Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 21 January, 2024, The Third Sunday of Epiphany. Readings for this Sunday: Psalm 62.6-14; Jonah 3.1-5,10; 1 Corinthians 7.29-31; Mark 1.14-20
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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).
Today I’d like to spend some time with our first reading from Jonah, a book we don’t often hear read on Sundays. Most of us think remember Jonah as a fish story, thanks to children’s bibles and the Gershwin song:
Oh Jonah, he lived in de whale, Fo' he made his home in / Dat fish's abdomen. / Oh Jonah, he lived in de whale.
Which may be one of the cleverest lyrics ever written, but I digress. Fewer of us, I suspect, think of Jonah as a book about how God can freely forgive even the most unlikely of people, so I want to suggest today that the book of Jonah can be seen as a thought experiment about how God’s grace works.
But first, speaking of thought experiments, some of you may have heard that Pope Francis created some controversy recently when he said in an interview that “I like to think of hell as being empty. I hope it is.” This was a personal comment; Francis was not trying to Catholic teaching, which, like most Christian teaching, acknowledge’s God’s right to judge us and to reward or punish us. However, given the turmoil in the Roman Catholic church over Francis’ teaching, this comment ignited a minor firestorm. Some claimed that Hell was a necessary part of God’s justice and that there must be consequences for sin. Others felt that theology that relied on hell to enforce good behaviour and church attendance was an impoverished understanding of God’s grace.
While we must leave our Roman Catholic friends to make decide what to think of the Pope’s remarks, in the larger Christian family there has long been a debate about how how unconditional God’s love and forgiveness might be. In theology there’s a position called universalism, which holds that God’s grace is so all-encompassing that all sins could be forgiven should people want that forgiveness. Within Anglicanism, C.S. Lewis said it well, I think, when he wrote that if the doors of hell have locks, then they must be on the inside, for those who consciously wish not to know God. These are speculations (what theologians get paid for) but they are based on the solid foundation of God’s love and grace, which brings us back to Jonah. What if the Book of Jonah was a similar speculation: could God forgive the most evil people that ever existed?
If you wanted a candidate for the most evil people who ever existed, you’d probably not go wrong if you said the ancient Assyrians. That’s the people that poor Jonah gets sent to preach to. Unlike the other prophets who hector their own people about Israel’s failings to live up to God’s covenant, 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 had a terrible reputation in the ancient world because it had built an empire on terror. It had a professional army that excelled in capturing cities. Any people that resisted were enslaved and their leaders tortured and slaughtered. Kings of Assyria, like Sennacherib and Ashurbanipal, left inscriptions boasting of how they cut throats of captives like lambs and dyed the hills with blood. Assyrian kings were feared (and hated) from Egypt to Babylon, and that hatred eventually meant their ruin.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Assyria was particularly hated by several of the prophets. One, the 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). He imagined a time when the world would learn of the destruction of Nineveh:
All who hear the news about you
clap their hands over you.
For who has ever escaped
your endless cruelty? (Nah 3.19)
So it’s not really surprising that Jonah wasn’t all that keen to go to Nineveh and probably embrace a martyr’s fate. He 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 ever 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 imagining God forgiving a repentant 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 and social media 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. God may love the people that we hate, but God hates sin and hatred. Jonah doesn’t teach us that some things about Assyira good, rather, it imagines a whole people returning to goodness. In Jonah, the king and people of Nineveh repent because they realize that they have done wrong. The thought experiment of Jonah thus challenges us with the question: “if a people can recognize their evil and repent, can we allow God to be gracious to them without being offended?” Thus, as I said at the beginning, Jonah is rather like Pope Francis’ musings on hell being empty. It’s a speculation on the depth of God’s mercy and the possibility that all might, somehow, one day, recognize the absolute goodness of God and of God’s love, and allow themselves to be changed by it.
A firm focus on the love and grace of God also has the benefit of keeping us from becoming self-righteous like Jonah. I can’t help but feel that there is a bit of Jonah in the opposition to Francis’ thoughts on hell. Why is it that some Christians might not want hell to be empty? Perhaps it is the satisfaction in thinking that there must be those worse than us who God should rightly punish? If such folk exist, then their fate is between them and God, and we should pray that they follow the example of the king of Nineveh and “turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands” (Jo 3.8).
A focus on the loving grace and mercy of God also allows us to hear afresh the words from today’s gospel, the very first words that Jesus speaks in Mark’s gospel: The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news’ (Mk 1:15). Can it be that the kingdom of God is not just heaven, some future place that we hope to go to, but is also a real place where we can live as people who are able to love and forgive others, as we are loved and forgiven by God. That kind of repentance and self-awareness is a good thing to focus on as we approach Lent.
There’s a lovely line we hear sometimes at Christmas time, in the reading from Isaiah 9.5:
For all the boots of the tramping warriors
and all the garments rolled in blood
shall be burned as fuel for the fire.
These lines remind us that the Christ child, the Messiah and Prince of Peace, will bring with him the kingdom of God which will always survive and thrive, whereas the cruelties of human empires, from Assyria to Rome to Putin’s Russia, are doomed to fail and to fade away. May we always be mindful that we are citizens of the kingdom of God, and give thanks to Christ our king of love and mercy.
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