Jonah 3:1-5, 10

I have a confession to make: I hate Christian bookstores. I know that may sound like an odd thing for a minister to say, but I find them rather depressing. The reason is that they’re filled with books giving what they claim to be biblical advice, but they’re often written by people who don’t really understand the Bible.

Let me give you one roundabout example. Some years ago, I was visited by a couple who was struggling to make ends meet at the end of the month. They wanted me to recommend a book about biblical principles for creating a household budget.

There actually are some books that claim to be like that, but I’ve never seen one that’s actually based to the Bible. Now this couple was very strong in their faith and wanted to know specific things like whether they should pay their tithe based on their total income or on the remainder after taxes.

There are so few people today who actually choose to tithe — that is, give ten percent of their income to the church — that that fact alone showed me how important this was to them. But the truth is that if they really wanted to follow biblical guidelines, the ancient Israelites actually paid three different tithes in the Old Testament times.

It’s not clear whether the total of those tithes was thirty percent of their income or if they were allowed to lessen the hit a little bit by taking ten percent off the original income, then take off ten percent of that new total and then ten percent off that. Now you could make a case that some that total went to fulfill the roles played by modern government, so your taxes would cover two of those tithes.

But in any case, that wasn’t what they were looking for. In browsing through some Christian bookstore, they had become convinced that lurking deep within the bowels of the Bible was a step-by-step plan for creating a household budget, which they could simply copy down and follow and so magically cure all their financial ills.

But the Bible doesn’t work that way. First of all, the Bible is filled with general principles for following God’s way of love, but it isn’t a how-to book. God trusts us — and even expects us — to work out on our own how to apply those principles of love in any given situation.

For that matter, the Bible is not a rule book either. So many of those Christian bookstore books miss the point that just because something is in the Bible doesn’t make it an example of God’s will. Clearly people can understand that Adam and Eve didn’t leave us an example to follow. We get that because their disobedience was clearly labeled a sin in the text.

But how many times have you heard about the wisdom of Solomon and so assumed that he was a good king? The fact is that the biblical authors considered him to be the ultimate example of all worst traits of the ancient monarchy — from his politically-inspired bloodshed to his forced labor policies to his lack of any real faith. And all of that was true in spite of the gift of great wisdom God had given him.

In addition, the Bible doesn’t speak with a single voice about a number of topics. When the Babylonians overran Jerusalem and led its leading citizens off into exile, they finally began to realize that the warnings Jeremiah had tried to give them about the defeat they would suffer due to their lack of faithfulness had been true.

Generations later, when the Israelites were allowed to return home under the leadership of Nehemiah, the governor, and Ezra, the priest, they were faced with trying to decide how to make sure that such a total defeat never happened again.

Sadly, Ezra and Nehemiah came to the conclusion that the people of Israel had watered down their faith by allowing foreigners to intermarry with Israelites. So they demanded that anyone who was married to a foreigner had to immediately divorce their spouse and then force that spouse leave the country.

So they destroyed families in the name of the God of love. And they did it in spite of numerous texts which explained that God commanded them to treat the foreigners in their midst as well as they wished to be treated themselves.

It was clearly a harsh and misguided policy based on fear that allowed the civic and religious leaders to take out their anxieties and frustrations on the most vulnerable members of society. It’s almost like watching your favorite news channel today, isn’t it?

The book of Jonah was written as a satire to protest those exclusivist policies and to try to remind its readers of the inclusive nature of God’s love. The plot of the book is rather simple. God tells Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital city of the arch-enemy Assyrians, and tell them that God is aware of their wickedness. But in the very next sentence Jonah jumps on a ship going west instead of travelling east to Nineveh.

Why does he do that? Because the Assyrians were the ones who destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and scattered its citizens to the winds so thoroughly that they were totally lost to history. The Assyrians had the most feared and most ruthless army on the face of the planet.

They were the epitome of evil — the ancient world’s equivalent of ISIS or Boko Haram. Jonah didn’t want to have anything to do with this mission in case the Assyrians might do something to cause God to forgive them. As someone once said, “Jonah hated evil more than he loved God.”

So he boards the ship, which is then caught in a terrible storm. The sailors try everything they can think of — prayer, sacrifice and even sheer muscle power, but their ship remains in grave danger. Jonah tells them to toss him overboard, which they eventually do, but only reluctantly. Already we’re seeing that the faith of these non-Jewish sailors is much greater than that of God’s chosen prophet.

Jonah is swallowed by a large fish who vomits him up on the shore. Then, presumably after a long bath, Jonah finally goes to Nineveh and delivers a sermon that is only five words long in Hebrew. The essence of that sermon is this: “God’s about to fry you all and I can’t wait to see it!” There was no note of grace; no indication that they could save themselves by repenting. Just vengeance. But the king and all his subjects chose to repent anyway, leading God to not take any action against them. It was the very thing that Jonah had feared.

So Jonah pouts and God tries to help him understand that the Assyrians are his beloved children, too. Then the book ends without any indication of whether Jonah ultimately changes his mind or not. Perhaps the ending of the story is left open-ended because we’re supposed to identify with Jonah, so we’re faced with our own question of whether we try to reserve God’s love only for people we approve of.

But, as a friend Anne Lamott once told her, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all of the same people that you do.” The truth is that God’s way are not like our own. God is not the enemy of our enemies. Instead, God is the one who would lay his own life down to build bridges between our most deeply-entrenched and heavily-guarded positions.

Frederick Edwards once wrote “The strife of Serbs and Croats and Bosnians and Muslims was half a world away from us. The painful road of Black Africans to equality in the Union of South Africa was an occasional article in a newspaper or newsmagazine. The holocaust of six million Jews and five million other human beings was half a century ago. And this Jonah of the scriptures was probably not even a real person, and certainly the events that are recorded didn’t even happen. So we can forget all this, right? […] But if we read Jonah with the sense that it has something important to say to us, we might then paraphrase Walt Kelly’s Pogo and say, ‘We have seen Jonah, and he is us!’

“No, we must not be isolated from those strife-torn places in the world. The holocaust is part of our history that, if we fail to learn from it, humanity may one day repeat. The biblical story of people sometimes following and as often disobeying God is our story, too. […] Jonah warns us about ourselves and the attitudes we perpetuate. If God is a universal God, whose redemptive love is for all people, then how can we exclude anyone from the circle of our love?

“[…] People of good will, and certainly the followers of Jesus, must forthrightly disavow exclusivism, whatever be the excuse. […] The darkness of disparagement of other people must be banished by the light of love. We are called to bring light into the darkness, which is what this season of Epiphany is to remind us.”

Week after week during our worship services we ask God’s forgiveness through our Prayers of Confession. Some of those prayers, of course, may not perfectly fit our own personal failings, although we participate in those prayers anyway because we realize that we are a part of the very human community in which those failings may be seen.

And that’s not to mention that we all have our own public and secret sins for which we desperately need God’s forgiveness. If God can look on you and me with an unblinking gaze of love in spite of his full knowledge of our failings and of the ways we hurt ourselves and others, then how can we possibly set ourselves up in judgment of others?

If we don’t extend grace to others, we deny them the very thing we crave, the very thing that sustains us through our own checked faithfulness. But if we commit ourselves to a world of unbounded grace, then we can help God to transform this world so that perhaps by the time Tristan comes to baptize his children or his grandchildren then prejudice could be a thing of the past.

May we all learn the lesson of Jonah, so that we will expand our vision to include all people, just as God has included us all. Every person without exception is a deeply-loved child of God. Everyone is equally created in God’s image. We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, but in Christ we can find our common humanity and our common goal. So, with Christ’s help, let us share the light of God’s love with all those we meet. Amen.

(Comments to Jim at jmccrea@galenalink.com.)