God Loves Those We Hate: A Sermon For the Third Sunday After Epiphany

 

Preached online to All Saints, King City, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 27 January, 2021, The Third Sunday After Epiphany.

 

Readings for this Sunday:  Psalm 62.6-14; Jonah 3.1-5,10; 1 Corinthians 7.29-31; Mark 1.14-20

 

 

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 (Jon 3.10).

 

Recently I was interacting with a stranger on social media and I realized during our conversation that I had totally misunderstood him.  Whereas I had first thought that he and I were likeminded, I realized that we were on opposite sides of the political fence.   What saved the conversation was that while he corrected me, he was kind and gracious, and that was incredibly refreshing, considering how badly people can behave online.   I certainly would speak with him again and could learn to call him a friend. 

Recent events in the US have shown us what happens when large groups of people entrench themselves into more and more extreme positions.   Social media, 24-hour news cycles, and over the top rhetoric make us tribal, suspicious, and hostile to those who don’t share our positions.    Politics has become transcendent, so that we see our side as the greatest good we can imagine, and so we become programmed into ways of thinking that are self-righteous, judging, and which are very far from the gospel  of our faith in Jesus Christ.

Today's reading from the Hebrew scriptures offers us a way out of the mindset that leaves so many people angry and hostile to one another.  Unlike the other prophets who hector their own people about Israel’s failings to live up to God’s covenant, Jonah gets sent to a foreign people, and a very nasty one at that.  God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire: “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it” (Jon 1.2).  It would be like today a Christian evangelist getting sent to the capital of North Korea.

Assyria was so hated and feared that another Hebrew prophet, Nahum, wrote a whole book in which he imagined God destroying Nineveh, rather like the author of Revelation imagines God destroying Rome.   Nahum called Nineveh a “city of bloodshed, utterly deceitful” (Nah 3.1) and predicted that it would face “Devastation, desolation, and destruction” (2.10).

Not one to embrace a martyr’s fate, Jonah buys a ticket on the first ship going as far from Nineveh as possible, but as you recall the story, Jonah can’t escape his destiny.  God sends a giant storm, the sailors appease God by throwing their passenger overboard, and Jonah ends up in a giant fish which “the Lord provided” (Jon 1.17).  In the belly of the fish, Jonah thanks God for saving him and praises him as the true God: “Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” (Jon 2.9), by which Jonah says more than he realizes.

It doesn’t occur to Jonah that if deliverance belongs to the Lord, then the Lord can deliver or save whomever he wishes, including the people of Nineveh.  After what is sometimes called the worst sermon every preached (loosely paraphrased as “Forty days from now, God will kill you all!” Jon 3.4), the King of Nineveh repents, along with the whole city, even the animals.  “All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands” (3.8) and God has mercy on them.   Jonah however is not pleased at this, he pouts, and in the final chapter, God teaches him a rather comic lesson about mercy.  First God makes a plant grow to shelter the pouting prophet, and then God kills the plant, and when Joseph is angry, God teaches him a lesson:   you’re angry that the plant died, but you were ok with a whole city being destroyed, so how is that right (Jon 4.11).

Jonah is a strange book of the bible, and Joseph is one of the bible’s antiheroes, the patron saint of reluctant missionaries and unwilling evangelists.   The totally unexpected repentance of the Ninevites is probably intended to make show the superiority of the Hebrew God over people who, as Job says, “worship vain idols” (Jon 2.8), which is a very common Old Testament theme. In that respect, Jonah says the same thing as his fellow prophet Nahum.  However, Jonah makes a radically different point by imaging God forgiving Nineveh rather than destroying it.   If deliverance does indeed belong to the Lord, then God is far more merciful then the self-righteous Jonah could have imagined.

As one commentator put it recently with marvellous simplicity, the Book of Jonah teaches us that God loves the people that we hate.     Jonah wants Nineveh destroyed because he hates them and fears them, and with good reason.    The Assyrians were a terrible, cruel empire, and historically they suffered the fate of other cruel empires.   But history and theology don’t always teach the same lessons.    The author of Jonah dared to imagine the love of God for all of his creation, even for the enemies of Israel, and took that thought experiment to its logical conclusion, where bad people can repent and be forgiven. 

If Jonah teaches us that God loves the people that we hate, how do we implement this lesson in our lives and in this historical place and time?  A friend of mine said that the partisanship and bitter politics of the last four years made him a worse person.   I confess the same thing.   In times of bitter division, it’s a great temptation to think the worst of those we disagree with.   Here in Canada, we’ve seen a change in our own politics and a deterioration of our civil discourse that seems driven by the events of the last five years, and maybe longer. 

Let me be clear that the answer is not to give into a kind of “good people on both sides” kind of moral relativism.   The images we saw from the attack on the US Capitol on 6 January included many images of fierce hatred and moral evil, including people identifying with racist and neo-Nazi causes.    God may love the people that we hate, but God hates sin and hatred.    There is a place for moral outrage in the life and voice of the church, and  there are some on the extremes of left and right who need to be shunned by decent people and corrected by just law.

Paul says that we as church have the “mind of Christ”.    How do we as disciples of Christ live in an age of violent and extreme beliefs?   It’s not easy, but I think we start by avoiding the self-righteousness of Jonah.   We believe in a good and merciful God.  We believe that all are created equally by that same God.    Our voices, our actions, and our ethics need to flow from these starting points.  Today, at the end of the Week of Christian Unity, we are called to ask ourselves, what will our disagreements look and sound like when we realize  that those we may disagree with are just as beloved of God as we are?