Jonah, Week 3
A Guide of Sorts:
A word about how to use this. Each week picks up where Sunday left off. The sermon can only hold so much, so these six mornings go back into the chapter we just read and sit with the parts we ran past. Read the day's short passage first, in your own Bible if you have one handy. Then read the reflection. Then pray, in the words here or your own. Six days, Monday through Saturday, and then we gather again.
One thread runs under all of it. Every week I am going to keep asking the same question, and I want you to keep asking it too: what is the word that has come to Hermiston First? Not to me. Not to you alone. To us. Jonah is a book about a whole city hearing a word and deciding what to do with it. So are we.
Jonah, Week 3:
Monday:
“The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying…”
Jonah 3:1
Chapter three opens almost exactly like chapter one. The word of the Lord came to Jonah. Except now there are two extra words that change everything. A second time.
Think about what has happened between the first time and the second. Jonah heard the word, said no with his whole body, bought a ticket to the far edge of the earth, nearly drowned a boat of innocent men, got swallowed, spent three days in the dark, and got thrown up on a beach. And God's response to all of that failure is to walk back over and say the same thing again. Same command. Same city. A second time.
God does not appear to keep a running total of how many times you have already run. The word comes a second time as if the first disaster never disqualified anything. That is not God lowering the bar. That is God being who God is, which is relentless in a way that has nothing to do with keeping score.
I have needed the second time. And the third. And a number after that I would rather not count out loud. The most important thing I can tell you about the call on my life is that it kept coming back after I had already ruined my chance at it, more than once. If God only called people once, God would have run out of usable people a long time ago, and I would not be standing in your pulpit.
Where does this congregation need to hear that the word is coming a second time? What have we decided we already blew, that God has not written off at all?
A Prayer for Today
God, thank you for the second time. And the ones after that. Thank you for not keeping the score I keep on myself. Say it to me again. I am ready to hear it now. Amen.
Tuesday:
“He cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’”
Jonah 3:4
The whole sermon is five words in Hebrew, and the last one is a trap door. The word translated overthrown can mean exactly that, destroyed, flattened, wiped out. It is the same word used for what happened to Sodom. But it has a second meaning, and the writer picked it on purpose. That same word can mean turned. Changed. Transformed. Flipped around.
So Jonah's grim little threat, forty days and Nineveh is overturned, is secretly also a promise. Forty days and Nineveh is turned around. Jonah means it one way, the ugly way, the way he is hoping for. And God means it the other way. And the beauty is that both come true. In forty days Nineveh is completely overturned. Not into rubble. Into repentance. The city is destroyed, in the sense that the city it used to be is gone.
I think this is one of the most hopeful hidden words in the whole book, and Jonah did not even know he was saying it. The very same event, the same overturning, is destruction to the person hoping for destruction and transformation to the God hoping for transformation.
That has held true in my life too. The same season that felt like the end of me was, from another angle, the turning of me. Overturned. Both meanings at once. I only got to pick which one I would call it afterward.
The changes coming to Hermiston, the ones pressing in on this town and this church, are they an overturning we should dread or a turning we should welcome? The word in Jonah's mouth says the honest answer might be both, and that we get some say in which.
A Prayer for Today
God, the same word means ruin and means renewal. Help me stop bracing for the ruin long enough to notice you might be doing the renewal. Turn me around. Amen.
Wednesday:
“Who knows? God may relent and change his mind…”
Jonah 3:9
The king of Nineveh gets the best theology in the book, and he is a pagan tyrant who heard eight words from a man who did not even mention God by name. Here is his reasoning for why the whole city should repent: who knows? God may relent. He does not say God will. He does not claim a promise. He does not have a guarantee. He has a maybe, and he bets the entire city on it.
That same small word showed up once already in this book. Back in the storm, the terrified captain shook Jonah awake and said maybe, perhaps, who knows, the god will spare us a thought. A pagan sailor and a pagan king, two chapters apart, both staking everything on the same fragile maybe. And notice the honesty in it. A maybe that might be a yes is also a maybe that might be a no. Neither man is in control of the outcome. All they can do is turn, and wait, and see.
I find that more honest than most of the certainty I hear in church. The king does not repent because he has done the math and knows it will pay off. He repents because there is a chance, and a chance is enough to change everything, and he would rather turn toward a maybe than march confidently off a cliff.
That same small word showed up once already in this book. Back in the storm, the terrified captain shook Jonah awake and said maybe, perhaps, who knows, the god will spare us a thought. A pagan sailor and a pagan king, two chapters apart, both staking everything on the same fragile maybe. And notice the honesty in it. A maybe that might be a yes is also a maybe that might be a no. Neither man is in control of the outcome. All they can do is turn, and wait, and see.
So much of the real life of faith lives in that phrase. Who knows. We do not get guarantees. We get maybes worth betting on. Maybe this hard conversation heals something. Maybe showing up for this person matters. Maybe the word really has come to this church and God really is up to something here. We do not know. We act anyway, in hope, without the receipt.
I moved my very pregnant wife a thousand miles on a who knows. I did not have certainty. I had a maybe I was willing to bet my family on. Every real act of faith I have ever made looked exactly like that.
What is the who knows that God is putting in front of Hermiston First? What maybe is worth betting on, even without the guarantee we keep wishing we had?
A Prayer for Today
God, I keep waiting for certainty before I move. Give me the nerve of that pagan king, willing to turn my whole life toward a maybe because you might be in it. Who knows. Let's find out. Amen.
Thursday:
“All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands.”
Jonah 3:8
When the king calls for repentance, he gets specific, and the specific thing he names matters. Turn from the violence that is in your hands. Not vague wickedness. Not a general bad feeling about sin. Violence. Harm. The actual damage these people had done to other people with their actual hands. Assyria was famous for its cruelty, and the king names the cruelty out loud.
That is a more grown-up picture of repentance than the one I was often handed. I was taught that repentance was mostly private. Feel bad about your personal sins, apologize to God in the quiet of your own heart, get right. And that is part of it. But Nineveh's repentance is not just feeling bad. It is turning from the harm they were doing to their neighbors. It has hands in it. It changes what they do to other people, not just how they feel about themselves.
I spent years thinking my faith was between me and God and nobody else's business. It took a long time to learn that a repentance that never reaches my hands, never changes how I treat the person in front of me, is not really repentance. It is just religious feelings.
The violence in our hands is rarely as dramatic as an empire's. It is the way we talk about people who are not in the room. The neighbor we will not learn from. The harm we do by looking away. It still counts. It still needs turning from.
What is the violence in this congregation's hands, the harm we do or allow, that turning toward God would actually have to change?
A Prayer for Today
God, do not let my repentance stop at my feelings. Reach my hands. Change what I actually do to the people around me, not just how I feel about myself on Sunday. Amen.
Friday:
“God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it.”
Jonah 3:10
Here is the sentence some people find hardest in the whole book. God changed his mind. Nineveh turned, and God saw it, and God relented, and the destruction did not come. The word is plain. God changed course.
I know that unsettles some folks, because we get taught that God never changes, that God is a fixed and unmovable thing. But the Bible, right here and in a lot of other places, describes a God who is genuinely moved by us. A God who responds. A God whose heart can be reached and whose plans can bend toward mercy when people turn. This is not God being unreliable. This is God being in a real relationship, where what we do actually matters to how the story goes.
And notice which direction God changes. God does not change toward more punishment. God changes toward mercy. Every single time this comes up in Scripture, the change bends the same way, away from destruction, toward grace. If God is going to move, God moves toward letting people live.
I take enormous comfort in a God who can be moved. A God who was fixed and finished with me would have been done with me a long time ago. The God I have actually met kept changing course toward mercy, over and over, in response to the smallest turns I managed to make.
Do we believe in a God who can still be moved, right here, over us? And if God's heart bends toward mercy when a city turns, what might God do with a church that decides to turn?
A Prayer for Today
God, thank you for being the kind of God who can be reached. Who bends toward mercy when we turn even a little. I am turning. Meet me the way you always have. Amen.
Saturday:
“The people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.”
Jonah 3:5
Let me tell you why this chapter would have landed like a slap on its first audience. Israel had prophets. Real ones. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Micah. Gifted, faithful, eloquent men who preached their hearts out for years, with poetry and tears and everything they had. And the people mostly did not listen.
And here, in this satire, comes the worst prophet imaginable, giving the laziest sermon imaginable, in the enemy's capital city, and the entire population repents instantly. Great and small. The king. Even the livestock, dressed in sackcloth, which is the writer laughing out loud. The point is not subtle and it was not meant to be. If Nineveh will turn at a bad sermon, what is our excuse, we who got the good ones?
That is what I mean when I say Jonah is a mirror. The book is not really about the Assyrians at all. They are a device. The book is holding a mirror up to God's own people and asking a very uncomfortable question. The outsiders keep getting it. The enemies keep getting it. The pagans and the sailors and now a whole wicked city keep getting it. Why don't you?
It is a mirror for us too. The people we have quietly counted out keep turning toward God faster than the people who have been in the pews for fifty years. That should not make us bitter. It should wake us up.
Tomorrow is the last Sunday of the series, and it ends on a question God asks and Jonah never answers. Come with this one first: who have we assumed would never turn, who might turn faster than us? And what does it say about us that they might?
A Prayer for Today
God, hold the mirror up. If a wicked city can turn at a terrible sermon, do not let me make excuses with all the good ones I have been given. Wake this church up. Amen.