Second Turn
Jonah 3:1-5, 10

January 26, 2003

I haven’t worked out the details, but if I were asked to rewrite a modern version of the tale of Jonah, I would situate it during the Cold War, right in the middle of the infamous McCarthy hearings.

Jonah would be a diplomat, sent on a sensitive mission behind the Iron Curtain. It’s dangerous, and what’s more, he might succeed. With the black-and-white world of the 1950’s and all the antipathy vested by characters on both sides of the Curtain, it is difficult for him to buy the fact that the Enemy might be human.

I’m open for suggestions regarding the whale. I suppose a Soviet sub would count, but I kind of believe some other prop would be more fitting.

Many people are horrified by the imposition of politics into religion. The sacred has been violated by the very profane. Yet we have no problem with making the Royal Canadian Air Farce largely a political parody. The Bible has more than its share of political parables.

The three famous stories in the Book of Daniel - the three men in the fiery furnace; Daniel in the lions’ den; the handwriting on the wall - are fiercely political diatribes, but use an old literary device.

The stories are told about a despotic king several centuries before, but the parable is about someone contemporary. King Nebuchadnezzar is given the role of the bad guy setting up idols, throwing dissidents into furnaces and lion pits. Nebuchadnezzar may not have been a fun guy, but he wasn’t that bad.

But the author of Daniel didn’t mean Nebuchadnezzar, but writing in the second century B.C.E. in Palestine occupied by a Greek dynasty, the king was Antioches. He had an ego to match to match anyone’s. He had coins made declaring he was God, and since gods like to be worshipped, Antioches urged all he could to worship him, setting up his own statues right in the centre of the Jerusalem Temple. The Maccabean revolt and the initiation of Hanukkah was the final resolution.

Jonah can operate in the same way - a parable of the best kind. It can be about your personal pilgrimage and a tale of political satire and commentary - personal, as well as something that affects all of us at once.

Listen with both ears. Listen aggressively. Listen with Jonah’s ears and yours, and see what you hear.

The Word of the Lord came to Jonah. In a way it was an “ordinary” Word, like so many other Words of the Lord that came to the other prophets. Yet the Word of the Lord is never ordinary. There were periods of time when “the Word of the Lord was not heard very much in Israel,” but Jonah did hear. He knew exactly all the ramifications, but thought God was being too divine, too open to the chance wickedness might be transformed.

Nineveh was a huge, wicked, foreign city (New York?). It was nearby either: Mosul, Iraq, hundreds of kilometres away from Israel. However, it was too close for Jonah and he took the first ship for Tarshish, the literary end of the world, perhaps in Spain. Jonah was running away from certain repentance.

I have known people who have had problems in Halifax and move to idyllic Vancouver to escape their problems, but problems move as fast as you do. It’s almost a caricature that Jonah thought God would not bug him in Tarshish. God didn’t wait that long.

Out in the middle of the tempestuous Mediterranean a fierce storm arose and your religion came out into the open. The sailors believed everybody had an individual god and if only they could hit upon the right person, his god would quell the storm. We know that storms happen, whether a god is handy or not. Jonah knew that his God created the heavens and the earth and the problem was inside of him.

He thought he deserved death for disobeying the code of the prophets. He wanted death because that would solve his problem - and Nineveh would be destroyed.

The sailors were the moral ones, refusing to accept Jonah’s suggestions, trying to avert the terrible. Finally, he allowed them no choice - his God was the one - and the storm stopped.

Jonah was saved in a way worthy of death - swallowed by a great fish and digested for three days - the same number of days Jesus was in the tomb, Christians would later say. Jonah was not saved for his own righteousness; God wanted to save the Ninevites.

So he turned around and this time headed towards Nineveh by land. He preached judgment and calamity, and the people believed. Then it was by public opinion, not sermons, that caused the king to repent. Did the king have any morality of his own? Records aren’t kept of such matters.

Finally, God repented, a second time around, just as God had wanted to do all along.

In an important way, Jonah had not made a real second turn, and had not repented of his desire to see the Ninevites get theirs.

If public opinion - hopefully - has its influence to force George W. Bush to back away from an armed conflict with modern-day Mosul and Baghdad, I believe we will hear another Jonah frustrated to desperation that wickedness was not dealt with properly.

Jonah mopes and pouts almost comically, sitting out in the open desert sun daring to die of exposure. A plant grows to shade him at first, and then wilts to wilt him again. Nevertheless, Jonah is still angry.

“Is it right for you to be angry?” God twice asks Jonah. Am I not right to be concerned for Nineveh and all its people, and even its animals?

In the best fashion of literature intended to redescribe the world, the book ends right here with “and many animals” - no resolution, no more actions, who knows what happens with Jonah, Nineveh, or God?

Is it wrong to be angry? No. Lots of damage done to lots of people through the well-meaning auspices of the church when they are urged to suppress their real anger over real wrongs. If we are never angry, we are never human in the image we are created.

In redescribing the world, the author of Jonah asks something different, “Is it right for you to be angry?” A second turn, the Gospel in Old Testament garb. “Love does not rejoice in the wrong, but rejoices in the right” (1 Corinthians 13:6).

Jonah’s not just a pretty whale. If you want God to take care of you, if you allow only friends and people you approve to be forgiven, Jonah is tough to swallow. If you want to hear the Word of the Lord and know that the worst people will become blessed, then the world is turned around and changed.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan