Running Away

 

Oh Jonah

This is what I think of when I start to look at Jonah’s story.  

Oh Jonah.  

I look at him and what he does, and because I’m reading the story and know the things that are going on around him, I want to cringe on his behalf. Because he doesn’t seem to get it.

Have you done that? Have you cringed for someone?

That happens when you’re watching someone, and you know that they aren’t making the best decisions because you know they don’t know what they need to know, or (even worse) you know that their own beliefs and biases are keeping them from doing what in their own best interest?

Have you ever cringed for that?  

There are sometimes when it’s almost painful, and its even worse when you’re watching it from a distance. In those times all you can do is watch, and pray that something breaks their way.

When I say Oh Jonah, that’s what I’m doing. Because Jonah is this intensely, intensely, average guy.  In fact, in the Old Testament, the only other mention we have of him is in 2 Kings 14

We think Jonah is a bigger deal than he is, because he has book named after him, and here he is named as a prophet of the Lord!!  That means he has to be special...doesn't it?

And he is, but he is also very average.  He’s a lot like you and me.

Being a prophet then was what we would call an analyst today.  Both jobs serve the same purpose.  It’s not about “predicting the future” or being a “fortune teller” which is what we think of a prophet a lot of time. This is to our detriment that we think this, but they interpret the world around us with the intent to teach us a lesson, to teach us something we need to know. 

Prophets in that time were easy to come by.  The ones that we have in scripture, that we say are important, are the ones who were listening for God's voice.  There were a lot more prophets than there were prophets listening to God.

And, from what we learn of Jonah in 2 Kings, we see that he was taking on one of the roles in his job as prophet that a lot of folks did in his time. That was as an adviser to the king.  In the circles he operated in, that was a very average job.

But there was more to it than that.  Because Jonah was an adviser to King Jeroboam II who 2 Kings says this about Jeroboam:

We don’t know everything that was going on at the time, but what we do know is that God didn’t want the people in the northern kingdom of Israel to suffer, so he used Jonah to help Jeroboam so that the people would be okay.

All of that is setup for Jonah.  Jonah is an average man who’s life at this stage is a mixture of good an bad. 

Does that sound familiar?  

His is the life that most of us have the possibility of leading. We're people that have a mix of good and bad. Then Jonah struggles with what to do.  He has success, but how does he follow that up? This should also feel familiar.

What does he do when he is working for a King that God supported only to help the people?

How does he deal with things when they all of a sudden don’t go according to his plan or how he thinks they should go?

We’ve heard about the story of Jonah, but the only one we tell about him is getting swallowed by a big fish for three days. In reality, Jonah is us.  We don’t ever really find out how his story ends, but that’s okay, because its up to us to write the ending of his story.

And as we’ll see later in the series, that ending becomes an important part of our faith formation throughout the Gospels.

The Book of Jonah opens up with a command from God to Jonah telling him to go the Nineveh and preach hellfire and damnation.

Before we go any farther, a question.

How far would you go?

How far would you go to get away from a problem?  How about a small problem? As they get bigger, how far would you go?

Let’s say Jonah is in the middle of the map.  God tells him to go to Nineveh. These aren't exact locations, but the map us used as a reference for us (in distances we can understand) about how far Jonah was going to go.

Jonah says no to God, and goes to Tarshish instead.  In Jonah's world, he was going as far from Nineveh as he could get.  He was putting an entire world's worth of distance between him and where God wanted him to go.

He wasn’t going to stick around for this.  He didn’t want to go to Nineveh.  He didn’t want to preach hellfire and damnation. He’d had his one big moment in the spotlight, his fifteen minutes of fame.  He didn’t want to go any farther.

He knew, I think on some level, that he was only an average man, and this was a more than average mission God was sending him on.

He wants to be the Run Away Prophet more than he wants to go to Nineveh.

And he’s not without merit in this.  From our Christian tradition, we have a strong belief in evangelism, even if we aren’t always great at it.  We know that is a part of what we are supposed to do.  

But the Israelites didn’t have that.  They were as much nation as religion, and you didn’t just go and invite people to immigrate into your religion like that, because they aren’t going to be the same nation as you.

Especially Nineveh, which was the capital of the Assyrian empire.  They were mean, nasty, awful, evil people, and God was calling on Jonah to go be an evangelist to a gentile people, who aren't like him and his nation. Worse yet, he wasn’t even really going to be converting them, just telling them that God is going to destroy them.

There is a reason why Jonah runs to the opposite side of the known world.  He’s afraid, deathly afraid of what will happen to him, this average guy who is now in a situation far bigger than him.

Then things seem to get worse.

Jonah then gets swallowed by a big fish, but the truth is, that sometimes we need a big fish.  It’s why we tell Jonah’s story.  Because we all need time to get our heads together, to find space to figure things out.

Why does God send a big fish after a guy who was running away from him?  It’s not punishment, or because God is angry with him.  It’s because Jonah needed time.  He needed time to clear his head and figure out what to do so he could take his next step.

Jonah doesn’t get the “happily ever after” sort of ending either.  What he gets is the next step.  Jonah ends after chapter 4 on something of a cliff hanger.  It's like season one ended, but season two never got picked up. What he gets is the chance to go one more step farther than we was before.  

He’s still struggling with what God is doing, but he’s farther on his own journey now.

And what we see later is a more complete picture of the Kingdom of God.  It’s why this story is told in the Gospels.  Through Jesus Christ, God’s kingdom is revealed to us in a way that it wasn’t before. 

It isn’t done through a grand vision that shows us a better world, but it’s done through repentance and baptism.  The things we need that keep us from taking the next step.

This is what we’ll see next week.  Because Jonah was still struggling, even after he won, because he hadn’t really dealt with his own problems.

The Kingdom of God is revealed to us, not with a great general at the head of an invincible army, but through a humble teacher, that through his life, death, and resurrection, we learn is the Son of God who gives us the ability to do what Jonah couldn’t do at the start.

This is our hope as people of faith. God won’t send us a whale so that we can clear our heads. God has already sent us his Son. 

Will you trust and let him lead? Our response won’t only change our lives, but it will change the lives of all those around us. Go out this week, skip the big fish, and know that even for average people, God is calling to us. Amen.