JONAH 3:10-4:11

PSALM 145:1-8

PHILIPPIANS 1:21-27

MATTHEW 20:1-16

Sermon – 9/22/02

Last week we reflected on God’s vast forgiveness for us – and on how we are expected to then go out and forgive others or our forgiveness may be reduced to the level we give out – or canceled entirely!

Today’s Scriptures concentrate on God’s startling generosity towards others – including in ways we may think “isn’t fair” or even makes us angry!

The Gospel story, on the surface, is about a landowner who hires day laborers to bring in his harvest. He hires some laborers early in the morning and agrees with them for “the usual daily wage”. The landowner continues to hire more and more people throughout the day – including starting some of them just an hour before quitting time.

To the astonishment of all and the profound irritation of those who had worked all day, the landowner gave each laborer “the usual daily wage”.

Now before you say “there’s a union grievance here” or “call a meeting of the Chamber of Commerce or the Grange and bounce this ‘fruitcake’ out of the membership”, remember this is a parable, not a literal story.

The “land-owner” in this parable is God, and the “wage” he gives out “at the end of the day” I understand to be salvation at the end of each life or at The End of Time.

Ultimately, people either are saved or they aren’t, you can’t get a “double helping”. And it depends both on the people and especially on God’s overwhelming generosity. So those who are faithful servants of God throughout long lives of righteousness, generosity and love get the same “wage” – as those who do dramatic U-turns with their lives at the last minute before they die or the world ends.

Fair? No. Thank God.

God’s mercy and generosity are beyond human conceptions of fairness. Thank God – because we human beings are each tempted to want God’s mercy for ourselves – and God’s justice for everybody else.

Doesn’t work that way. Everyone gets mercy and justice both. And as the landowner says, sort of, if you don’t like it you can lump it.

God is merciful. Get used to it.

Which leads us to the really wonderful story of Jonah. Jonah’s story is often trivialized by people who only remember “something about somebody getting swallowed by a whale” and blow off the story as a fanciful and meaningless tale for children.

Yes, this is a story, like the Gospel parable, not to be taken literally, but nevertheless having great truth in it. And the whale – or “great fish” as it says in Hebrew – is a prop, not a crucial part, so if you say “I can’t listen to Jonah because I can’t believe in the whale”, fine. Then listen to the rest of the story – as perhaps you’ve never heard it.

The job of a prophet in ancient Israel was primarily to speak God’s word to people and secondly to predict what would happen in the future – usually, connected to whether or not the people listened to and obeyed God’s word.

In this story, God calls an otherwise unknown person named Jonah to preach to the people of Nineveh, imploring them to repent of their sins or else be punished severely by God.

Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, the rapacious scourge of the Ancient Near East, which totally destroyed the northern Israelite Kingdom in 727 B.C. and scared the living daylights out of the surviving Jews who were huddled around Jerusalem.

God asking an Israelite like Jonah to preach “repent and be saved” to Nineveh would be like God asking a Korean to preach “repent and be saved” to the people of Tokyo in 1945...or a Polish person to preach “repent and be saved” to Berlin in 1945.

The last thing Jonah wanted was for the Ninevites to have any chance to be saved. So instead of obeying God’s orders and going to Nineveh, he goes down to a seaport and buys a ticket on a ship going to Spain, the farthest place he can get a ticket to. Now, understand ancient Israelites were not ace ocean sailors or even ocean passengers; the average ancient Israelite had as much experience of and comfort with deep-water-sailing as a life-long resident of Kansas. Old Testament poetry is filled with fearful references to the ocean and chaos; the writers were petrified to go out of sight of land.

So for Jonah to buy a ticket from Israel to Spain was like someone with claustrophobia getting on a non-stop airline flight to Australia: it would take a lot of motivation to do this. Jonah really doesn’t want to obey God’s orders.

Once underway, the ship is beset by a storm, which leads the pagan sailors to pray to their gods – and to throw the cargo overboard in an effort to save the ship. Jonah confesses to them that he is trying to run away from God (a pretty silly idea indeed) and says that if they throw him overboard he’ll get what he deserves and they’ll be fine. They don’t want to do that because they’re good people, but finally they do – and as soon as Jonah is overboard the storm stops completely.

The pagan sailors decide that the God Jonah worships is the One True God and they all convert! Jonah is a successful evangelist despite his intentions.

This is where the “whale” comes in. Jonah spends three days in the belly of the “whale” where he sees the error of his ways and decides to obey God’s command. After he leaves a note for Geppetto, Jonah is spat out on dry land and walks to Nineveh.

With great vigor, Jonah marches up and down Nineveh declaring it will be destroyed by God unless its people repent. Then, rubbing his hands with anticipation, he climbs to a good view point outside the city, buys a bucket of popcorn and a soda and sits down to watch the show. Which he hopes will include lots of fire and brimstone, and the utter destruction of Nineveh.

By the way, does anyone know in what modern-day country Nineveh can be found?

Iraq.

Yet another example of the Bible being eerily contemporary, perhaps.

Anyway, a funny thing happens on the way to the utter destruction of Nineveh.

The whole city repents, from the King on down.

Never mind how unlikely this was in real life: the story-teller deliberately chooses the least likely candidate for repentance to demonstrate what God would do if such a city – or a similar person – repented.

Everyone in Nineveh repented in sackcloth and ashes, a¢ la Ash Wednesday. The King even ordered sackcloth to be put over the cows in case the cows had sinned.

God saw the genuineness of the repentance.

God forgave the people of Nineveh.

And Jonah was really ticked off, because he hadn’t.

So God had a plant grow up overnight to shade Jonah from the hot desert sun, which delighted him. Then God made the plant wither and die, which ticked off Jonah again.

For the conclusion of the story, let me quote directly from the text. “Then the Lord said (to Jonah), ‘You are concerned about the bush for 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 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?’”

God is merciful to those who sincerely repent.

We had better get used to it.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church