Sermon 1st June 2014

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Trevor Tayleur, continues out look and the Minor Prophets. The reading is from Jonah 4: 1-11

Jonah

Ezra. Nehemiah. Hosea. As Cameron pointed out four weeks ago, at the start of our current sermon series, many of the Minor Prophets we’re looking at are hardly household names. But today’s prophet, Jonah, comes into a different category. His story is actually quite well known.

God ordered Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh to prophesy against it "because its wickedness has come up before me" [verse 2]. But Jonah, scared at the prospect, runs away from the Lord by going to Jaffa and sailing to Tarshish, in the opposite direction. A huge storm arises and the sailors realise that it is no ordinary storm, so they cast lots and find out that Jonah is to blame. Jonah admits this and states that if they throw him overboard, the storm will cease. The sailors try to dump as much cargo as possible before giving up, but in the end feel forced to throw him overboard, at which point the sea calms.

The sailors then offer sacrifices to God. But that’s not the end of Jonah. God miraculously saves him by sending a large fish, traditionally thought to be a whale, to swallow him. While inside the great fish, Jonah prays fervently to God and God commands the fish to vomit Jonah onto dry land.

This time Jonah obeys God’s commands to visit Nineveh and to prophesy to its inhabitants. He enters the city, crying "In forty days Nineveh shall be overthrown". The people of Nineveh believe his prophesy and repent, so God spares the great city. And Jonah goes home praising God for what has happened. Well, actually, that last bit didn’t happen – as you will know from our first reading. Instead, Jonah was very cross and grumpy because God had spared Nineveh.

So, what can we learn from Jonah? The lesson from Jonah that many sermons proclaim is that you can’t run away from God. If God tells you to do something, it’s a good idea to do it, even if it seems very scary. And indeed, obedience is one of the lessons of Jonah, but it’s not the one I’m going to focus on today. Instead I’m going to look at three main themes –

·      God’s compassion;

·      Jonah’s anger, and

·      Our answer to the question that God asks at the end of verse 11; “And should I not have concern for the great city…?”

  

But before I go any further, let’s have a look at the context, as we have with the other Minor Prophets. The scholars are by no means unanimous in their views, but it is generally thought that Jonah was a prophet from the Northern Kingdom active in the eight century BC. Now, as Cameron explained at the start of our series on the Minor Prophets, the Northern Kingdom was wiped out for all time by the Assyrians in 720 BC. After that date, the events described in the Old Testament relate mainly to the Southern Kingdom. Jonah was active a few decades before the fall of the Northern Kingdom, and Nineveh was an Assyrian city. So although the events in Jonah occurred well before the Assyrians overran the Northern Kingdom, the Israelites would have regarded the Assyrians as their enemies, and the feelings would have been mutual. It is no surprise therefore that Jonah was reluctant to go and prophesy to the Ninevites. I think he would have found it very difficult to obtain travel insurance for his trip to Nineveh.  The Ninevites were unlikely to welcome an Israelite prophet with open arms; God was asking Jonah to go on a dangerous mission. And why? Because of compassion. God had compassion for the city of Nineveh.

In Jonah Chapter 4 we read about the confrontation between Jonah and God, and one of Jonah’s complaints is that God is compassionate! In verse 2 he says, “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 highlights something that we see time and time and time again in the Bible – that God is kind, God is compassionate and God is slow to anger. So, what does it mean to be merciful and compassionate? It means that you see the needs of those around you; you see their social needs; you see their spiritual needs and you see their physical, psychological and emotional needs. And you don’t just see those needs. You are so moved by them that you do something about them.

The compassion and mercy of God – they are the aspects of his nature that move him to alleviate suffering and misery. God’s compassion and mercy are present throughout the Bible. Perhaps the verse that sums up God’s compassion best is John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” The world has turned against God, yet despite the world’s rebellion, God sent his Son to die for us. He sent his Son because he is moved by compassion for us.

And the Gospels are full of examples of Jesus’ compassion. Jesus was moved by compassion when he saw people in need, and he was stirred into action. He raised a widow’s son from the dead because he was moved by compassion. He healed lepers, who were complete outcasts, because he was moved by compassion. He had compassion on the people because they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he taught them and he fed them, as the story of the feeding of the 5,000 records. And ultimately he died on the Cross because he was moved by compassion for a lost humanity. It is through God’s compassion that we can enter into a relationship with him.

At the start of this series, Cameron explained that one of our aims is to make sure that we have learned the lessons we think we have learned in getting to where we are. Well, one lesson is that compassion is at the heart of God and if we admit our need, we can enter into a relationship with him. If God were not compassionate, there’s no way we could enter into a relationship with him. And that’s a lesson that Jonah hadn’t learned. And that brings us on to our second part – Jonah’s anger.

The primary job of a prophet is to preach and teach in such a way that those listening to the message repent and run back to God. Now many prophets, through no fault of their own, were rejected by the people, but their aim was to bring people back to God. You would have thought that Jonah couldn’t have had a better day, because he had got a wicked and corrupt city of 120,000 plus people to turn around and come to God.  You would have thought that he would been rejoicing with the people of the city, that they had repented and God had relented from totally destroying them. But where do you find him?

You find him alone, sulking outside the city gates, waiting to see what would happen to the city. Perhaps even then he was hoping that God would change his mind and destroy the city. Jonah is angry, very angry with God, so angry that he says that he wishes he were dead. And why was he angry? He was angry because of God’s mercy and compassion. The compassion and mercy of God caused him to snap, to lose it. It’s as if he were saying,   “This is just not fair. These people are pagans; these people are sinners; they are the enemies of Israel. They are the most morally corrupt people on the planet, yet you’ve forgiven them!” Something about the compassion of God made him snap. But why? What was it about the compassion of God that sent him over the edge? When he saw the compassion of God towards these people, these pagans, it threatened his identity. If God could show compassion to these people, Jonah wanted out.

Now, before we’re too critical of Jonah, let’s pause a moment. Who is Jonah? The initial hearers of the story would have been Israelites. Jonah would have been their man on the scene, their representative in the story. Jonah is a believer, burned up and angry that God has forgiven the Ninevites. The questions that God asks Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry?” and “Why should I not care for the great city of Nineveh?” are questions that God is asking those who hear the story. The story asks its hearers:  Do you recognise Jonah in yourself? Do you detect in yourself the Jonah syndrome?

Jonah was, I suspect, more like us than we may care to believe. He was a good religious person; he was a good moral person and he worshipped regularly; he did it all. And yet beneath all this veneer was the misunderstanding that God loves me because I am good, God will reward me because I am good. The people who disobey God will get their just deserts, but God will bless those of us who follow the rules. But God comes along and completely up-ends that view. In effect he says, “I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy, I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. If you build your life on the belief that I will love you because you are good and that I will bless you because you do the right things and deserve it, you’ve got it wrong.”

The point that Jonah had missed is that everyone needs mercy, everyone needs compassion. You can detect the Jonah syndrome in some of the parables that Jesus told, in particular the Prodigal Son. In that parable the younger son asked his father for his inheritance, left home and wasted all his money. But despite all this, when he realised his folly and returned home, his father rushed out and welcomed him with open arms. The father threw a great party to celebrate his son’s homecoming, but the older brother would have no part of it. He had been the good, obedient son and was bitter at the welcome his prodigal younger brother had received. He too, showed signs of the Jonah syndrome.

In the parable of the Prodigal Son, Jesus was speaking directly to the Pharisees, the religious leaders who considered themselves morally upright. Like Jonah, they failed to see that they needed God’s mercy and compassion. Jonah waited outside the city gate, still hoping that God would destroy Nineveh. But Jesus, unlike Jonah, went outside the city gate to be condemned and to die for us. Jesus, the Son of God, came down and gave up everything for us. He was rich, but for our sakes he became poor.

To the extent that we can see the mercy and compassion of Jesus Christ, on the Cross, it will free us from the Jonah syndrome – the need to feel superior to the people around us, because we will have the love and compassion of God in our lives. And we receive God’s mercy and compassion, not because we are good and moral people, but because we admit that we need God’s mercy and compassion. We are all beggars; we are all sinners; we all need God’s love.

In Jonah we have seen on the one hand the compassion of God and on the other the anger of Jonah. Jonah based his identity on his own righteousness, and he couldn’t cope with God’s mercy and compassion for the Ninevites. Do we suffer from the Jonah syndrome? Or have we learnt the lesson that our relationship with God is based on his mercy and compassion.

As Cameron said four weeks ago, the second aim of this series is asking what God is saying to us about where we go from here. So where do we go from here? A good way of answering that question is by answering God’s question to Jonah, “And should I not have concern for the great city…?”

Of course, God was referring to Nineveh, but we too live in a great city, a great city of more than 8 million people, compared to Nineveh’s 120,000. And so, should we not have concern and compassion for the great city of London? Compassion is at the heart of the Gospel message.  Jesus associated with the lepers, the prostitutes, the tax collectors – people who were written off as sinners. The Kingdom of God is based on compassion, mercy, grace, forgiveness and healing. Jonah was bothered about the leafy plant that God had provided to shelter him from the heat; he was upset when it died! “Shouldn’t we love the great city?” God in effect says to Jonah, “because people are far more important than plants.”

How can we show concern for our great city of more than 8 million? The task seems huge, but as an old Chinese proverb says, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Individually we can’t do everything, but working together we can do a lot. Already much is going on in our parish. We have a group that regular visits Brixton Prison; members of our church family are involved in the Herne Hill Bereavement Group; we have two play groups; we have our Discovery group looking at ways to bring Jesus to the heart of our community more effectively. But there is more we could be doing. We have a wonderful refurbished church which gives us tremendous opportunities for serving our community. If you’re not sure what you can do, at the back of the church you can find a new “Opportunities to Serve” booklet.

It’s very easy to become cynical and hopeless, but the story of Jonah urges us to reach out to our city. If we really understand our own lostness and our own need for mercy and compassion, we will realise that no-one is beyond God’s love. To the degree we get that and move out to the city in compassion, we shall help to make Jesus’ words come true, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” (Luke 6:20)

Let’s pray. Help us as individuals and as a community to incorporate and see the mercy of God in our lives, so that we may serve this great city of London with the love and compassion of Christ.

In Jesus’ name.

Amen.                                           

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[i] 1 June 2014