God does, too. God decides not to burn the whole place to the ground.[1]
Jonah finally does what he’s told. And it all works out quite remarkably. He preaches to Nineveh. They repent, and they’re saved. The whole thing goes off without a hitch. See, Jonah—that wasn’t so bad! It was easy, in fact.
Now, we generally know the story of Jonah (if we know it at all) from the passage we heard last week. The part where he was in the belly with the big fish. One of the reasons that we know that passage, and not this one, is because being eaten by a whale, surviving for a few days, and then getting rocketed out in the exact right place is fantastical. It’s what fairy tales are made of. It’s the kind of thing we hear in the Bible and think “yeah right. Stuff like that can’t happen.” It’s impossible.
You know what’s more impossible than getting swallowed by a giant fish, though? This chapter. The repentance of Nineveh. Here’s why.
In the first sermon in this series I pointed out that the city of Nineveh sounds like just another city in the ancient far-east to our modern ears. Might as well be Sumer, or Moab or Ur. But remember Nineveh’s the capital city of Assyria, one of history’s most brutal empires. These guys invaded Jonah’s homeland, and wiped out the whole northern kingdom, obliterating ten out of the twelve original tribes of Israel. They razed cities, killed and tortured civilians. They didn’t pull down Jerusalem, but they did siege it. They’re the kind of people who hung the mutilated bodies of their enemies on their pyramids. The great Hebrew Bible scholar Robert Alter says Jonah heading to Nineveh’s like a Jew wandering into the heart of Nazi Germany, 1930’s Berlin and tellin’ them the whole thing’s gonna come crashing down.[2]
So picture this: lone Jew preaches from one end of Berlin to the other. Upon hearing the news, Hitler repudiates anti-Semitism, orders the swastika outlawed, and disarms the Wehrmacht. Germany isn’t reduced to rubble by bombs, but instead becomes a global advocate for peace.
Or Ukrainian kulak preaches his way through Moscow to the Kremlin and Stalin says “I’m sorry for the famine” and after stepping down implements immediate free, fair elections. The Berlin Wall’s never built. The Soviet Union never falls and instead flourishes as an economic powerhouse.
It’s like that. Thanks to Jonah’s preaching, this whole militaristic, murderous society bent on violence and destruction repents, with the Dictator waving to the crowd from his “We were Wrong Day” parade float. They turn from their wicked ways on a dime, and are transformed.
If you think that a great fish is the implausible thing in this story, then you need to read this chapter. Cuz the real miracle is the repentance, the transformation of Nineveh.
The repentance of Nineveh’s the true miracle in this story. Makes a fine ideal, a heartwarming dream. But we live in the real world. A world of sin, and violence, and selfishness. It’s hard enough for us to make a life-change like this, let alone whole nations or societies. This is why we all feel so anxious about the future on so many fronts—change on this scale just doesn’t happen. You might be wiser to bet on getting swallowed by a whale for three days. We’re on a Highhhhhway to Sheol. No stop—signs, speed limits. No going back. Right?
Right. It’s true. It’s the way life generally goes. But before you start contacting officials in the United Church with your worries about Rev. Ryan, that he’s taken a suspiciously dark turn. Before you do that let me tell you why we can be hopeful. Note I said hopeful—not optimistic. Optimism says things work out for good inevitably. But hope is the ability to cling to the good even if circumstances say otherwise. “Faith is assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.”[3] Hope comes in the face of a sober assessment of reality. In spite of it all.
By all accounts in the story Nineveh should have been destroyed. Laws of cause and effect suggest it was destined to be an archaeological ruin at best. If not crushed by divine fireballs from up above, it should have buckled under its own weight. But—it says—God spares the city. By the incredible mercy and forgiveness of God, delivered through his divinely appointed messenger, the inevitable is averted. Even the most destructive and depraved human society isn’t left to its own devices, because there’s another agent at work. One who is hidden, but who is nonetheless the ultimate master of history. Here a divine spoke is jammed in the never-ending wheel of fate… by One who isn’t hemmed in by the ironclad rules of cause and effect. One who makes the inevitable, evitable. Who makes the impossible a possibility.[4]
The message here is that because of the Living God the world isn’t on its own. Which means that change is possible. And not even the most heinous people and societies are ultimately fated to destruction. But they can be turned around. They can be saved. We can be saved. Which means that as disciples of Jesus, we need not give in to pessimism, nor be naively optimistic. But we can be hopeful because we trust the world is in the hands of the LORD, the One who is “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love.”[5] The One who desires mercy, not punishment, and whose will is not death but life for all creation.[6]
Which brings me to our role in this whole thing. And by “our” I mean the church. Disciples of Jesus Christ. Those of us called in baptism, gathered and sent by the Holy Spirit. Our role is unique.
You’ll notice that this transformation for Nineveh isn’t accomplished in the way we’d expect. There’s no call to arms, no storming of the Bastille (or congressional coup), no grabbing the reins of power. There’s no Twitter campaign, no protest, no re-education camps, no legislative agenda. It’s all accomplished by the Sovereign Word given to Jonah. Even when the King signs an executive order it’s a by-product of the change that’s already bubbled up in response to Jonah’s holy speech. In spite of his own obvious limitations.
Our role is in receiving the message we’ve been given and sharing it with the world. Spoken person to person, block to block. Like Jonah, making that patient pilgrimage from one end of Nineveh to the other, bringing hope, in spite of our own obvious limitations. Proclaiming the divine pardon for sin, and the transformation that’s possible in the light of God’s great love for creation on the cross, and in his resurrection. Trusting that though it may not overturn Nineveh in a matter of days, it’s how God has promised to renew all things.
Brothers and sisters. While the existence of a great fish is hard enough to swallow, the repentance of Nineveh is the true test of faith. The transformation of a spiritually devastated society, the healing of broken world is the true miracle. But if this text from Jonah gives us a glimpse of the truth beyond our conventional wisdom, beyond the cold hard evidence, then it means all is never lost. Because God plans to prosper and not to harm, plans to give hope and a future.[7] There’s no less days to sing God’s praise, then when we’d first begun.[8]
May we repent of our cynicism and believe in this great good news. May we be given the grace to believe it and the courage to speak it. From one end of the great city to the other.
Amen.
[1] There are, of course, multiple questions that come with God’s mind about destroying Nineveh. Does God really do stuff like this? If God’s mind changes, does this mean God is inconsistent? St. Augustine suggests that this language is a symbolic or metaphorical way for God to “stoop down” and explain God’s mercy to those who are not trained philosophers. See Phillip Cary, Jonah: the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008), 120.
[2] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019).
[3] Hebrews 11:1.
[4] “In showing the power of the body politic to turn around, it prevents faith from succumbing to despair about the world. It models corporate and social salvation that faith wills to claim for all cities of the earth.” Phyllis Trible, “Jonah,” in The New Interpreters Bible Commentary (Nashville, Abingdon: 1996), 516.
[5] Psalm 103:8.
[6] “The work of God has a future before it. It is not a completed work or abandoned work. It is not a risk the Creator took. It is a majestic adventure which moves on to its consummation by ways which are constantly renewed by God’s love. All the future belongs to the Lord.” Jacques Ellul, The Judgment of Jonah, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 54.
[7] Jeremiah 29:11.
[8] John Newton, “Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound,” Voices United (Toronto: United Church Publishing House, 1995), # 266.