Jonah and the Whale 6. Customer Service Complaints About God's Compassion.

You only understand Jonah if you’ve learned to hate, if life experience has educated you in heartfelt, instinctive, focused and justified hostility.

And so you only understand Jonah’s God if you are prepared to unlearn hatred, and by a painful inner re-orientation, accept that God is not in the hate business. Jonah hated Nineveh – ‘the great city’ famed for terrorist atrocities, centre of a brutal, organised, military machine – merciless, meticulous, arrogant, conqueror and oppressor of Israel.

The equivalent today is hard to imagine – but where there is religious hatred, ancient tribal enmities, and people whose suffering and oppression have educated them into hatred, there we come near to the same mindset – that wants to obliterate the enemy. The combination of terror and anger, of hatred and hopelessness, produces that lethal cocktail we call terrorism – and it flourishes in a world sold on consumerism, militarism and the polarisation of extremes, two poles arcing in violence

Jonah stands for those who want to see power get what it deserves; those who pray that cruelty and violence will get its payback. So you’d think that a word from the Lord to preach against the wickedness of the great city would have Jonah book a first class overnight camel to be the first to tell Nineveh “You’ve had it!” God’s call could be understood as permission to hate, time to ridicule and gloat, and celebrate the anguish of the enemy.

So why did Jonah run in the exact opposite direction? Why miss out on the vengeance he’d prayed for? Why not takes his hate and use it to make him an eloquent herald of doom? Instead, “But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. (1.)

Jonah’s bizarre behaviour only makes sense when you come to Jonah’s angry and exasperated prayer once Nineveh repents and the Lord relents! “Jonah prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”

 Jonah isn’t disobedient – he’s in denial. It isn’t that he doesn’t believe enough in God – he believes too much. He knows too well, his theology of God is so true it’s a liability. He runs in the opposite direction because he senses God is going to do the opposite of what Jonah wants. There’s a million to one chance that Nineveh will repent – and if that happens, there isn’t one chance in a million that God won’t be merciful. It’s an absolute certainty that God would be slow to anger and abounding in love.

And that isn’t fair. That is theologically unacceptable. Abounding in love, slow to anger, with Nineveh? That is absolutely scandalous! That a vast city built on the blood and tears of the conquered should turn from their wickedness and find mercy shows there is no justice in the universe. Jonah prays his anger. The very thing he believes most about God (compassion) is getting in the way of the very thing he wants most from God (punishment). His faith, The God he believes in, is frustrating his sense of justice. So Jonah won’t take that million to one chance. God, of course, has other plans.

And as the story unfolds it isn’t that Jonah will, learn a new theology of God – he will learn the hard way that a theology of grace and mercy forces a re-think about the deepest, hardest, most heart-breaking, experiences of his life.

He’ll learn about God’s generosity and legitimate human grievances; he’ll learn that mercy is greater than murder; that compassion not cruelty is God’s way; all that and more he’ll learn. As we read this story today it also touches on some of the most important things we will ever need to know - about ourselves, about God, about all those different others, human and animal, planetary and elemental, who share this planet with us – and about whom we should be concerned.

The story about Jonah doesn't set out to give us the right answers to our questions; it does something far more subversive. It givers us new questions that show us how little we understand the scandal of grace, how hard it is to have sympathy with the creative strategies of divine mercy, and how outrageously different is God's compassion from our expectations.

One further thought. When you have time, read the whole story - then these verses from a much longer hymn by F. W. Faber.

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
Like the wideness of the sea;
There’s a kindness in His justice,
Which is more than liberty.

There is grace enough for thousands
Of new worlds as great as this;
There is room for fresh creations
In that upper home of bliss.

For the love of God is broader
Than the measure of our mind;
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind.

It is God: His love looks mighty,
But is mightier than it seems;
’Tis our Father: and His fondness
Goes far out beyond our dreams.

But we make His love too narrow
By false limits of our own;
And we magnify His strictness
With a zeal He will not own.

 

Comments

[ANG ALMOND]

If our love were but more simple we should take him at his word. And our lives would be illumined by the presence of the Lord. Great hymn!!