Christchurch Parish News, April 2017
In this final reflection on the story of Jonah, I explore God’s identity and character and how we are free to respond.
‘But God said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said, ‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ Then the Lord said, ‘You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’’’ Jonah 4.9-11 (NRSV)
Last month I said that there were three questions which I was going to focus on in this my final reflection on the book of Jonah. Firstly, who is this God of Israel? Secondly, what is His character really like? And thirdly, how do we respond?
By way of approaching the first question, let me begin by asking you three related questions: do you believe that God is actively involved in a) your life, b) the life of our community and c) the life of our country? Our responses to these questions will vary and the reason why they vary is that we have different understandings of what we mean by God.
Some of us will respond by saying yes to all three: God is actively involved in my life (for example, what job I have, where I live, who my friends are, whom I marry etc.), my community (for example, in and through the work and service of those in our schools and hospitals, voluntary organisations, local businesses, and decisions made by local government), and my nation (be it the monarchy or the outcome of elections or international conflicts in which our country is involved).
At the other end of the spectrum, some of us will be more naturally inclined to feel a little uncomfortable speaking of God in such terms, preferring not to talk about God as being actively involved in x or y decision but more in terms of being the overarching context in whom, as St. Paul said, ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17). From this perspective, as a 20th century theologian, Paul Tillich, later put it, God is ‘the ground of all being’, in the absence of whom, nothing would exist or be sustained in its existence for one moment.
Most of us find ourselves probably somewhere in between the two ends of this spectrum, feeling more confident to speak about God as being actively involved in some parts of our lives, our communities and our nation some of the time, and usually only in ways that are easier to identity in retrospect rather than in any given moment. Likewise most of us are probably more confident, even if only in hindsight, to speak of God’s active involvement in our own lives but less confident when it comes to speaking of God’s active involvement in the decisions, for example, of local or national government.
So we’re faced with quite a challenge when reading a story like the one of Jonah, where as we’ve seen, God is presented as being very much actively involved in the life of Jonah, the community he becomes a part of (the sailors on board the ship sailing to Tarshish) and at a national level, too—the capital of Israel’s Assyrian enemies, Nineveh. This is no story of a detached, distant God who provides the context but doesn’t interfere. No God as ‘the ground of all being’ here. Instead, the story portrays the God of Israel as the key protagonist of the narrative with whom everyone, from Jonah to the Ninevites, has to reckon.
Given that the God of Israel gets involved at every level of creation, the second question, namely what is God’s character like, becomes all the more important. This is where it’s tricky for Jonah because the story reveals God’s character to be such that Israel’s Assyrian enemies stand to be forgiven and blessed if they repent. Jonah, as we know, would have it otherwise. He doesn’t want God to be this kind of God. He prefers the God of Israel to be God of only Israel and not to care a hoot about Israel’s enemies, let alone desire their repentance so that they might avoid catastrophe.
Last month we followed Jonah as he left Nineveh and sat down overlooking that great city to see whether God would finally come to His senses (as Jonah sees it) and mete out some fire and brimstone. Whilst he waits, the LORD makes a plant grow up to provide Jonah with shelter from the elements. Jonah rather likes this. God then causes the plant to shrivel up, thereby depriving Jonah of his shade from the hot sun and showing Jonah who’s boss. Jonah is now really angry, ‘angry enough to die’! In response to which, the LORD brings to Jonah’s attention the contrast between Jonah’s pity on the plant and God’s pit on the thousands of Ninevites who had been living in ignorance of how God would have them live (that’s what most scholars think is meant by ‘do not know their right hand from their left’). Jonah’s pity/concern was one born purely of self-interest, whereas the LORD’s was born of God’s compassion.
The LORD even tries to nudge Jonah in the direction of a less self-interested pity by pointing out that the Ninevites had lots of animals (‘much cattle’ in the King James translation). Even if Jonah can’t feel pity for his enemies, perhaps, since he’s shown pity on the plant, he might just be able to feel pity for his enemy’s animals, as they’re one step up the ladder. Then Jonah responds by saying …
Well, in fact he doesn’t say anything because the story stops there quite abruptly, giving the last word to the God of Israel. It’s a rhetorical move in the narrative by which the listener is left asking, ‘well, what happened next? What did Jonah do or say?’ But the narrator doesn’t tell us how Jonah responds to God’s final remark because at this stage of the story how Jonah responds is no longer what’s important. What matters now, on having heard the story of Jonah from start to finish, is howwe respond. Because we don’t know how Jonah does, we try to complete the story and in doing so, we ask ourselves how we would act if we were in Jonah’s situation.
The most important part of this story lies in what is left unsaid. For stories don’t just create new worlds for our imaginations to inhabit and be shaped by, they can also in the very same act of being told, challenge us and become the means by which God takes our broken hearts and minds and reshapes them in his image and likeness, which at the heart of it all, is what truly matters both now and for all eternity.
So how would you respond? Do you draw comfort from the fact that the story tells us that it is God’s character to forgive those who wish us ill? Do you sign up for a God who loves your enemies just as much as He loves you and desires their repentance just as much as he desires yours? And let’s not trivialise this by reducing it to the level of disagreements over church politics or a falling out at the sailing club. To paraphrase the Croation theologian Miroslav Volf, if the gospel is not good news in countries ripped apart by war (and Volf was writing in the context of the 1990s Balkan conflict), then it’s not good news in Christchurch. It’s not good news anywhere.
You may be thinking at this point that I’ve made a sudden jump. One moment I’m talking about Jonah and the God of Israel, and the next moment I’m suddenly talking about the Good News. That’s to do with Jesus, isn’t it? But Jesus doesn’t feature in the story of Jonah. So what’s going on? Am I just shoe-horning him in?
As you know, the earliest Christians were Jewish, just like Jesus was. As such, having experienced Jesus, his way of being, his teaching, his execution on a cross and his utterly unexpected resurrection, they swiftly came to speak of him using language that they had hitherto reserved uniquely for speaking of the God of Israel. For them, the identity of the God of Israel and of Jesus had become one and the same. They could no longer speak of the One without speaking of the Other. As such, if we, the spiritual descendants of these first disciples, disconnect Jesus in our hearts and minds from the God of Israel, then we are left with a thinned out understanding of the One whose identity is revealed in the stories of both.
Why does this matter? I am writing this in early Lent but you will be reading it as we draw closer to Good Friday and Easter Day. As such, the identity and character of the God we see revealed in Jesus’ death and resurrection illuminates our understanding of the story of the God of Israel’s forgiveness of the Ninevites and of our enemies now, be they in parts of the world ravaged by war, or within families torn apart by addiction or deception. Taken as a whole, Holy Scripture, both Old and New Testaments alike, reveals that it is the very identity of God to forgive and to reconcile. In Jesus’ death on the cross we glimpse the cost of this to God.
The gospel accounts describe and explain Jesus’ death on the cross in many ways, much like someone turning a diamond around and around in the light to appreciate better its beauty from every angle, for not one perspective reveals all. In the gospel according to St. John, we read that just before Jesus dies on the cross, he says ‘Tetelestai’, which is the Greek for ‘it is finished, it’s fulfilled’ in the sense of ‘mission accomplished’. In Jesus’ death, this reconciliation between God and His creation, which was the fulfilment of Israel’s calling, has been accomplished and the new creation can begin, which it does in Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Day.
Jonah’s question, which drove him to such despair, was how could the God of Israel be just if He was a God who could forgive Israel’s enemies without them having to suffer the consequences of their sins. Jesus’ death on the cross is the answer to Jonah’s howl of protest. God’s forgiveness of the Ninevites, God’s forgiveness of the Israelites, God’s forgiveness of you and of me was secured by the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.
As with the sudden ending of St. Mark’s gospel, the story of Jonah leave us to answer the question for ourselves. There is no forcing us into a corner. We are free to shrug it all off and go on our way. God in no way coerces us to respond in a way that is in harmony with His character. We are free, just as Jonah is presented as being at the end of the story, to remain entirely opposed to this extension of God’s good news for all, or even to dismiss it as simply being one big fairytale. On the other hand, we are just as free to delight in this good news. To rejoice in it. To embrace it and by inhabiting this story which the whole of Holy Scripture tells, allow God to mend and reshape the very core of our being and thereby transform us, our communities and our world.
Which is it to be?