Dark Comedy

Propers: The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 25), AD 2023 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.

When’s the last time that you read the book of Jonah? I’m willing to bet that it’s been a while, Sunday school, perhaps. Due to its fantastic imagery, and the prominence of a whale or giant fish within the narrative, we tend to relegate it to a children’s tale. Which is a pity, because for as short as this story is, it contains a message that every religious adult ought to hear. It’s a dark comedy.

The book of Jonah is a joke, containing elements both of humor and of horror. It’s a four-chapter satire setting up a punchline, but what a punchline it turns out to be—poignant enough to have secured its place firmly in the Scriptures of Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike.

Our eponymous prophet was active in the eighth century B.C., during the height of the Assyrian Empire. And the Assyrians, you have to understand, are the villains of the Bible. They may not technically be the first empire in history, but they’re the first one of note. And nobody liked these guys. They’re credited with the invention of crucifixion. When conquering a territory, they would deport the population, all but the very poorest, then bring in and mix up displaced peoples from various other locales that they’d conquered.

It was an ingenious way of preventing rebellion. It was also cultural genocide. And that’s precisely what would happen to Israel in the year 722 B.C. The Northern Kingdom, centered on Samaria, would be wiped out, its people scattered to the winds, forever after known as the Lost Tribes. And the Southern Kingdom of Judah would only be saved by some sort of miraculous plague felling the Assyrian army.

Anyone reading the book of Jonah would know this. Anyone reading the Bible would know this. For Israelites, the Assyrians, and especially the Ninevites of Assyria’s capital, were the Nazis of their day, the ISIS of their day, the Big Bad. Little wonder, then, that when God calls Jonah to prophesy the destruction of Nineveh, Jonah immediately skedaddles in the opposite direction. Not only that, he books passage on a ship and sails for Tarshish, which is the furthest port that anyone had ever heard of.

It’s funny, really: the cowardly prophet afraid to plunge into the proverbial hornets’ nest in order to prophesy their doom. Yet as he flees from his duty, he cannot flee from God. An unnatural storm seizes and tosses the ship about, threatening to dash it to pieces. All of the sailors panic, each calling upon his god. And this is scary stuff. To the ancients, the sea was a chaotic and terrible place. “Impious was he who first spread sail and braved the terrors of the frantic deep,” according to Caesar Augustus.

The last thing that one would expect of our prophet in such a situation would be to find him fast asleep in the hold, untroubled by the wrath of God and fury of the waves. Yet there he sleeps. And when the crew draws lots to determine just who it is amongst them who has angered someone’s god, Jonah says, “Hi. It’s me. I’m the problem; it’s me.” When they then ask him how they ought to proceed, he tells them to simply throw him overboard and all the storms shall cease. Honestly, he sounds bizarrely nonchalant.

Note that they are reluctant to do so, and when pushed by extremity, beg God’s forgiveness. The pagans, the heathens, are the pious ones, the ones with moral qualms, while Jonah continues to defy the will of God. Over they heave him, and the waves are stilled. Down, down sinks Jonah, down into the house death, down to Davy Jones. And there in the abyss, Jonah calls out to God for deliverance—and is promptly swallowed by a fish! The fish is not the punishment, you see. The fish delivers the prophet from a watery grave.

There are accounts of such things happening, mind you. When I lived in Boston, I would visit the New Bedford Whaling Museum, a vaguely terrifying place that one entered through the jaws of a leviathan. There I read eyewitness reports of men swallowed by whales, only to be cut out later, horrified but still breathing, their skin reduced to the consistency of paper by stomach acid. Jonah spends three days and three nights in the gullet of a sea beast—and there he sings.

At the end of his undersea journey, he’s then vomited up on the shores of—who’d have guessed it?—Nineveh! And this too contains a wry and gallows humor, for the people of Nineveh worshipped a West Semitic fertility god named Dagon. And Dagon was represented iconically as a man emerging from the mouth of a fish. Now that ought to ring a bell. The Ninevites in our story would think that Jonah is a god.

Having gotten their attention, he then preaches the shortest and lamest sermon ever recorded in the Bible: “40 days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” That’s it. That’s all he seems to say, to a city so enormous that it takes him three days to walk about it. And having done the absolute bare minimum required by his job, Jonah then finds a hill with a nice view of the city and sits down to watch it burn. But against all odds, and against common sense, the Ninevites listen to Jonah, even the king upon his throne.

They all repent in sackcloth and ash. The whole metropolis listens to Jonah’s lackluster warning. A single drop of judgment brings Assyria to her knees. And so God also repents, as it were, and turns from the destruction He’d intended for the city. The whole thing is satirical. The whole thing is a farce. At every stage it upends expectations, confounding the audience, humiliating the prophet, and uplifting unbelievers. We even have a sea monster who saves the day.

And so now, finally, we’re ready for the punchline. Now, finally, we’ve come to Jonah’s point. “I knew it!” the prophet calls out in his rage. “I knew that this would happen from the very start! I knew, O Lord, that You are gracious and merciful, slow to anger and relenting from punishment. That’s why I ran! That’s why I took off for Tarshish and threw myself into the sea. Because I knew that You would forgive them, and I want to see them all burn!”

That’s the twist. Throughout this whole narrative, the entire book of Jonah, we thought that a pusillanimous prophet fled from a wrathful, angry God. But just the opposite is true. The point of the book of Jonah is that we are the unforgiving ones, we are the wrathful ones, we want to see our enemies punished and the wicked all burned to the ground. Thus we flee from the grace of God, the love of God, the mercy of God, because we know that He will forgive the people whom we hate, and we’ll be damned if they get grace too.

God is not the monster here. Humanity is. We are. We resist grace with everything we have, even unto death, even unto the abyss. Yet death itself cannot prevent the love and grace of God. He will pull us up from the waters, up unto life everlasting. And we will sing. The parallels with Jesus Christ are not all that hard to discern. Jesus too rests soundly while a storm threatens His boat. Jesus outright tells us that we would have the sign of Noah: three days in the land of the dead, to rise on the third as a God.

Even the parable this morning contains much the same message: that we as a people of God are fine when we receive His grace, His generosity, His mercy, His blessing. That’s all well and good. But when others receive the same, then we think we have been wronged. Can God not do what He wants with His own, or are we jealous because Jesus is good? So often in His parables it seems that the only way to be excluded from the Kingdom of God is for us to exclude others. That’s what casts us out, what separates us from grace.

Yet even then there is repentance. Even then Christ comes to find His lost and wayward sheep. It’s not that we have to love others as a condition or requirement or test to earn the Kingdom. It’s that loving others is the Kingdom. Loving others is salvation. To withhold grace, to withhold forgiveness, even and especially from our enemies, is to misunderstand fundamentally who God is and what Christ has come to do. In liberating others, God is liberating you.

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

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