Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity, 4:00pm Choral Evensong

admin | 26 October 2014

“Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord; / Lord, hear my voice”
(Psalm 130.1)

The psalmist’s cry echoes the cry of Jonah from the belly of the great fish, a cry, he suggests, that is from “the belly of Sheol,” the term for the Jewish underworld. Jonah is as far from God as he can be. And yet, not unlike Christ on the cross in his cry of dereliction, he cries out to God. In the case of Jonah, he cries out to the God from whom he has tried to get as far away from as possible. The biblical, theological, and psychological point is that you can’t.

As another psalm (Psalm 139) reminds us, “O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me:/ thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts from afar” (vs.1). It goes on to ask “whither shall I go then from thy spirit?/ or whither shall I flee from thy presence?/ If I climb up into heaven, thou art there:/ if I go down to hell, thou art there also” (vs. 6,7). God would not be God if we thought we could escape his presence and his truth.

The story of Jonah is partly told to make this point about God and about God as the universal God and not just the God of a particular people, a tribal god as it were. The Book of Jonah is actually a profound satire upon the folly of that kind of thinking. A most unusual book of Hebrew prophecy, to be sure, it yet offers an important spiritual insight into the nature of God, not altogether unlike The Book of Ruth with her insight that “your people shall be my people, your God my God” for God is for all people. They may have been written about the same time in the third century BC.

The satire of Jonah is that he is designated as a prophet but he is a reluctant prophet, a prophet who does not want to do what prophets are supposed to do, namely, be the mouthpiece for God, to speak His word to whomever they are sent. Not altogether unlike us when we resist doing what we know we should do and what God wants us to do. God says to Jonah, “Go to Nineveh,” and Jonah immediately jumps on the next boat to Tarshish. It would be a bit like being told to go to Halifax and getting on the ferry at Digby heading for Saint John. Jonah is trying to get as far away from Nineveh in central Iraq as he possibly can and to get completely away from the divine imperative. As if one could flee from the presence of the Lord God of all creation. Nineveh, of course, represents all that is foreign and all that is opposed to Israel.

God appoints both a storm at sea and a great fish to swallow up Jonah once he has been thrown of the ship at the great distress of the sailors, you note, who show great reluctance to get rid of him even though he has been identified as the cause of the storm. “What is this that you have done?” they asked having learned that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord. With reluctance they throw him overboard and the storm ceases and they come to acknowledge the truth and power of the universal God. But their question serves as a kind of appeal to conscience.

Jonah, in the belly of the great fish, has plenty of opportunity to reflect upon his situation and even more to contemplate his folly; actually for three days and three nights. The times will take on a symbolic significance in relation to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Ultimately, in that place imaged as being like Sheol by Jonah himself, he prays to the Lord his God. “I called to the Lord out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.”

The rest of the story of Jonah explores some of the further dimensions of thinking that one can avoid God and the power of God’s goodness. It will turn out that one of the reasons Jonah is reluctant to go to Nineveh and to preach repentance is that he thinks that God will show mercy on the Ninevites rather than ‘nuke’m till they glow’ which is what Jonah would really like to see happen. The deeper lesson is that God’s mercy is greater than human justice and far greater than our human desire for revenge and destruction, a lesson which complements this morning’s Gospel (Matthew 9.1-8) about forgiveness as that which Jesus wants us to know.

It is precisely this insight that makes The Book of Jonah so important. It isn’t about the Ninevites having some quality of other that makes them worthy; it is entirely about the mercy of God. In a famous and, I think, humorous phrase, God asks Jonah who has gone into a sulk, “why should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left and also much cattle?” But, then, are we not all very much like the Ninevites, too?

God recalls Jonah and us to his transcendence and to his mercy and truth. In being recalled to the truth of God and to his mercy and forgiveness, we discover our truth and our dignity. Sometimes it happens out of the deep, out of the depths of darkness and despair, but only if we call out to God. Sometimes out of loss there is a greater gain like what Paul in the second lesson from Philippians 3 reminds us – “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus our Lord.”