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