Swallowing Grace

 

Propers: The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 25), A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

Grace. It is such a balm when God pours it out upon us. And such a pain in the butt when we have to pour it out upon others.

I really do love the book of Jonah. It’s a delightful little work, all too often overlooked. It only comes up in the Church’s lectionary once or twice every three years. It’s short; it’s simple; it’s quite consciously comical. And because of this we tend to treat it as a children’s story, don’t we? Something that comes up in Sunday School, next to a mural of Noah’s Ark, and then we move on and never speak of it again.

But the truth is that a good kids’ story is a good story, period. And while “Jonah and the Whale” certainly does have a storybook ring to it, nevertheless these four short chapters deliver a message very much intended for adults of every age. Indeed, I would argue that the whole book of Jonah is but one big set-up for a single punchline—but what a punchline it is.

The bones of the story are thus: God calls Jonah to prophesy destruction to the great city of Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire. Now the Assyrians, as Jonah’s audience would well have known, were the great villains of the Old Testament. They were religious zealots renowned for ferocity. They have been compared, in later days, to the Nazis or to ISIS. It was Assyria which annihilated the Northern Kingdom of Israel, Assyria which scattered 10 of the 12 Tribes, never to return.

Of course God would prophesy the destruction of such monsters. Of course God would obliterate Nineveh, raining down fire and brimstone from on high. Why, it couldn’t happen to a better group of people. The Assyrians definitely have this coming.

But Jonah, terrified, does precisely the opposite of what he’s told. Rather than heading east toward Nineveh, he hops a boat traveling west to the farthest end of the world. But a storm comes up, supernatural in its fury, blocking his way. And all the pagan members of the crew cry out to their traditional gods; one after the other entreating the mercies of heaven, all to no avail. When they find Jonah, asleep and hiding in the hold, they beg him to do the same. And he will not.

They then cast lots—pagan divination—in order to discern the guilty party deserving of such wrath. And the lot falls, unsurprisingly, to Jonah. “Who are you and whence do you come?” they demand of him, as the boat heaves to and fro. And Jonah confesses that he worships Yahweh, the Creator of all things, of earth and sea and sky, and this frightens them even more. “What have you done?” cry the crew.

“I’m the one who has angered the Lord,” Jonah says. “Throw me into the sea and you will be spared.” But they don’t want to do it. These are good pagans, moral people. They try their best to row back to land, to make it safely to shore. But the tempest only worsens, so they call out, “Please do not hold this against us, O Lord! Let us not be guilty of this man’s blood!” And they heave Jonah overboard—and the storm abruptly ceases.

Down, down sinks Jonah. Down into the abyss. Down to Sheol, the land of the dead. And just when all seems lost—he is swallowed by a whale.

Now, in fairness, the text does not say whale; it says a big fish. But it’s only in latter centuries that such distinctions have been made. As recently as Moby Dick, a whale is a fish. I used to live in New England, and visited a few whaling museums. One actually welcomes visitors by walking them through the jawbones of a whale—quite horrifying, really. And there are accounts, nineteenth century accounts, of people being swallowed by whales, only to be cut out, alive, hours or even days later. Good Lord.

In any other circumstance, being swallowed by Leviathan would be a worst-case scenario. Yet for Jonah, the whale is his salvation. In brings him up from death. And in a scene so bizarre as to be funny, Jonah sings a hymn of thanksgiving to the Lord from inside the gullet of the monster.

The whale swims thus for three days and three nights—and then vomits Jonah up on shore, in Assyria, right where God had commanded him to go in the first place. And this again is funny, because the Ninevites worship Dagon, a sea-god often portrayed as a man coming forth from the mouth of a whale. Poor bedraggled Jonah looks like this city’s pagan god. And this may account for their receptivity.

For Jonah bluntly declares, “40 days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”—and everybody listens! Against all odds, the villainous Assyrians, from the common people in the street to the King of Nineveh himself, repent in sackcloth and ash. And this is ridiculous. Jonah is in many ways the worst prophet in the Bible. He flees from his call. He endangers others. He is constantly shown up by morally superior pagans all around him. And his message is brutish, boorish, and uninspiring.

Yet everywhere he goes, people are converted—from the ship to Tarshish, to this entire massive capital city, so large that it takes days just to walk around it. Truly, Jonah spending three nights in the belly of a fish is the most believable part of his story.

Thus having said his piece, Jonah then finds a hilltop from which to watch the city burn.

But then something unexpected happens. God relents from His judgment against Nineveh. He sees how they repent, how they turn from evil ways, and He spares them from the righteous wrath which they so patently deserve. God pours out His grace upon Nineveh. He has mercy on the greatest villains of the Bible.

And now comes the punchline which I promised at the start: “I knew it!” snarls Jonah. “I knew it all along! Isn’t this what I said back home in my own country? Isn’t this the very reason why I fled as far as I could to the west? Didn’t I know that You are a God gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, looking for every excuse to relent from punishing the wicked?

“I knew all along that You would spare this people, that You would have mercy upon them, that You would be gracious to them, and I didn’t want that. I wanted to see them burn! I wanted to see them pay! I wanted them all scream and writhe and die for what they’ve done, what they deserve!”

And with that one outburst, the entire story is flipped upon its own ridiculous head. It was never God who was wrathful. It was never God who desired the destruction of the wicked, the burning of cities, the overthrowing of empires. It was us! It’s always us. We want vengeance. We want payback. We want blood. We want an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.

And we’ll be damned before God has mercy on our enemies. We’d rather flee to the ends of the earth. We’d rather be thrown into the storm and sink down to the abyss. Anything, anything other than see the people we despise receive the grace of God!

Here we thought that God was the monster. But the monster, as always, is Man.

Grace is a hard pill to swallow. It wipes out our sins, yes, thank God. But it doesn’t stop there. Grace demands our grudges. It pummels away at our ego. It murders us in the defiance of our pride. Grace robs us of our vengeance, our hatred, our rage. And we are loathe to let go, for we define ourselves by those whom we hate, those whom we judge, those on whom we must look down. For who am I if I’m not them? I’m better. I’m worthier. Grace is just for me.

God will have none of it. Nor will He abandon us to it. He shall hound us to the ends of the earth. He shall raise up a tempest in our way. If we plunge down to Sheol, He will find us even there, to swallow us, to drag us back up to life. And though we kick and bite and scream, He shall work His mercies in us, He shall burn forgiveness through us—until at the last we are saved in spite of ourselves, along with everyone around us, all we love and all we hate. Such is God’s grace.

The miracle of Jonah is the miracle of Christ: that no matter what we do, how we flee, the evils to which we resort, God’s will shall be done. It will be beautiful and terrible and glorious and awful. It will be the dread destruction of sin and death and hell. It will be the crucifixion of our pride, and the resurrection of us all.

40 days, and Nineveh is overthrown. Repent. And believe the Good News.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.