Materials
The Old Testament
Minor Prophets #4
Our Anger And GOD's Grace
Jonah 3
by R. Todd Bouldin
Jonah had some very clear convictions. One of them
was that the world was divided between the righteous and the unrighteous.
His people, Israel, were righteous because they lived by God’s
holy laws. Their enemies, particularly the ones in Nineveh, were unrighteous,
and thus would be judged by God. But recently, after spending three
days in the belly of a large fish, Jonah had developed some new convictions.
One of them was that God is hard to understand. Another of them is
that God has a strange way of taking you to the unrighteous places
you believe are far from His grace.
Prayer - O God, who in Jesus Christ, loved the drunkards,
the prostitutes, the sexually immoral, and the tax collector, come
now and have mercy on our pride, for the way we demonize and dehumanize
the unrighteous. Convict us of your love for all people. In
the Name of Christ, Amen.
We all have some pretty core convictions about life. Your core conviction
can be that if you work hard, you will succeed. It may be that if
you are careful, watch your diet and exercise, you will stay healthy.
It may be that life is about being happy and making others happy.
It may be that your conviction that if you know Scripture and live
by its teachings, that God will bless your life and you will go to
heaven. These convictions are cornerstones, and we build our lives
upon them. Notice that most of our core convictions are conditional,
claiming that “if” we do what we are supposed to do, then
we will be okay. But what if you did everything you were supposed
to do, and God still loved those who didn’t?
When Jonah was called by God to go to Nineveh, he tried to sail to
Tarshish initially. Tarshish was a dream, a fantasy. It was a place
of gold, silver, and sheer beauty. We have no idea where it really
was, if it ever existed at all. Maybe it was just fantasy land. But
that doesn’t really matter. Tarshish always works best as a
dream place. It is where we expect our hard work and carefulness to
get us. Maybe it is heaven. Nineveh by contrast was a very real city
with real problems. We know it was the capital city of Assyria, Israel’s
great enemy. The text numbers its population and measures its size
for us just to make it all the more real. Nineveh is no dream. It
isn’t fantasy land. It is a large city with lots of problems,
and with a great many blatant and alluring immoralities. It seemed
God abandoned, and Jonah didn’t want to go there.
Nineveh is all the places you don’t expect to be. Nineveh
can be a hospital room or an unemployment office. It can be the empty
apartment you come to at the end of the day, or the home that is being
torn apart by anger and hurt. It can be a hospital room or an unemployment
office. For many of us who consider ourselves righteous, it also
is all the places you don’t expect God to be – in
countries with pagan or non-Christian beliefs, with people and nations
that are our nation’s enemies, in halls of government or in
an Hollywood studio, or with people whose lifestyles or moral choices
we do not approve. Our world, like Jonah’s, is so divided
between religious and secular that there are some places we just don’t
expect to find anything but the punishment of God. Certainly not
His grace.
The problem with finding yourself in Nineveh is not simply that you
don’t want to be there. The real problem is a God problem. “Why
did God bring me to this place?” So being in Nineveh challenges
your core convictions. Living wisely and carefully didn’t necessarily
bring you to the place you hoped or dreamed. Nineveh ain’t Tarshish.
And you never thought that careful living would bring you to the same
grace as those who lived so carelessly. How did this happen?
You are not in the hard places in your life because you are being
punished. Or because God has singled you out for bad treatment to
“teach you patience.” You are there on a mission. When
the fourth century bishop Basil of Caesarea ordained his younger brother
Gregory, he sent him to the city of Nyssa. This was not Tarshish.
Nyssa was an unremarkable city that had little to commend it. There
were no great churches or universities there. No theater, art museums
or sports teams. No one built a great career in Nyssa. When Gregory
complained, his brother said, “I am not sending you to Nyssa
to confer distinction upon you. I am sending you there for you to
confer distinction on the city.” If you find yourself in a place
you don’t want to be, or especially in a place where you feel
like God wouldn’t even be, the real question is not what you
did to deserve this. The real mission is to confer distinction
on the hard place so that you make it a holy place for holy purposes.
Of course, Nineveh was already a holy place because it belonged to
God, as all places do. “The earth is The Lord’s and all
that is in it.” (Psalm 24:1) But the Ninevites did not see that
and had been making a lot of really bad choices. In fact, the Bible
doesn’t mince words. We are told that it was an evil place.
Rather than judging them for their evil, however, The Lord wanted
to redeem the city. It’s all a matter of how you look at evil.
Some people look at evil and want to destroy it. God wants something
different. He wants to redeem it. So He sent Jonah into the midst
of the city to do a little preaching about the need to turn around,
to repent, to stop moving away from God, and to turn back to Him.
That is what God wants for all the people in your hard place, for
the people you think are so evil and far from the presence of God.
And God wants to make you a messenger of His redeeming desire. That
doesn’t mean that you have to knock doors, or preach in the
city square, or turn your work desk into a pulpit. But it does mean
that God sent you there to be a ray of light in the darkness. And
because you are there, someone may just turn back to God because of
the light they see in you. But whether they see the light will
depend on whether they see love or judgment in your eyes.
In the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:
"Christ is at play in ten thousand places
Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not His
To the Father through the features of men’s faces."
“Christ is at play.” That is a fascinating line. Perhaps
the poet meant to say that Christ is at work, as in people’s
lives. Or that Christ’s play is an unfolding drama in our lives
that is not finished. But I think it is possible that he meant that
Christ is at play, and in Christ we are made playful again.
In Christ we realize that life is not an achievement, not a condition
to be met, not a rule to be kept, or a formula to be believed . .
. but a gift to be received with all the delight that a child finds
in each new day, with the joyful freedom with which we enter into
the places where we are finally free to play. That would make all
places, even the hard places like Nineveh, a doxological playground.
But you can’t really play if you are more concerned with carefulness
than freedom.
Jonah was not a model of witnessing through joy and playfulness in
Nineveh. He warned the people with his bad dog sermons that they were
in a heap of trouble so that they had better turn or burn. It didn’t
take a lot of convincing. Most people know when they are in a heap
of trouble with God. They don’t really need us to tell them.
But to Jonah’s dismay, the Ninevites all repented and turned
back 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.”
(Jonah 3:8-9) And God was so delighted about their return home that,
as the text says, “God changed His mind about the calamity He
said He would bring upon them; and He did not do it.” (Jonah
3:10) As the Ninevites turned to God, God turned to them. They turned
from their sin and God turned from His anger.
But not Jonah. “But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and
he became angry.” (Jonah 4:1) Jonah would have none of this
playful grace. Jonah had been careful all of his life, He had associated
himself only with the righteous people, and he deserved better from
God. The fourth chapter depicts Jonah’s anger as he cries out
to God, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in
my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for
I knew that You are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and
abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. If
this is the way You are going to treat me, just kill me and get it
over with.” (Jonah 4:2-3)
Jonah’s core conviction had just been destroyed. He was certain
that the world was divided into two camps, the good and the bad, the
holy and the profane, and that God was going to judge the profane
places. Staying holy had been a lot of hard work even at home, but
the least you could ask for all your carefulness was getting to watch
God clobber the sinners in the end. It was a demented kind of desire,
but nothing like a little vindication by God to make you feel like
you always made the right choices. That is why Jonah didn’t
want to see Nineveh repent. He wanted God to destroy it, and so do
we. It sure would make us feel better about ourselves. But God has
His own convictions. Jonah discovers that one core conviction of God
is that it isn’t all about Jonah. God’s actions, especially
His redemption, are never based on your deep seated psychological
need for the vindication of your beliefs, morals and lifestyle. If
you need vindication, then you still need God, because your concern
really isn’t for God but for yourself.
One of God’s great convictions is that He is eager to forgive
anyone who turns to Him. His anger is for a moment, but His favor
is for a lifetime. At the end of the story, God asks Jonah if it was
really right for him to be angry. “Should I not be concerned
for the people of Nineveh?” (Jonah 4:11) It was as if to say,
“They are not of your religion or your nationality but they
belong to me too. Should I not be concerned?” The Hebrew word
for “concern” is placed together here with the Hebrew
word for " I ". When those two words are placed together
in Hebrew, it means welling up with tears. So in essence God is asking
Jonah, “Should I not weep over those who are lost in their own
way, and should I not cry with delight over their return?”
When you look at the lostness of the world, do you get angry or do
you weep? It will make all the difference in whether you are a light
in the world or whether you spend your days in a pity party under
a shriveled plant like Jonah. If you can put aside all of your carefulness,
all of your certainty that you are right, and your pride in following
the rules, you might just discover that there is freedom and joy
in following a God whose compassion you can’t measure or predict.
As long as you need vindicating or affirming, you can’t really
be free to play. Legalism, smugness and self-righteousness are never
really about God. It’s about you. When you can give up your
conviction that God has to vindicate your decisions and choices, then
you can truly be free to play. Waiting for the vindication of God
upon sinners really is a terrible way to live. Your whole life will
be characterized by anger and cantankerous behavior toward those who
just don’t understand what you understand, or who just don’t
meet your moral standard. You might as well just go sulk under a plant.
You might feel secure in such a black and white, profane and secular,
good vs. evil, type of world for a while. But God will always cause
that kind of plant to wilt over time. There is nothing more lonely
and self-defeating than to find yourself in that hard place where
all of your convictions have shriveled up and died in a world and
with a God who no longer meets your expectations.
There is another alternative. It is to wake up into a world every
day that belongs to God, and to know that the God you serve is doggedly
pursuing everything in it that is lost to bring it back to Himself.
Even the people and places you find difficult to love. Even yourself.
It is to give up your need for vindication and to rest in the secure
love of Jesus Christ. Once you can look upon Nineveh and weep and
not judge, then you are ready to leave your theological pity party,
your life of carefulness and duty, and to enter into a world alive
with the presence and mercy of God. It’s play time.
July 3,
2005
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