"Jonah: Son of Truth"
The First United Presbyterian Church
“Jonah: Son of Truth”
Rev. Amy Morgan
September 6, 2020
Jonah 1
1 Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying,
2 “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.”
3 But Jonah set out to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord. He went down to Joppa and found a ship going to Tarshish; so he paid his fare and went on board, to go with them to Tarshish, away from the presence of the Lord.
4 But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up.
5 Then the mariners were afraid, and each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down, and was fast asleep.
6 The captain came and said to him, “What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.”
7 The sailors said to one another, “Come, let us cast lots, so that we may know on whose account this calamity has come upon us.” So they cast lots, and the lot fell on Jonah.
8 Then they said to him, “Tell us why this calamity has come upon us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And of what people are you?”
9 “I am a Hebrew,” he replied. “I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”
10 Then the men were even more afraid, and said to him, “What is this that you have done!” For the men knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them so.
11 Then they said to him, “What shall we do to you, that the sea may quiet down for us?” For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous.
12 He said to them, “Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you; for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.”
13 Nevertheless the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them.
14 Then they cried out to the Lord, “Please, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done as it pleased you.”
15 So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging.
16 Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
17 But the Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
Jonah is an unusual prophet. Jewish scholar Erica Brown calls him a “reluctant prophet,” asserting that “reluctance carries with it a sense of hesitation, the nod of the unwilling, the disinclined, the resistant, the oppositional, the unenthusiastic.”
Jonah’s reluctance is one of the characteristics that makes him such an oddity in the cast of the Bible’s prophetic characters. In the call stories of other prophets, the typical pattern involves God showing up, telling the prophet what their job is, listening to the prophet’s objections and patiently reassuring them, even offering them a sign, and eventually the prophet responding, “Here I am,” before taking the stage with their “Thus says the Lord” scripts. Jonah’s story doesn’t follow this pattern. God shows up and gives him a job. But Jonah doesn’t object with his lips, he protests with his feet. God tells him to get up and go to Nineveh. And he gets up and goes – in the exact opposite direction. Jonah’s flight takes him on a downward spiral – down to Joppa, down into a ship bound for Tarshish, down into the belly of the ship, and finally down into the belly of a great fish. By the end of the first chapter, Jonah has sunk to the depths of the sea.
Perhaps Jonah was never really cut out for the work of a prophet. The only mention of Jonah outside of the book named after him is one verse in 2 Kings. We’re told that Jonah was a prophet of the Lord, the God of Israel, and that he assisted in expanding the borders of Israel. His career, it would seem, was less concerned with “Thus says the Lord,” and more concerned with real estate. He has not been risking his life to speak God’s word, as other prophets did. He has been assisting heads of state in land expansion.
And the word of God that comes to Jonah now is that he should go to the city that is the greatest threat to Israel’s borders and try to save them. Up to this point in the Hebrew scriptures, the job of Israel’s prophets is to cry out against the wickedness of their own people. Not because God hates them but because God loves them. The prophet’s cry of “Thus says the Lord” is always in service to God’s compassionate, redemptive grace, to restore the covenant relationship between God and God’s people. To offer a cry of “Thus says the Lord” to the people of Nineveh would be tantamount to offering them the greatest weapon in your arsenal. You are offering them God’s grace.
And Jonah wants none of it. He flees the very presence of God, knowing it is a fool’s errand. He later acknowledges that God is the creator of the sea and dry land. He knows better than to think he can actually escape. Instead of risking his life to speak God’s word, as other prophets do, Jonah would rather die than obey God’s command.
And this is because Jonah is convinced that God is wrong. Jonah is introduced here, and in 2 Kings, as the “son of Amittai.” The name Amittai is a form of the Hebrew word for “truth.” Jonah is the son of truth. He knows what is right. He’s got a firm grip on reality. He is committed to a fault to those truths he holds to be self-evident.
Those truths include:
- The Ninevites are ruthless, violent, terrorists bent on the destruction of anyone in their vicinity.
- God’s job is to destroy Israel’s enemies and preserve God’s chosen people
- Prophets prophesy to Israel. They provide the word of God to the people of God
- Bad people are always bad. People don’t change.
- God hates bad people, and God never changes.
Therefore, when God commands Jonah to go to Nineveh to give them an opportunity to repent and not be destroyed, when God says to take the word of God to those who clearly are not the people of God, God must be out of God’s divine mind. If God loves Israel, why would God give their enemies a chance at redemption? The Ninevites are not going to repent and change, so why would God send a prophet to them? Why does God even care about the Ninevites? They are bad people. They are a threat to Israel. They should be destroyed, not prophesied to.
Jonah is running because God has gone rogue. God’s compassion and grace are no longer fitting into Jonah’s logic scheme. He does not want to work for a lunatic deity. He’d rather die than participate in this doomed enterprise. His commitment to his truth prohibits him from participating in God’s truth.
Writer Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, Holy Envy, writes, “Ask anyone what she means when she says 'God' and chances are that you will learn a lot more about that person than you will learn about God.” When Jonah says “God,” he means an almighty power that will protect some and destroy others. The God of heaven, who created the sea and the dry land, who will destroy a ship full of innocent people to get at just one disobedient prophet.
He knows who God is. He knows the truth. And he is so committed to that truth that his is convinced God must be wrong. And if God is wrong, what hope is there? If God was wrong to offer redemption to Nineveh, it would be equally wrong for God to offer redemption to Jonah. If it was wrong for God to command Jonah to prophesy to the Ninevites, God was equally wrong to call Jonah to be a prophet in the first place. Maybe it was wrong for God to have created Jonah at all. Believing that God is wrong and Jonah is right, that his truth is the only possible truth, takes Jonah to some dark places.
As Jonah flees with his truth intact but his life in tatters, God confronts him with an alternative to Jonah’s truth. While Jonah professes to worship God, the ship’s crew, men who are not acquainted with Jonah’s God, pray and express awe and make sacrifices and vows to God. Jonah sleeps while the sailors pray. He would throw his life away, but the sailors would save it if they could. God provides Jonah with a living example of the relationship that is possible between God and all humanity. God’s truth is that everyone matters. People can’t easily be separated into categories of good and evil. God would rather restore relationships than demolish cities. The same wickedness that has overtaken Nineveh has infected Jonah. And the same compassionate grace that will save Jonah can save Nineveh. That is God’s truth. But Jonah refuses to believe it.
Our story today ends with Jonah in the depths, in the belly of a great fish at the bottom of the sea. It would be easy for us to pity him, knowing what we know about how this familiar story turns out. If only he could have been more open-minded. If he could have trusted in God’s expansive love. If he hadn’t been such an inflexible, hard-hearted, self-righteous fool.
But let us not be too quick to judge. Those of us in the church have been commanded and sent, like Jonah. Jesus commanded us to love our enemies and to go to all the world with the good news of Jesus Christ. But sometimes the church’s ministry looks an awful lot like Jonah’s.
The church is more often than not a place where the Word of God is reserved for the people of God, for those who speak our language, get our codes, understand our rituals and customs, share our values and worldviews. We expect people to come to us and be like us. We are focused on our own redemption, on fixing what is broken in our lives, not in the world around us. If God would call us get up and go spend our Sunday mornings working on restoring God’s relationship with sex offenders and murderers, terrorists and human traffickers, we’d likely pretend we couldn’t hear too well. We might even hop in the car and take a drive in the mountains instead. But we likely wouldn’t say, “Here I am,” and “Thus says the Lord.”
Like Jonah, the church is often more concerned with real estate than with the state of God’s relationship with humanity. Churches measure success with material expansion – number of members or souls saved, the number of pledges or size of endowments, campus expansions and sanctuary renovations. We declare this to be the work of the Lord, and perhaps it is. But we don’t measure the number of enemies we’ve loved, betrayers we’ve forgiven, or sins we’ve repented.
Like Jonah, the church is often found to be moving in exactly the opposite direction from where God is calling us to go. When we are commanded to do things that seem illogical, like a waste of time and a guaranteed failure, we sail toward what is comforting and attractive.
Like Jonah, the “son of truth,” the church’s commitment to its doctrine and theology, to its truth, impedes our ability to proclaim, and accept, God’s grace and compassion. So many people have felt the pain of the church’s “truth” throughout history. From the horrific violence of Christian holy wars and crusades, to the execution of heretics, from witch hunts to lynchings, the church has often used its truth as a weapon instead of a cure. Many churches today continue to hold to truths that inhibit our ability to proclaim God’s grace and compassion to people of color, to immigrants, to LGBTQ persons.
Each of us carries a truth about who is worthy of God’s love and grace, who logically fits into God’s scheme for salvation. And that narrow version of truth endangers not only our own souls but the lives of people around us. We claim the truth that God created everything, but we cling to our possessions as though we deserve them while billions of people struggle for the basic necessities of life. When the world around us is battered by the storms of division and hatred, of greed and anger, we hole up in our bubbles of relative safety and tune it all out instead of praying as though people’s lives depended on it.
Thousands of churches die each year, and millions of people have left the church in the last few decades. Because the church would rather die than change our commitment to our truth, to our way of seeing things and doing things. Our ideas about God have grown so stagnant that we’d rather jump ship than admit that we might be wrong.
In Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, the mariner preacher Father Mapple proclaims in a sermon about Jonah, “all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do – remember that – and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.” Disobeying ourselves means going against our own truth. It means getting our perception of truth out of the way so that we can see the greater truth that has been offered to us. Our reluctance or refusal to disobey ourselves and obey God, to go against what might feel true to us because God is trying to show us a greater truth, endangers not just ourselves but others around us.
Barbara Brown Taylor writes in Holy Envy that some people today “are questioning whether the churches they grew up in have anything to offer them as they make their ways in a culture of many cultures with many views of truth, some of which make a great deal of sense to them.” If all we have to offer is the word of God for the people of God, salvation for those who are already saved, a lot of people are going to be left out to sea. A lot of truth is going to be missed. And we are going to end up sinking.
The good news is that God continues to confront us with alternatives to our truth. People who may not share our truth, worship our God, pray our prayers, practice our customs or participate in our culture. People who do, however, show awe and reverence, spiritual curiosity and profound wonder, who are humane and pious. God provides us with living examples of the relationship that is possible between God and all humanity. God shows us the truth that everyone matters and that good and evil reside in each of us. God’s truth is that restoring relationships is more important that being right and that love and compassion can save anyone, even us.
If we can accept this truth, which will require us to dismantle some of our own truths, if we can obey God and disobey ourselves, we might just find rebirth out of the belly of the fish, and we might just save more lives than our own.
To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.
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