Jonah 1:1-4:11
“Angry Enough To Die”
By: Rev. Kenneth E. Sauer
Pastor of Parkview United Methodist Church, Newport News, VA
www.parkview-umc.org
It would be fair to say that one of the underlying themes of the New Testament is the wideness of God’s mercy—that God is not the God of the Jews only…
…and that Jesus came to save all people—no matter what their nationality!
I believe one of the greatest puzzles in this life…
…one of the greatest obstacles we are called to overcome…
…one of the greatest lessons we are to learn is that we are supposed to love one another without regard to race, sex, religion or any other characteristic.
And once we learn this, we are to spend our lives figuring out how to go about doing this—loving one another as God has loved us.
As Rodney King proclaimed some eleven years ago: “Why can’t we all just get along?”
In the Old Testament, after the Exile, there grew up in Israel a spirit of bitterness and vengefulness toward other nations.
The most passionate desire of the people was that God’s wrath should utterly consume all of Israel’s enemies.
The nation had endured so much at the hands of it’s enemies that they had forgotten to keep alive the vision of Israel as God’s servant through whom the Redemptive Truth would one day reach all people.
It’s as if we were to say: “God Bless the United States of America—and no one else!”
This is the way Israel felt, and this is the reason that the Book of Jonah was written.
The author of Jonah was on fire with a great message!
He would teach his people and all people a great truth…
…that the love of God is broader than the measure of our minds!!!
The author saw in Jonah the whole nation of Israel.
The story of Jonah is a constant rebuke to our pretensions, our narrow judgments, and our divisions.
It sets the meanness and foolishness of humankind against the greatness and goodness and love of God!
God spoke to Jonah and said, basically, “Go to Ninevah, that huge city and tell them that I am disgusted by their behavior.”
Now this was a very strange command since the Ninevites were the enemies of the rest of the world—including Israel.
It would be like someone today traveling to the capital city of their worst enemy to tell them that God is unhappy with them.
So Jonah does the only sensible thing…
…he heads in the opposite direction.
Jonah doesn’t do this because he is afraid, but because what he wanted and what God wanted were two entirely different things.
He knew that God’s warning to Ninevah was God’s way to save Ninevah.
God would redeem.
Jonah wanted to destroy.
How many of us can relate to Jonah?
How many of us are unable to see God’s purpose which is pointing toward a more equal world, simply because we would rather return to the good old days of “special privilege”?
God sees in us a rebellion against His mandate that we are to recognize our common humanity with the other people of this earth—the people of the Arab world, of Ethiopia, of China, of persons of differing colors and backgrounds—even within our own country.
Jonah fled God’s presence because it was too uncomfortable.
If he were to stay in God’s presence, his littleness, his sin, his prejudices and hypocrisies would be revealed for what they were.
If he had chosen to stay in God’s presence, he would have become a changed man.
In God’s presence his pride and his hatreds would have been transformed.
In God’s presence, and in God’s presence alone Jonah could have found the inner healing that he lacked.
And the same goes for all of us.
What is it that Jesus tells us in John Chapter 3?
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”…
…And…
… “This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.”
Will we stay in the Light and be transformed…
…or will we flee from the Light and remain the angry, selfish creatures that we are?
Worn out by his inner turmoil and the hardships of his hasty journey of escape, Jonah went down into the hold of the ship and “fell into a deep sleep.”
Jonah was fast asleep just as we Christian people often are—professing the Gospel of Jesus Christ but being content to do very little with our faith—like putting it to action!
Two thousand years of preaching and our world is still trapped in a barbed wire entanglement.
Two thousand years of preaching about the sacredness and dignity of every individual, and racism is still rearing its ugly head!
It’s interesting that Jonah has a moment of insight while he is on the ship.
This horrible storm comes…threatening the lives of all the persons on the ship.
Now these other people on the ship weren’t Israelites…
…they were foreigners…
…like the Ninevites.
Jonah was able to hate foreigners en masse.
He hated Gentiles, Assyrians, Ninevah.
He’s the kind of person who would hate the Afghans, the Iraqis, black persons en masse…but once he gets to know them as individuals…these hated foreigners become people just like himself.
Let’s remember that this is how God sees people…
…as individuals…
…all equal…
…all having sacred worth…
…all in need of love, mercy, kindness, forgiveness, salvation.
Jesus died for the sins of the world…not for the sins of one particular group of people!!!
So Jonah has a moment of insight and sacrifices himself for these individuals.
He no longer saw these folks as his enemies…but he continued to see the entire nation of Ninevah this way.
Did not Jesus tell us to love and pray for our enemies?
Jonah fled from God, and ended up in darkness.
This is what happens when we rebel against the love of God and the call of God on our lives…
…darkness consumes us…
…hatred overtakes us…
…we become murderers rather than lovers…
…war-mongers rather than peace makers…
…unhappy, and angry persons instead of the Children of God who are living life to the full!!!
Eventually, Jonah decides to repent…
…he cannot stand the darkness any longer…
…and of course, God gives him another chance…
…but the call upon Jonah’s life remains the same: “Go to the great city of Ninevah and proclaim to it the message I give you.”
And Jonah’s heart remains the same—he is a first class nationalist…
…exalting only his own country…
…his own people and no one else!
He had learned nothing from his experience in the darkness.
Jonah preached to the Ninevites, but there was no mercy in his heart.
Not even God’s graciousness towards him had caused him to have mercy on others!
“Forty more days and Ninevah will be overturned,” was Jonah’s message.
There was only judgment in his seven word sermon—no hope.
But despite Jonah’s rebellion and hatred, God uses the message and the Ninevites believe God, repent and are saved!!!
This really irked Jonah.
Since he had gone to all the effort to proclaim destruction, he wanted to see the fireworks—an earthquake or raging fire that would consume his enemies.
But God “had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.”
Are we able to see with the ‘eyes of Christ’ and rejoice when good things happen in the lives of other people—even our enemies?…
…or does it just make us angry?
We are told that “Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry.”
“This is the very reason I tried to escape you in the first place,” Jonah basically whines.
Accusing God, Jonah says, in essence: “I should have known you would pull something like this. After all, it’s just like you—compassionate, slow to anger, merciful, always ready to forgive and rescue people from the punishment they deserve. Just kill me right here on the spot. I’d be better off dead than alive anyway.”
Would any of us rather die than see something good happen to those we hate?
We sure do act this way sometimes…
…not only by our actions, but by our inaction!!!
God bless us and no one else!!!
God answers Jonah with this question: “Have you any right to be angry?”
Jonah doesn’t answer, but instead goes out to a place east of the city to sulk.
Then God causes a castor-oil plant to spring up and shade the pouting prophet.
The next morning, however, God sent a worm to cut the plant down, and then sent the scorching sun and a hot wind from the east to heat up the situation.
Once again Jonah proclaims: “It would be better for me to die than to live.”
We are selfish people. Our main preoccupation is with ourselves.
Our reaction to events are so often aimed only at ourselves: “How will this affect me, my wealth, my position, my future?”…
…rather than “How will it further the general good of all people?”
God asks Jonah the same question he had refused to answer before which is basically: “What reason do you have to be angry?”
“Every reason,” Jonah snaps!
“I am angry enough to die.”
Have we ever been angry enough to die?
Have we ever been so consumed with ourselves…
…with our own agendas…
…with our own egos…
…that when we didn’t get our way…
…we were angry enough to die?
Jonah was more concerned about a plant than he was about all those people in Ninevah.
“But the Lord said, ‘You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Ninevah has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left…”
Do we ever find ourselves more concerned over temporal things than people?
We are left with God’s moving plea to Jonah to recognize his kinship, his common humanity with these “foreigners”—this vision of the universal love of God which seeks to bind up our wounds and our divisions.
We aren’t told what happens to Jonah, but the author isn’t concerned with him…
…the author is concerned with us.
What does this story mean to us?
Does this story shed light on our hatreds, our prejudices, and selfish ambitions?
Can any of us resist a gracious and loving God?
And especially, can we resist the God Who has revealed Himself, on the highest level possible, in Christ?
What does this mean to us, this Cross, this sacrifice?…
…and what are we doing about it?
Like Jonah, many of us have not learned a thing.
Our racist thoughts and actions, our hatred of foreign people, our resistance of anyone who looks or thinks or acts differently than we do goes straight in the opposite direction of God’s will and purpose.
Many of us would rather face toward the past and hope for the return of the society that once was, so that we can manipulate other people to our own advantage.
We are all slow to learn.
Many of us resist the Light of Christ.
But if we continue to resist we will face darkness and ruin.
We live in a world where if we are to save ourselves, we must also strive to save others…
…if we are unwilling to try and save others…
…we will not be saved!
