Jonah 3

           The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across.  Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”  And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.

           When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”

           When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.

Jonah Chapter 3

“The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.”

This could be the introduction of a tragedy. Sometimes, you end up in a place and you say, wait, wasn’t I just here? Where life has turned around and given you the same struggles once again. Where lo and behold, the old argument with a loved one reemerges for another time around with renewed conviction. When lo and behold we keep making the same choices and the same mistakes over and again.

Sometimes you can look at our world and go… I think I recognize this tree from the last time we were here. I think I recognize this place where distrust meets aggression. I think I recognize this place where our deep shame meets the new fears in our life. Where here we are once again facing our racist, sexist, and terrible ghosts. I think I recognize this place where the swords rattle and the enemies wait for one another to blink, just like the time before.

“The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.” This sounds like it could be the beginning of a tragedy. And here’s what we know about tragedies: even going in we know how it’s going to end. People will not grow and change. Misunderstandings will not be recognized and instead will be amplified by bad choices and firm behavior. New understandings will not be reached. There will be no transformation. Faults will prove insurmountable, and these characters will keep playing the roles that they have been cast, speaking the words that have been assigned to them, passed down in tradition from one to the next. We will end the scene with death and weeping, and then the curtain closes. In a tragedy we know how it ends.

Let me tell you how it goes in nearly every book of the prophets: God says to the soon-to be prophet “Go to such and such, and tell them what I have to say.” The prophet immediately goes to where God has said, prophesies at length, ad nausem, using poetry, promises, threats of upcoming disaster, trying to get the people’s attention. And after all of this the most frequent response is that the Holy People of God will shrug their shoulders and imminent destruction and exile will occur. This happens in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel; you name it, this is what a prophet does. And so we know that the people of God will inevitably do is fail to turn to God, continue in their wicked ways, and so get to feel the full brunt of their own

Jonah 1

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.”  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.

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. 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. 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.”

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. 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?”  “I am a Hebrew,” he replied. “I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”  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.

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.  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.”  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.  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.”  So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the sea; and the sea ceased from its raging. Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.

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 CHAPTER 1

For the next few weeks we will be reading the book of Jonah, and so I want to let you know it is ok to laugh. Jonah is a short book – only 4 chapters long, squashed in the middle of the prophets in the Hebrew Scriptures. And you would not be wrong in being confused that sacred writing can actually be funny. If you were to read the books before Jonah or after Jonah, they are very serious. Prophets speaking oracles of judgment upon the people in their sin and the sins of the nations.

The book of Micah, which in our Scriptures follows Jonah, starts off with this great imagery:

“For Lo, the Lord is coming out of his place

and will come down and tread

upon the high places of the earth

Then the mountains will melt under him

and the valleys will burst open

like wax near the fire

like waters poured down a steep place

All this for the transgression of Jacob

and for the sins of the house of Israel”

Micah does not have much of a sense of humor. Prophets on the whole

spend their time holding up a mirror to the people naming just how we have fallen away from the ways of God and how the consequences will be disastrous. And you have this feeling that even if people know that