Jonah, Week 4
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 4:
Monday:
“That is why I fled… for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”
Jonah 4:2
Finally, four chapters in, Jonah tells us why he ran in the first place, and it is not what any of us were taught in Sunday school. He did not run because he was scared of the Ninevites. He ran because he was afraid God would forgive them. And now that God has, Jonah is furious, and he says so.
Listen to the words he uses to accuse God. Gracious. Merciful. Slow to anger. Abounding in steadfast love. If those words sound familiar, they should. It is the oldest and most beautiful confession Israel had about the character of God, repeated all over the Old Testament. It is the sentence you would want carved over the door of the church. And Jonah spits it out like an insult. This is why I ran, God. Because I knew you were like this. Because I knew you would be good to them.
That is the sharpest thing in the whole book. Jonah quotes the loveliest truth about God as the reason for his rage. He knows exactly who God is. That is the problem. He would rather God be small and vengeful, because a small and vengeful God would be on his side against his enemies.
I have to be careful here, because I know this move from the inside. I have loved God's mercy right up until it landed on someone I did not want it to land on. And then, suddenly, the width of grace stops feeling like good news and starts feeling like a betrayal.
Whose forgiveness would make this congregation angry? That is not a comfortable question. It is the whole point of the book.
A Prayer for Today
God, I love your mercy until it reaches someone I wanted you to punish. Forgive that in me. Make your grace good news to me even when it saves the people I cannot stand. Amen.
Tuesday:
“And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
Jonah 4:3
Jonah is so angry that a city was spared that he asks to die. Take my life, he says, it is better for me to die than to live. Over what? Over mercy. Over other people getting the grace he did not want them to have. He would genuinely rather be dead than watch his enemies be loved.
There is an old echo here. The prophet Elijah, at his lowest, prayed almost the exact same words, take my life, I have had enough. But Elijah prayed it out of exhaustion and despair, worn down to nothing in service of God. Jonah prays it out of spite. Same words, opposite hearts. The writer wants us to hear the difference. This is what resentment does when you feed it long enough. It will make a person prefer death to the sight of someone else being forgiven.
I want to be gentle about this, because a death wish is a serious and painful thing, and if you carry one that is real, please tell someone, please do not carry it alone. But Jonah's is a specific kind. It is the bitterness that has curdled so far that being right matters more to him than being alive.
I have never been all the way to Jonah's place, but I have felt the edge of it. The way holding a grudge can slowly poison everything, until you would rather nurse the anger than let go of it and live. Resentment is a bad thing to be right about.
Where is this church holding onto being right in a way that is quietly killing something in us? What would we have to release in order to actually live?
A Prayer for Today
God, do not let me love being right more than I love being alive. Where I am nursing a resentment, help me set it down before it costs me everything. Amen.
Wednesday:
“Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city… to see what would become of the city.”
Jonah 4:5
After God spares Nineveh, Jonah does not go home. He goes up on a hill east of the city, builds himself a little shelter, sits down in the shade, and waits. He is waiting to see what will become of the city. He is still hoping, even now, even after everything, that God might change his mind back and destroy the place after all. He has front-row seats booked for a disaster he refuses to believe is cancelled.
That is a devastating picture when you sit with it. A man who has just watched God save a hundred thousand people, camped on a hillside, disappointed, waiting for the fire. Unable to enjoy the good news because it was good news for the wrong people. Unable to come down off the hill and into the city and join the party, because the party is celebrating the exact thing he was against.
I have sat on that hill. Not over a whole city. But I have absolutely held onto a hope that someone would still get what was coming to them, long after grace had already been extended. I have watched good things happen for people I did not think deserved them and felt myself refuse to come down and be glad about it.
The saddest part is that Jonah exiles himself. Nobody keeps him out of the city. He keeps himself out, on principle, in the heat, to protect his right to be angry.
Is there a hillside this congregation is sitting on, watching and waiting and refusing to come down and celebrate what God is actually doing, because it is not happening the way we wanted? What would it take to leave the booth and walk into the city?
A Prayer for Today
God, get me off the hillside. Do not let me sit outside your mercy waiting for a disaster that you already called off. Help me come down and join what you are actually doing. Amen.
Thursday:
“The Lord God appointed a bush… But God appointed a worm… God appointed a sultry east wind.”
Jonah 4:6-8
Remember that word from a couple of weeks ago, the one for appointed, the same verb used for the fish? Here it comes three more times in a row, quick, one after another. God appoints a plant to grow up over Jonah and shade his head, and Jonah is delighted, the happiest he has been in the whole book. Then God appoints a worm to eat the plant, and it withers. Then God appoints a scorching east wind, and Jonah, hot and miserable, wants to die all over again.
God is teaching him something with a plant, because the direct approach clearly was not working. Jonah loved that plant. He grieved that plant. He was more moved by a bush that grew overnight than by a hundred thousand human lives. God set the whole thing up to expose exactly that, and it works, though Jonah never admits it.
It is such a human failure, and I know it in myself. I can get genuinely broken up over small comforts, a lost convenience, some minor thing that made my day easier, and stay strangely cold about enormous suffering happening to people I have never met. My grief is often wildly out of proportion. I will mourn a plant and shrug at a city.
The plant, the worm, the wind. Comfort given, comfort taken, discomfort sent. All of it appointed. All of it trying to get one stubborn man to feel about people the way he felt about his own shade.
What are the small comforts this congregation grieves loudly, while staying quiet about the larger things breaking God's heart right here? What would it mean to grieve the right things?
A Prayer for Today
God, my grief is so often out of proportion. I mourn my lost comforts and shrug at real suffering. Rearrange my heart. Help me care about what you care about, at the size you care about it. Amen.
Friday:
“And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people… and also many animals?”
Jonah 4:11
God gets the last word, and it is a question, and it is the whole book. You cared about a plant, God says, that you did not plant and did not grow, that came up overnight and died overnight. And you would have me not care about a city of more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left? People who are lost, who do not know any better, whom I made?
And then, at the very end, the funniest and most tender line in the book. And also many animals. God's mercy is so wide it reaches all the way down to include the cows. The same cows we laughed about in their sackcloth. God means them too. There is no edge to it. It goes all the way out.
That is the argument God makes, and it is not really an argument, it is a heart laid bare. Should I not care? Of course God should. Of course God does. God's concern has no cutoff, no line past which someone stops mattering. Not the enemy city. Not the morally clueless. Not even the livestock.
Which is the exact opposite of Jonah, and if I am honest, the exact opposite of me. My mercy has an edge. I can tell you almost precisely where it stops. There are people, groups, names, past whom my care thins out into something cold. God does not have that line. That is the difference the whole book is driving at.
Where does this congregation's mercy have an edge? Name the people just past it. That is where the word for Hermiston First is waiting.
A Prayer for Today
God, my mercy has an edge and yours does not. Push mine outward. Show me the people just past where my care runs out, and help me believe you love them as much as you love me. Amen.
Saturday:
“And should I not be concerned…?”
Jonah 4:11
The book ends and Jonah never answers. God asks the question, should I not care about all these people, and then the story just stops. No last verse where Jonah softens. No scene where he comes down off the hill. No resolution. The camera holds on a sulking prophet and an open question and then it cuts to black.
That is not sloppy writing. That is the most deliberate move in the entire book. The question is left hanging on purpose, because it was never really Jonah's question to answer. It is ours. The writer built four chapters of satire and storm and fish and cattle to get us to this exact moment, and then handed us the microphone. Should God care about all these people? Well? What do you say?
Five weeks ago I stood up in front of you as a stranger and told you about a dead truck in a parking lot outside Provo. Since then I have handed you my running, a little at a time, the way I promised I would. The work I burned out on. The people who got it before I did. The bottom I climbed out of. The mercy that kept finding the wrong people first, until I finally understood that I was one of the wrong people it had found.
But this series was never really about Jonah, and it was never really about me. It is about a word that comes to a whole community and asks what they will do with it. So here we are, at the end, standing where Jonah stood, with God's question hanging over us.
So answer it. Not in your head. Out loud, this week, to someone. What is the word that has come to Hermiston First? Where does our mercy have an edge, and who is standing just past it? We have watched a reluctant prophet run and go down and get swallowed and finally, barely, show up. Now it is our turn. The word has come. The rest of the sentence is ours to write.
A Prayer for Today
God, the question is ours now, and you are still waiting for the answer. Give this church the courage to say it out loud and then to live it. The word has come to us. Here we are. Send us. Amen.