Sermon: "Between Tarshish and Nineveh" (Jonah part 1), January 10, 2021

Preacher: Rev. Ryan Slifka
Scripture: Jonah 1:1-3
This is the first sermon in our 6 week series on the Book of Jonah.

This week we begin a six week sermon series and study on the Old Testament’s book of Jonah. If we know the book of Jonah at all it’s likely that we know about it from children’s Bible’s. Cuz there’s a big fish (or whale) who swallows him up. But it’s more than a family-friendly fairy tale. Though it’s only four chapters long it’s one of the most unique and fascinating texts in the whole Bible, maybe even western literature. My hope is that in ruminating on it over six weeks, in hosting it in worship and in our hearts we might discover just how interesting and how insightful it is. So get your spiritual wet suit on, ‘cuz we’re heading into the belly of the fish.

Jonah begins with divine communication. “Now the Word of the Lord,” it says. “The Word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Ammitai.” This isn’t particularly special. Jonah is counted as one of the prophetic books in the Old Testament. These books are focused on people called prophets. The late Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that prophets are people who are given a “divine view.” They’re tapped on the shoulder by the Holy One to speak “from a perspective of God as perceived from the perspective of his [or her] own situation.”[1] All we really know about Jonah outside the book of Jonah is a little mention in the book of Second Kings, where he was apparently a prophet in the court of king Jereboam.[2]  So the fact that this book begins with a “Word from the Lord,” is nothing out of the ordinary. At least from the vantage point of the Bible.

The fact that Jonah receives a Word from God isn’t unique. What is unique though, is the content of this Word from God. Where it sends him, and what it asks of him.

The Word of the Lord came to Jonah, it says, saying “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” Nineveh doesn’t mean much to us, but it sure would means something to Jonah. Nineveh’s a great city of 120,000 people. Which for its time—8th century B.C.—is massive. It’s so big because it’s the capital of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians are known for their brutality, murdering and pillaged their way throughout the middle east. They’d burn their enemies alive and decorate their walls and pyramids with their bodies—among many other cruelties.[3] So Nineveh’s basically the symbolic home of everything evil, hateful, and idolatrous. We’re talking Azkaban from Harry Potter, Mordor from the Lord of the Rings. Black smokestacks and human sacrifices. It’s the last place anybody would wanna be sent to.[4]

And to top it all off, Jonah’s people were some of their worst victims. The Assyrians sacked both the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, wiping out ten out of the original twelve tribes. The great Hebrew scholar and Bible translator Robert Alter compares God sending Jonah to Nineveh sending a Jew to Nazi Germany, Berlin 1940. So Jonah’s not only one single person being sent to a place of wickedness, he’s being sent to the belly of the beast to prophesy to his people’s worst enemies—the jack-booted victimizers of his own people—to let ‘em know God’s giving them another chance to turn their lives around.[5]

It’s insane. Nineveh’s the last place anyone would wanna go. And the Ninevites are the last people any Jew would wanna go to. It’s basically an impossible request.

Seeing as how it’s impossible, Jonah does what any sane person would do. He flees. Jonah’s name actually means “dove.”[6] And this dove flies the coop. Jonah, it says, goes down to Joppa. It’s a seaport on the east side of the Mediterranean. And he buys a ticket on a ship headed for this place called Tarshish. “Away from the presence of the Lord.” Now, we’re not exactly sure where Tarshish is. The best guess is southern Spain—on the exact opposite side of the Mediterranean.[7] Really, it’s the end of the known world. And not only that, it’s like a seaside resort. Disneyland, Hawaii. The kind of place you go to get away. It’s the exact opposite of Nineveh. Both geographically and spiritually.

God says go East, Jonah goes west. God sends him to Nineveh, the dark place of terror, and instead Jonah books his literal getaway at an all inclusive resort. On the other side of the world. So where God’s sending Jonah, and what God’s asking of Jonah… it’s impossible. No wonder he hops a boat without a single hesitation.

Now, I know that few of us have received a direct, prophet-style Word from God. Let alone a word directing us into the heart of a bloodthirsty empire (though perhaps your prayer lives are more exciting than mine). Even so, we all have our Nineveh’s. Though they’re far less dramatic, there are places in our lives we’re called to, situations and people that the Spirit nudges us towards, but just can’t bring ourselves to go to.

Like Jonah we all have our impossible places of fear and darkness. Maybe it’s a buried trauma too difficult to come to terms with. Maybe it’s someone who’s hurt us, caused us deep pain and grief who we can’t imagine ever forgiving. Or maybe it’s someone in our lives who needs to be confronted but we’re too scared to do it. Or maybe it’s even something about ourselves. Some sin, some fault, some failure that we hide from everyone else. Regardless of what it is—like Jonah—we’d much rather put all of our energies and resources into escape. Either through literal avoidance—running away. Or metaphorical avoidance. I mean, as a society we’re all eating, drinking, drugging, porn-ing and Netflixing our way away from the territory of pandemic fear. For every Nineveh in our lives there’s a ticket to Tarshish in our hand. It’s just what we do.

We all have our Nineveh’s. We all have our zones of extreme discomfort, and we all have our Tarshish, our preferred methods of escape. There’s some place we know we gotta go, something we know we gotta do. But just can’t bring ourselves to go there or do it because it’s impossible. So we run away. Literally or otherwise.

Now, of course, our text for today’s pretty short. It ends there. God sends Jonah East to Nineveh and he heads straight west. Away from darkness, the terror. Away from the presence of the Lord. Now, I don’t wanna ruin the rest of the story for you one sermon in. But spoiler alert: Jonah eventually goes to Nineveh. But he never actually goes of his own free will. This first passage gives us a pretty good summary of the rest of the book. Jonah resists his God-given vocation until the bitter end. He only really confronts the darkness when When God makes him go. When he’s given no other option.

We, however, have another option. And that other option comes to us in the New Testament.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is confronted by some of his opponents. They ask him for a “sign.” They wanna see Jesus do something divine to prove that he is who he says he is. That he’s the Messiah, the One sent by God. And he responds to them “no sign will be given […] except the sign of the prophet Jonah.”[8] We’ll dig a little deeper into the meaning of this in a couple weeks. But here Jesus connects his own ministry with Jonah’s. As a result, Christians have always interpreted the story of Jonah in the light of Christ.

Now Jonah’s obviously not Jesus—it only takes the first three verses to find that out. A big difference is that is that when Jesus is sent, he goes. I mean, today we celebrate the Baptism of Jesus. Jonah’s name means dove, and at the moment of his Baptism, God’s Spirit descended on him like a dove, saying “this is my beloved Son.” This was Jesus’ commissioning, his Word of the Lord moment.[9] [10] At that moment, he didn’t flee for Tarshish, but was driven by the Spirit’s prodding into the wilderness where he was confronted by the devil, that symbol of darkness and evil itself.[11] And soon enough, that same Spirit drove him to Jerusalem, the place of sin, violence and death. His own Nineveh. When the Word came to Jesus, Tarshish wasn’t even an option. The only option was his own betrayal, arrest, and execution, to enter the place of darkness and death. His only option was the cross. And it was his only option wasn’t because other ones weren’t available. It was the only option Jesus could take on account of who he was.

Jesus wasn’t Jonah. Unlike Jonah, Jesus was God’s saving Love in the flesh. So he was able to go to Nineveh, able to embrace the cross, trusting that whatever darkness, suffering and pain lay ahead of him, God would be victorious. And on Easter Sunday, he was proved right.

Jonah wasn’t Jesus. Jonah chose Tarshish over Nineveh. His comfort over his cross. Jonah wasn’t Jesus, and we aren’t Jesus, either. But the good news is that we don’t have to be. Because of Jesus. Because of Jesus, we have another option. Because of Jesus and his unrelenting obedience to God’s will to bring peace and reconciliation to creation, to bring salvation to the Nineveh’s of our world by entering into the darkness, by taking on human sin and death on the cross. It means that we don’t have to flee from our own. Instead, it means we can go. We can go because we know that God’s already gone there ahead of us. And already awaits us there with his resurrection power.

So what’s your place of darkness? Where’s your Nineveh? And where’s your Tarsish, your place of escape? The good news is that you can stop fleeing from your pain, you can stop hiding out of fear, you can stop running from the prodding presence of God. And you can turn away from using, abusing, and amusing your fear and troubles away. Because you’ve been given a whole other option by the grace of the crucified God. We can—you can—go to Nineveh. Because no corner of darkness has been permanently dimmed by the radiance of God’s grace. Because Christ has already gone there ahead and has overthrown it by the power of his self-giving love.

So friends, go to Nineveh, where ever and whatever it may be. Go with the courage that comes with trusting that God’s already gone there before you. Go, though it may seem impossible for you, knowing that nothing is impossible with God.

AMEN.

[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets: an Introduction, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), x.

[2] 2 Kings 14:25.

[3] Jacques Ellul, The Judgment of Jonah, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 27.

[4] “The nature of Nineveh’s evil is not mentioned, but it hardly needs to be. It is more infamous than Sodom and Gommorah.” Phillip Cary, Jonah: the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2008), 37.

[5] The irony being that by the time Jonah was written Nineveh had been destroyed, and the Assyrians supplanted by the Babylonians.

[6] Cary, Jonah, 29.

[7] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019).

[8] Matthew 12:39.

[9] Matthew 3:13-17.

[10] Cary, Jonah, 30.

[11] Matthew 4:1-11.