Dagon's Wrath

Scripture: The Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 25), A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

Today’s texts of Holy Scripture, brothers and sisters, are all about the blessed mercy of Almighty God, and about how we absolutely cannot stand it.

We start off this morning with the Book of the Prophet Jonah, easily one of the most entertaining prophets in the entire Bible.  What’s great about the story of Jonah is that Jonah is the one prophet whom we all think we know, but really we don’t. We can recall the Sunday school version, right?  Jonah is a reluctant prophet who flees from God’s call.  He ends up on a ship and gets thrown overboard, at which point he is eaten by a whale. Then, after three days in the belly of the beast, Jonah prays to God and God delivers him by causing the whale to hork him up on the beach, hale and hearty.  Good story, right?  Outlandish, adventurous, sticks in your head.  But if that’s all we know about the prophet Jonah, then I’m afraid that we’ve completely missed the point.

The Book of Jonah, my friends, is no children’s story, though one can be forgiven for thinking it such.  For starters, it’s rather slim: only four short chapters, with less than 50 verses between them.  You can read this book in 10 minutes flat. But thematically, I promise you, the tale is quite adult. There’s a kicker at the end.

We begin with God commanding Jonah, son of Amittai, “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, for its wickedness has come up before me.” And the first thing that Jonah does in response… is to run in the opposite direction.  We the readers aren’t told just yet exactly why he disobeys God and flees, but we are invited to take an educated guess.  Nineveh, you see, is the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and you would be hard pressed to find a viler hive of scum and villainy in all the pages of the Old Testament.

The Assyrians behave like a bunch of psychopaths; these are, after all, the people who invented crucifixion.  As you may recall, the Kingdom of Israel was split in two by civil war, and in 722 B.C. the Northern half was gobbled up and scattered to the winds, its people known ever after as the Lost Tribes of Israel. Well, it was the Assyrians who did that.  Thanks to them, half the Israelites were wiped out.  It wouldn’t be that great of a stretch to consider the Assyrians as the Nazis of their day: Israel’s most hated, most powerful, most bloodthirsty enemy. Imagine if God came to us and commanded that we go and speak a word of judgment against ISIS way out in the lawless, blood-soaked deserts of Iraq. That is, in fact, where Nineveh sits today: in territory held by ISIS. And the Assyrians were united not by ethnicity but by religion. They were extremists, fundamentalists. Yeah, sure, just go tell a bunch of gun-toting extremist nutjobs that God thinks they’re naughty.  We might very well run the other way ourselves.

So Jonah hops a boat to the far end of the earth, and as he sets out on his journey a fierce squall whips up while he’s trying to sleep.  The pagan crew proves discerning enough to realize that this is no natural storm, and they immediately begin crying out to their gods for deliverance and throwing overboard all excess weight. Then one of them remembers Jonah.  “Hey!” he says, “What about that Hebrew fellow asleep in the hold?  Go wake him up and see if his God will do us any good!” But when they rouse Jonah, he tells them quite clearly that his God is the very one causing the storm.  “This is my fault,” he tells them.  “I’m defying the very will of God.  Throw me overboard and you, at least, will be spared.”

The crew, however, proves a rather moral lot, and rather than sacrifice Jonah to preserve their own hides, they attempt to row ashore.  Alas, their efforts are to no avail.  Finally, at their wit’s end and sure to be sunk, they call out to God, “Please don’t blame us for this!” and they do as Jonah asks: they heave him over.  The crew then repents and makes vows to the Lord, Who grants to them calm seas.

Jonah, meanwhile, sinks down, down into the depths—into Sheol, the dark, watery land of the dead.  As seaweed wraps around his head and he descends into the pit, he finally turns back to God, praying for forgiveness—and is promptly swallowed by a sea monster, a giant fish! Now, this is where people start to think that this is a children’s story again, because how ridiculous is this?  Yet truly, truly I say to you, there have been multiple confirmed instances of men surviving for three days and longer in the gullet of a whale. You read about such horrors when you live in Boston for a while. And whether the beast in question was a whale or a fish is of little consequence, since up until the last century or so the whale was still considered a fish anyway.  In fact, there’s a whole chapter of Moby Dick in which Melville says, in essence, “I don’t care if they’re warm blooded, nurse young, and breathe air. They’re still fish.”

Regardless, Jonah being swallowed is supposed to be an outlandish occurrence, indeed, a miraculous one. Keep in mind that this is his deliverance, not his punishment.  In fleeing from God, Jonah found himself drowning and sinking into the pit of death.  The fish rescues him, pulls him back up to the land of the living.  Jesus Himself will later state that the miracle of Jonah prefigures Christ’s own Resurrection. Now, this leads to the admittedly comic scene of a grown man horked up by a gigantic fish on the shores of the very enemy territory from which Jonah attempted to flee. But here’s the thing: we know that the Assyrians primarily worshipped a sea-god named Dagon, and we know that one of their popular representations of Dagon was the image of a man being vomited out of a giant fish.  So while you and I may be thinking, “How funny,” or “Oh, that’s disgusting,” the Assyrians are seeing god.

Thus deposited, Jonah, the reluctant prophet, traipses his way into Nineveh and blurts out perhaps the lamest prophetic speech of all time: “40 more days and Nineveh will be overthrown!”  That’s it.  Way to phone it in, Jonah. But shockingly, impossibly, the Assyrians—these murderous barbarians—not only pay attention to this wayward slime-coated foreigner, but they immediately call a fast!  Why, the king himself hears the Word of the Lord and repents in sackcloth and ash, making Jonah not only the most reluctant and halfhearted prophet, but also the most inadvertently successful.  “Who knows?” proclaims the king: “God may yet relent and with compassion turn from fierce anger, so that we will not perish.”

This all brings us to the fourth and final chapter of our story, and here, brothers and sisters, is where the twist comes into play: the suckerpunch, if you will. Against all odds, the Assyrians—the murderers and villains of our story—repent of their evil, confess their guilt, and throw themselves upon the mercy of Almighty God. God, Who this entire time has been driving Jonah to proclaim Nineveh’s destruction, relents, and spares the city with its myriad inhabitants, in spite of all the truly heinous evil that they have inflicted upon their neighbors and upon God’s people. And Jonah… is absolutely furious about the entire affair.

As it turns out, the whole time that Nineveh has been begging God’s forgiveness, Jonah’s been sitting just outside of the city, watching from the shade of a tree, because he wants to see the entire city and everyone in it—120,000 souls—die screaming. When God shows mercy, when God refuses to make good on the threats that Jonah has delivered, the prophet grows livid.  “I knew it!” he shrieks at God.  “I knew that this is exactly what would happen! I knew that You are gracious and compassionate,” he practically spits, “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love!  I knew that You would do this, that You would forgive them, that You would spare them—I knew that You would go soft!

“That’s why I ran! That’s why I fled to the far side of the world!  Because I knew that if You warned them, if You spoke to them, they would turn to You and You would forgive them, and I would rather die than see those monsters live! That’s why I had those pagans throw me overboard—to dive into Hades before I’d see the damnable Assyrians spared God’s righteous wrath!  But even death could not stop Your mercy. Now this city of sin will live, and it’s all God’s fault.”

Right there, brothers and sisters, is what makes Jonah a very adult book indeed.  Because in one fell swoop it lays the horrid truth bare: that it isn’t God Who demands justice, demands blood, demands an eye for an eye. It’s us. We want the reckoning.  We want retribution.  For as often as we celebrate the unmerited grace of God poured out upon ourselves, nevertheless we recoil when we see these same mercies ladled out to others, even to our enemies—to people whom we know don’t deserve it.  Like Jonah, it makes us angry, so angry we could die.

Grace, they say, is free, but this much it does cost us: it costs us our pride, our privilege, our sense of superiority.  For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; and all are justified freely by His grace.

We are all sinners, my friends.  We are all equally in need of grace, and all equally undeserving of it.  Yet if Jonah makes anything clear, it’s that ours is a God Who continually goes to ridiculous, extravagant lengths to show mercy to the sinner. And that nothing, nothing—not obstinate prophets, not raging storms, not empires of earth nor leviathans of the deep—nothing can separate us from the love of our God Who follows us even into the abyss of death.

Thanks be to Christ, Who fulfills for us the sign of Jonah.  In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.