(Jonah 1; Acts 9:1-9)

I was tempted to stand up here and say, “Now that we’ve spent the last four weeks going through Jonah, we’re going to do it all over again”; but no worries, we aren’t. Before we move on, however, there are a couple things I want to note. One of them is in the language of this chapter—and also in chapter 2—and it’s something you probably don’t see in your English translation. If you look at verse 3, Jonah runs away from the Lord; the text tells us, “He went down to Joppa,” where he found a ship headed for Tarshish. Then, the Hebrew says, “he paid the fare and went down into the ship.” Next, according to verse 5, he went down into the hold, and lay down to sleep. Notice a pattern here?

Once the ship puts to sea, God sends the storm, and from that point on, Jonah isn’t in control of the situation; but it ends with him being thrown down into the sea, and then being sucked down by the great fish. Then in 2:6, he sums up his situation by saying, “I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever”—i.e., the land of the dead, the land of Sheol. It is only when he calls out to God that the direction begins to reverse, and he can say, “You brought my life up from the Pit, O Lord my God.”

The author is making a simple point here: when you run from the Lord, the only direction you can go is down. Your descent might be swift as Jonah’s, or it might be long and gradual; it might be drastic and unmistakable as the prophet’s, or it might be masked by worldly success; but regardless, it is as certain as sunrise and as inexorable as the grave. The Lord is the creator of all life, the source of all good things, the only Father of lights; to run from God is to turn away from light, air, warmth and goodness to run into the cold, suffocating dark. It is nothing less than to choose the drowning of the soul.

Which is bad enough if it’s just about you; but for all our age talks about “victimless crimes,” there’s really no such thing, because everything we do affects others. In Jonah’s case, imagine this whole scene from the sailors’ perspective. It was just an ordinary day for them—good load of cargo, even a paying passenger, long voyage ahead, and the weather looking fine—but then all of a sudden, out of nowhere comes the perfect storm. They throw the cargo overboard—that’s their income, they now have no way to make a living, but if they drown it won’t matter anyway—but nothing they can do is enough. Why? Not because of anything they’ve done, but because of Jonah. To quote Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood again, it’s “because of one man who ain’t where he’s supposed to be, and is where he ain’t got no business being!”

Or as another preacher, the English poet John Donne, put it: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine.” He was focused in that sermon on the way in which others’ lives and deaths affect us, going on to say, “any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde,” but it’s equally important for us to understand the way our lives (and deaths, when it comes to that) affect others. When you run from God, you don’t go down alone, you take others with you, because Dr. Donne was right: we are each a piece of something far greater than ourselves, and when we bring a storm down on our heads, those around us risk drowning, too. We’re never the only ones hurt by our sin; there is always collateral damage.

This isn’t just a concern on the individual level, either. The story of Nineveh and the Assyrian empire shows how the sin of a few can corrupt an entire society; the story of Jonah’s mission to Nineveh shows how repentance can spread in much the same way. You’ve probably heard of the idea, taken from chaos theory, of the butterfly effect—that a butterfly flapping its wings in Asia can theoretically cause a hurricane in the Atlantic; the underlying point is that in complex, non-linear systems, small changes in conditions can produce drastic changes in results. As far as physics, weather, and the like, I can’t speak to that—there’s a reason I was a history major—but I know it’s true in human society. We’ve seen it most vividly this year, as the series of revolutions dubbed the “Arab Spring” were touched off by a Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire after the police took his goods (again) and beat him. For another instance, African slavery arrived in the American South by accident. Little events, big results.

At the same time, though, Jonah’s story gives us a salutary reminder that God is bigger than all of it, and that he’s at work in and through all of it to accomplish his purposes; there is nothing he cannot use, and no problem he cannot solve. And perhaps most importantly, there is no one he cannot rescue—and no one he will refuse to rescue. There is no one who has gone beyond his mercy, and there is no one who has escaped his presence—just look at our call to worship this morning, taken from Psalm 139: “Where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to the heights of heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths of Hell, you are there.” There is no one, as Jesus’ parable of the two lost sons makes clear, who has done so bad that God wouldn’t save them, and there is no one who has ever managed to get themselves into a situation in which he couldn’t save them. However improbable it may be, nothing is impossible for God.

Joe McKeever, who used to be the Director of Missions for the Baptists down New Orleans way, illustrates this powerfully with the story of one night when two men were walking around a county airport in rural Mississippi. One of them was the airport’s manager; the other was his pastor, Slim Cornett, who was getting the full cook’s tour of the facility. They were in the tower, and the manager pointed to a switch, said to Slim, “This switch lights up the runway,” and flipped it. “Then,” he said, pointing to another switch, “let’s say there is a plane in distress up there. I would throw this switch”—and he did so—“and turn on the searchlights.” The night sky lit up—and the Rev. Cornett and his friend were amazed to see a small plane come out of the blackness and land on the runway. Their amazement redoubled as Franklin Graham got out of the airplane.

This was when Franklin was in college; the pilot was flying him back to school in Texas from his home in North Carolina when something shut down the electrical system. That had left the airplane without lights, without its guidance systems—no way for the pilot to know where they were, which way they were going, what was below them, or how close it was—and with the radio dead, they had no way to call for help. Then, out of nowhere, the searchlight had come on to guide them to safety. Earlier that evening, before Franklin left home, his father had prayed that God would guide and protect the pilot and his son; when trouble struck, God answered.

What hits us about that story isn’t that it’s impossible; clearly, it isn’t. But it’s implausible. It’s the sort of wild coincidence you’d expect of a fifth-rate novelist who doesn’t care that things like that don’t happen in real life; it’s a billion-to-one shot, like winning the lottery with a ticket you found stuck to the bottom of your shoe. But you know, God doesn’t just do the impossible; he does the wildly implausible, in order to save us. There is no one he cannot reach, and no one he cannot redeem—just look at Saul; just look at the Ninevites—and he’s willing to go to ridiculous lengths to do it. No matter how fast or far we might run, God will never stop pursuing us, because he loves us; no matter how deep we may sink, his love can always lift us to safety.

(Jonah 4; Matthew 18:21-35)

“The LORD is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all he has made.” From David’s pen in Psalm 145, that’s praise. On Jonah’s lips, it’s an indictment.

Which is telling, and should be sobering for us. We’ve talked about why Jonah thinks and feels this way; Israel is God’s chosen people, Assyrians are his enemies, which means that the Israelites are the good guys and the Assyrians the bad guys, and therefore mercy is for Israel, while the Assyrians are for judgment. The command to go give Nineveh a chance to repent, and thus to avoid judgment, violated his understanding of how things ought to be.

We understand that. Whether it’s that car that just cut us off, the person who just hurt someone we love, or that group of people who are advocating for causes and laws we find repugnant, we have our own Ninevites. I remember hearing Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood, a black Baptist preacher who founded a megachurch in Brooklyn, talk about receiving invitations to preach to white congregations and wanting to refuse, “because white folk been mean. They’re Ninevites, and I don’t like preaching to Ninevites.” Our Ninevites are different, but we understand the desire that those who we believe have done evil to us and ours should suffer the full consequences.

What should give us pause, though, is to realize just how far that desire has driven Jonah. In his self-righteous insistence on his own idea of justice, he has gotten to the point of criticizing God for being merciful—even when he himself is only alive to complain because of that same mercy. You can just hear it, can’t you? “God, I told you this would happen! Isn’t this exactly what I said was going to happen? This is why I ran away to sea, to try to keep you from making this mistake!” And on and on, until finally he declaims, “And now, O Lord, please kill me, for after this I’m better off dead.”

To borrow a phrase from Mark Driscoll, what we see here is Jonah the emotional counter-punching drama queen; but beneath the melodramatics, we also see just how far his heart is from God, how he has let his idea of what God ought to be like blind him to who God is. His worship has been taken over by arrogance and self-righteousness, to the point where he believes he has the right to keep God’s mercy for himself; though he had been forgiven much, he refused to forgive others, and was even presumptuous enough to object to God doing so.

As Jesus’ parable makes clear, such an attitude offends God; Jonah is now, for the second time, in exactly the same position as the Assyrians he despises: in rebellion against God. His rebellion is less severe than theirs, but no less real; once again, you can make the case that Jonah deserves death for his defiance, and once again, he invites death rather than submit. If God isn’t going to do things his way, he wants out.

Instead, for the second time, God in his difficult mercy spares his life. Rather than killing him, God merely asks, “Do you really have the right to be angry?” Jonah doesn’t answer; instead, he goes out east of the city and sits down to wait, hoping God will see reason and obliterate it. He builds a little booth for himself, but it doesn’t provide much shelter; so God commands a plant to grow over Jonah’s head and give him shade, easing his discomfort. But that night, God sends a worm to kill the plant, and with the sunrise he sends a hot east wind, so that Jonah’s discomfort is far worse than before; and once again, he prays for death.

Look at God’s response. He asks Jonah, “Do you really have the right to be angry about the plant?” This time, Jonah snaps back, “Yes—angry enough to die!” This plays right into God’s hands, as the Lord turns Jonah’s anger against him. “You’re angry about the plant,” God says, “but you never took care of it—you didn’t make it grow; it was here one day and gone the next. If you’re concerned about that plant, why shouldn’t I be concerned about Nineveh? I made Nineveh, and everyone in it—more than 120,000 people, who have never had the chance to learn right from wrong. Yes, they do evil, but I love them in spite of their sin. But you, even if you can’t spare a thought for them, at least think of all the animals who would die if I destroyed the city.”

And there the book leaves us, with God’s appeal hanging in the air and Jonah still sitting in his selfish bitterness and tribal arrogance. The mere fact of the book’s existence may suggest that Jonah grew up and learned what God was trying to teach him, but we really have no way of knowing—which means that we can’t move on with the story and leave God’s appeal behind us; we’re left to answer the question, not for Jonah, but for ourselves. We don’t get to leave this safely in the past, where the Assyrian Empire has been dust for millennia; we have to face our own Nineveh, and our own Ninevites.

I don’t know where Nineveh is for you. It’s for you to consider whom you resent, who angers you, against whom you’re holding a grudge; I won’t name the person in your life who not only deserves to be judged, but whom you want to see judged—and quite frankly, I’m not going to tell you they don’t deserve it. But you know, even if they’re every bit as bad as you think, we still have God’s question ringing in our ears: “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh?” And behind that question, we hear the voice of Jesus: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for”—catch this—“for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” In other words, “I made the Ninevites, too; I sent them the sun and the rain, and I sent my Son to die and rise again for them just as much as for you. Should I not be concerned about Nineveh?”

God doesn’t try to convince us that our enemies aren’t that bad; he doesn’t try to get us to understand them or sympathize with them; he doesn’t, in fact, do anything to minimize the scandal of what he asks of us. He simply says, “Love them. Bless them. Turn the other cheek, pray for them, and work for their well-being. Yes, they’re your enemies, yes, they hurt you; remember how I dealt with my enemies: I died for them. You were my enemy; I died for you. No, they don’t deserve it. Love them anyway.”

(Jonah 3; John 3:11-21)

So Jonah disobeyed God, got caught by a terrible storm, had the sailors throw him overboard, was swallowed by a big fish, repented, got spit back on the beach, and now he’s learned his lesson. Right? Well, maybe not exactly. Yes, he’s given up on defying God, and he goes to Nineveh—but he doesn’t do it on his own initiative. Sure, you can’t expect him to start walking as soon as he’s back on his feet—he would at least have wanted a bath and some clean clothes—but once he’s freshened up a bit, he doesn’t need new orders from God; he knows where he’s supposed to go. And yet, he doesn’t start moving until God tells him a second time: “Go to Nineveh.” Clearly, he still resents God’s command. He’s learned his lesson about fighting God, he’ll be a good little prophet and do what he’s told, but he refuses to really accept it.

Which fits with his prayer in chapter 2, because there’s a major omission there. If you go back and take a look at that, he thanks God for his deliverance and promises to obey in future—but isn’t something missing? Where’s the repentance? Nowhere in his prayer does he admit that he was cast into the deep because of his own sin; nowhere does he confess his rebellion or ask forgiveness for his defiance. He goes to Nineveh because he has to, because God makes him; but his heart has not been humbled.

Jonah gets to Nineveh, and the book gives us an interesting statement about the city in verse 3. Literally, the Hebrew reads, “Nineveh was a city great to God, a visit of three days.” For the first part, I think it means more than just “a really big city”—I think the point here is that this was an important city to God. The second part’s more difficult, because we don’t have this expression anywhere else in the Bible, and so we get a lot of different translations; most of them, like the NIV, end up exaggerating the city’s size. What I think is in view here is that because Nineveh was a royal city, where the king had a palace and held court, there was protocol involved in any visit. Small towns, you could just show up, conduct your business, and then leave, but in places like Nineveh, there were formalities that had to be observed on arrival and departure, requiring a visit of at least three days. Think of it like traveling abroad and going through customs; their customs weren’t the same as ours, but they still had them, and they took time.

The expectation, then, is that Jonah would arrive at the city, meet with the officials at the gate, and declare his business. He would spend the second day preaching around the city. The third day, he would conclude his preaching, perhaps have an audience with the king, and then go through the proper rituals of farewell. Except—it didn’t work that way, because the people of Nineveh disrupted the schedule. From the moment Jonah opened his mouth, his message carried such power that it spread across the city like wildfire; the king commanded his people to fast and put on sackcloth, but he was only confirming what they were already doing. The Ninevites took Jonah’s warning with deadly seriousness, crying out to God and begging him to forgive them.

Now, we shouldn’t overstate this; it doesn’t mean that the people of Nineveh abandoned the worship of their own gods. They should have, but they didn’t go that far; as long as Assyria was in existence, they continued to worship Ishtar and the rest, and they kept right on waging war and conquering other nations—including, eventually, Israel. But they did recognize the God of Israel as a god they needed to honor and appease, and if they didn’t completely change their ways, they did mend them. There was an abrupt change in Assyrian behavior, as their exaltation of cruelty came to a sudden end; going forward, they treated the countries they conquered far more humanely. Their repentance wasn’t total, but it was real; and God saw it and lifted their sentence.

The irony here is that Jonah’s story very likely played a part in this. Though not a seafaring people, the Assyrians recognized the fish god, the god of the sea, as one of the deities they acknowledged and respected. Here comes Jonah, telling the story of his God who had overcome the fish god—who had called up a great storm on a whim, then dismissed it in a moment, and who had used the fish god as a beast of burden to save Jonah from drowning and deliver him to shore; and it’s not just a crazy story, because his skin is bleached and damaged from the stomach acids of the fish, and maybe he even still smells funny. Any god powerful enough to do that could well be the god who had sent Assyria the famine, the eclipse, and the earthquake; if that god was now threatening to destroy Nineveh, then it was time to repent, to change their ways and beg his forgiveness. Jonah’s message probably had more credibility and effect because of his disobedience than it would have if he’d just gone straight to Nineveh.

Now, it’s safe to say that Jonah didn’t appreciate that irony, because he didn’t want Nineveh to repent; he wanted God to be just on his side, against his enemies. But God is never just on our side. He doesn’t offer salvation to one group and refuse it to another; his concern is for the whole world, not just those who worship him. It’s tempting to imagine that God favors us because we’re better than everyone else—as demonstrated by the fact that we don’t commit those sins, like those people over there (whatever those sins and those people may be)—but it isn’t true; the fact is, we too are saved only by God’s grace, in spite of what we deserve; we need God’s mercy as badly as anyone.

It is no stranger that God shows mercy to Nineveh than it is that he gives us his grace, for we haven’t earned it any more than they had; both come because he desires to show mercy. God is just and holy, and so he punishes those who do evil because he will not allow their evil to endure—but that isn’t his preferred method of defeating his enemies. Rather, as he declares in Ezekiel 33, he takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but only when they repent and come to him and live. As such, God will show mercy even where we are scandalized by the injustice—and so remind us that the grace we have received from his hand is every bit as scandalous and undeserved.

And in truth, we should rejoice at that; for it’s when God shows love and grace beyond reason that he produces blessing beyond all expectation. Sometimes the greatest mercies he gives us are the mercies he shows our enemies, for it is by this that he defeats them and makes them his friends—and ours. We object when God forgives those whom we believe unforgiveable, because we tend to think of his mercy as a free pass, but it’s nothing of the sort; his grace costs nothing, but it isn’t cheap. It is free, in that we don’t have to do anything to earn it—but as we saw last week, that very fact means that we can’t control what it costs us, or what it requires of us. We do not accept God’s mercy on our own terms, but only on his; receiving his grace necessarily means admitting that we need his grace. We must allow ourselves to be convicted of sin, called to repent, challenged to grow and to change; to refuse to repent is to insist that we don’t need mercy, and thus to reject it. Grace costs us nothing to gain and everything to receive; it’s just the nature of grace. It’s why we find grace so hard to take.

(Jonah 2; 2 Corinthians 1:3-11)

Jonah was in an awkward and unpleasant position: he’d tried to escape from God by killing himself, and God had blocked him. He’d tried to run from God, and now he couldn’t get away; he could try to ignore God, but he certainly couldn’t hide, and he didn’t have anyone else to talk to. And to crown everything, however unpleasant his situation, and however much it was not what he had wanted, he had to be grateful for it; whatever else he might say, being alive instead of dead was still a good thing.

And so he began to pray. This is a formal psalm, crafted to be useful to a wide audience, so while it could be taken to mean that Jonah repented and prayed for deliverance before God sent the fish, that’s not necessarily true; in fact, it probably isn’t. Still, despite his ambivalence toward God at this point, Jonah does at least praise God for saving his life. When he went overboard, Jonah believed he was cut off from God, and going down to the land of the dead where that separation would be permanent—and he had chosen that fate. God had mercy on him despite himself. It’s significant that Jonah praises God for that mercy which he had not wanted, and for which he had not asked.

Even more significant, Jonah rejects idolatry and recommits himself to keep his vows to the Lord. He confesses that only God can deliver anyone, that salvation belongs to him and him alone—which means that God is free to save whomever he chooses. He is free to save Jonah; he is also free to save the Assyrians, and Jonah has no right to complain one way or the other about either. It isn’t his place to decide who will be shown grace and mercy, and who won’t; his own undeserved salvation obliges him to offer the same to Nineveh, and he acknowledges that. What had he vowed to the Lord? As his prophet, to go where God sent him and speak what God told him to speak. Jonah bows his head and accepts the Lord’s will, and the fish spits him up on the shore.

Now, I have to ask you, how far would you trust Jonah at this point? Sure, he’s repented, to some extent, under extreme duress; but based on his record so far, how deep do you think that repentance is? You could hardly blame God if he wanted a few guarantees out of his recalcitrant prophet before putting him back on his feet. But then, if the Lord had been a prudent God—if he’d been the kind of God people tend to imagine when they hear the word “God”—he wouldn’t have bothered to save Jonah at all, he would have just let him drown, and call another prophet who’d do what he was told. After all, Jonah certainly had it coming, and it would have been an object lesson to everybody in what happens if you disobey. That would have saved time, saved effort, and provided a nice neat moral lesson to boot: do what God says or you’re fish food.

But that’s not how he works. Rather, he is a God of utterly imprudent mercy. He doesn’t ration out his mercy drop by drop, careful not to use too much, as if in fear of running out; he doesn’t hold back his grace from anyone who would take advantage of it, nor does he keep it for the most deserving or those of whom he might make the greatest use. Instead, he lavishes it on us, grace upon grace. We see that with Jonah; most fully, we see it in Jesus Christ, in whom his mercy would go to the uttermost limit, climbing up on a cross to die in order to bring all of us back from the shipwreck we had allowed sin to make of our lives. That was utterly imprudent, it is utterly God, and it is utterly glorious.

Of course, Jonah wasn’t looking for mercy; in fact, he was trying to reject salvation—but God saved him anyway, despite himself. In truth, in some sense he always does, because salvation is always God’s work, and his initiative; we never turn to look for him except he draws us. Still, most of the time it would seem that those whom God saves are at least cooperating with his work; but sometimes, as with Jonah, God saves us even though we don’t want to be saved. Why he lets some go and hauls others back, I don’t know; that’s something for him to know and me not to find out, I suspect. But he’s God, if he wants to he can save people even when they’re bound and determined not to let him—as Jonah was; and sometimes he does.

This story highlights a strange reality, that sometimes God’s mercy is harder than his justice. That might sound hard to believe, when his mercy means sparing us punishment, but it’s true. Punishment doesn’t really demand much of us, after all. When we’re punished, either we know we’ve earned it or we can tell ourselves we haven’t, but either way we’re still in control; we can choose to change in response, but we don’t have to if we don’t want to. All we have to do is endure it. Mercy, though—mercy unsettles us, because it reverses the field on us. It takes us out of control, because we can’t predict it, we can’t earn it, we can’t determine it in any way—God’s mercy is entirely his own doing, completely outside us, completely beyond us. And mercy has a power to compel which punishment lacks, because it challenges us to respond in kind; it challenges us to live up to it. In the very fact that it makes no demands of us, it requires us to change.

No author has ever captured this truth better than Victor Hugo in his great novel Les Misérables, in the relationship between the hero, ex-convict Jean Valjean, and the Bishop, whom Hugo refers to as “Monseigneur Bienvenu”—Bishop Welcome. Dirty, shivering and bedraggled, abused by free society, Valjean knocked at the bishop’s door, begging; the bishop invited him in, fed him, warmed him, and gave him a room and a bed for the night. And what did Valjean do? Having woken up in the middle of the night because the bed was too comfortable, he slipped out, stole the six silver place settings and the ladle, and fled.

Of course, the gendarmes catch him and drag him back to the bishop’s house. Expecting to be returned to prison, instead Valjean hears the bishop say this: “Ah! here you are! I am glad to see you. Well, but how is this? I gave you the candlesticks too, which are of silver like the rest, and for which you can certainly get 200 francs. Why did you not carry them away with your forks and spoons?” The bishop sends the gendarmes on their way, then turns to Valjean and says this: “Do not forget, never forget, that you have promised to use this money in becoming an honest man. . . . Jean Valjean, my brother, you no longer belong to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I buy from you; I withdraw it from black thoughts and the spirit of perdition, and I give it to God.”

That is the imprudent, transforming, difficult mercy of God; Valjean, overwhelmed, accepted it and was transformed, becoming the good man the bishop saw he could be. This is the marvelous, infinite, matchless grace that overwhelms our pride and all our defenses. It isn’t easy, because we can’t control it and we can’t take it on our own terms; it isn’t always what we want, but it’s ever what we need.