Jonah 3:10-4:11
Twelve years ago, the Disney corporation premiered a television series on ABC that attempted to bring classic fairytale characters into the modern world. There were obvious tie-ins to Disney intellectual properties, since many of those fairytales had been turned into classic animated films. Characters included Cinderella by the 17th century Italian author Giambattista Basile, though with roots in ancient Greece, and Rumpelstiltskin, collected by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century.
The television series lasted seven seasons, though I grew bored and didn’t make it much past the first. I’m sure it “jumped the shark,” to use the phrase taken from “Happy Days,” probably some point after adding Pinocchio, Elsa, and Cruella DeVille.
The show was named after that classic line that starts so many fairytales, “Once Upon A Time.”
The phrase “once upon a time” serves as a marker, telling the reader or listener or couch potato that we are in the world of story. It does not mean everything you hear will necessarily be false. It just means that the narrative is the point, not the facts. The story is meant to entertain, and maybe to teach a lesson, like a fable, for good stories often depict a struggle between good and evil, and lean into the good. Except for like anything by the late Cormac McCarthy, because in his world, people mostly suck, the end, cue the fire and ashes.
The ancient Hebrew equivalent of “once upon a time” is “vayehi,” something like “and it happened,” though we are used to the more fanciful King James, which renders it as “Now it came to pass.” There are quite a few texts in scripture that bear this literary marker, entire books like Esther and Ruth, and narrative sections of other books.
The Book of the Prophet Jonah begins with “vayehi.” And it is a story about a prophet, though I suspect it is only listed that way because the Book of the Twelve, a traditional way of thinking about the minor prophets in Hebrew Scripture, would be the Book of the Eleven without him, and “eleven” just doesn’t have the same meaning as twelve in ancient Hebrew numerology.
We are in the world of story, and a story that lends itself to Sunday School and coloring pages. Never mind that the text says “great fish,” not whale, because again, fact is not the point.
But let’s start with some facts. The Book of Jonah was probably written after the Babylonian captivity, but uses a known prophet from an earlier period, the final century of the Northern Kingdom, as a character. We see something similar happen with Daniel, a historical figure from the time of the captivity who is written into an extraordinary fiction in the 2ndcentury before the Common Era, another coloring book classic with the prophet in the lion’s den.
The ancients did not read pious fictions like the Book of Job or the Book of the Prophet Jonah and ask themselves “did this happen.” They understood that they were reading a story, and that the proper question was “What can we learn from the world of this story?”
This particular story, the story of Jonah, resonates across all three of the great monotheisms. Originating in the Jewish Bible, the Jewish reformer Jesus of Nazareth references Jonah, and Muhammad would include Jonah in the Qur’an. Our sisters and brothers in the Rabbinic Jewish traditions will read the story of Jonah tomorrow afternoon as part of their Yom Kippur observance.
In the story, Jonah is from Israel, which was the Northern Kingdom after the once united kingdom of David and Solomon fell apart. When God calls Jonah to deliver a prophetic word in Nineveh, he flees.
His destination is Tarshish. Biblical references to this location are unclear, but it was across some portion of the Mediterranean, and many scholars today believe it to have been Sardinia, the island off the west coast of Italy. This gives us the dramatic scene of the boat in the storm, and the sailors eventually throwing Jonah overboard, only for him to be swallowed by the previously mentioned large fish.
Cue the millions of sermons that have been delivered about God’s call, God’s very specific call. But we are not Rick Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life” sort of folks that see God as a puppet master and our call as being extremely particular. We’re more the God’s call to love, justice, and creativity sort of folks, though we do fudge a bit at times, especially when we are trying to explain call and authorized ministry.
Let us turn for a moment to Nineveh itself. It was a major Assyrian city on the bank of the Tigris River, though maybe not quite as big as described in scripture during the time in which the story is set, the 8th century before the Common Era.
Today, Nineveh is part of the greater city of Mosul in Iraq, a city that had a significant Jewish population until the 1950’s, and a significant Christian population until the misguided Iraq War destabilized the region, leading to violent sectarianism, and the eventual occupation of Mosul by Daesh, a terrorist group that used rape and execution to control people in areas they occupied as they pursued fundamentalist jihad.
Even before the Iraqi Army retook Mosul after an extended siege that destroyed most of the city, Daesh had waged its own war on the region’s cultural heritage. One of the buildings they destroyed was the Mosque of the Prophet Yunis, which is to say Jonah, which had replaced an Assyrian Christian Church, with a history and archeological connection all the way back to the age of the prophet.
Nineveh/Mosul was in Assyria, the enemy that would eventually conquer and destroy the Northern Kingdom, not in that Northern Kingdom of Israel which was home to Jonah. The prophet Amos goes from the Southern Kingdom of Judah to the Northern Kingdom to deliver the word of the Lord, but both of those kingdoms are depicted as worshipping Yahweh. Assyria does not worship Yahweh.
Jonah was sent to proclaim the divine destruction of Nineveh because of the city’s great wickedness. And a remarkable thing happens. The people of Nineveh listen to the prophet, which doesn’t always happen in scripture. See Jeremiah in the well, or Elijah hiding in a cave.
In this story, the king and all the people observe a fast of repentance. They set aside their evil ways. And the Lord relents and forgives them. That is where we come in with today’s reading.
Jonah is infuriated. The Hebrew literally reads that he is “burning up.” He was sent to declare divine punishment, an orgy of destruction not unlike that eventually visited upon the city by Daesh, and instead, there is contrition and reconciliation. Jonah heads out of the city, in a huff, the setting for this exchange with God, in which Jonah complains about divine mercy.
And I’d like to lift up two things from this story, violating the rule that you never try to make more than one point in a sermon. So we’ll just pretend I only made one point, and you pick the one you like.
First, Yahweh is concerned about the behavior of the people in Nineveh. This is interesting and unique.
In the prophetic books, God is often said to be using other nations to punish Israel or Judah, or to be punishing other nations because they did something to Israel or Judah, but it is always about Israel or Judah.
The sinful behavior in Nineveh is not connected in any way with the Israelites, and while it is an Israelite prophet who brings the word of God, the salvation of the people of Nineveh has nothing to do with Israel.
The dominant narrative throughout the Hebrew language scriptures and in the Judaism that is constructed after the Babylonian Captivity, often known as the Second Temple period, is framed around the idea of a divinely chosen people that is racially pure. But the text is subversive of its own claims if you are paying attention. Christian supersessionist theology, so necessary as the foundation of antisemitism, then takes this one step further, claiming that through Jesus, God transfers the exclusive covenant with the Jewish people to Christians, who are not one singular people, but are “ethne,” the nations in the Koine Greek.
But here is God pre-Jesus who cares about Assyrians. What if God was always the God of all peoples? Which, now that you mention it, makes me sound like a universalist. Because a god, lower case g, who would select only one tribe, permanently and always, a people Christian jihadis believe will be the last to convert before Armageddon, that god does not love all humans equally, and is not worthy of my worship. That is the god that works for racists and nationalists, always in competition with the god who loves some other race or nation.
But a God, upper case G, who cares about Jerusalem and Nineveh? Now that I can get behind.
And the other thing worth noticing, the second thing which you are now free to ignore, is how mad Jonah gets. I know exactly how he feels, and I bet you do too. There is a part of me that is not interested in reconciliation. I want destruction. I want that traitor in an orange jumpsuit, humiliated. I want them all behind bars, not to prevent their continued attacks, not just as a warning to others, as deterrence, but as punishment. Would I have been part of the crowd during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror as the guillotine claimed one prize after another? I want murderers to be murdered, at least part of me does, and not the best part.
Mercy and forgiveness are hard work, while judgment is easy. And scripture says crazy thing like “judge not, lest ye be judged,” and don’t look for the splinter in your neighbor’s eye when you have a two by four in your own.
Our story is the story of a man who calmly challenges the one who is without sin to cast the first stone, is the story of a healer who says “Your sins are forgiven. Now, take up your mat and walk.”
That doesn’t mean I want Payton Gendron, the white nationalist terrorist who murdered ten in the Buffalo Tops to go free. It does mean that I need to be honest about my own blood lust, and lean into grace, for I want God to lean into Her grace, right here in our modern day Nineveh.
Once upon a time, there was a God, a God of grace and glory, a God who called people, all people of every nation, to a life of love justice and creativity. Once upon a time… this time… right now. Amen.