Jonah: Unexpected Success

          Today we continue our sermon series on the book of Jonah. Last time we spoke of the great evil and violence of Nineveh, Jonah’s desire to thus flee far away from having to go and be a prophet there, and the resulting storm that caused Jonah to be thrown overboard and swallowed up by a whale. And now Jonah has been spit up by the whale onto dry land. And Jonah is given a second chance. The word of God comes to Jonah calling him to go to Nineveh a second time, and this time he obeys.

But my hunch is that he is still a little halfhearted about this mission to which he has been called. Because look at what message Jonah goes to proclaim to them: he says, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” As far as I can tell Jonah is doing the bare minimum that he can do to still plausibly claim to God that he’s fulfilling his prophetic role in this city. Because I’ve never preached a sermon so short in my life. If I were Jonah I’d be going into great detail about the evil Nineveh has done and why it is so bad, I’d be telling them all about God and why He is deserving of our obedience, and most of all I’d be telling them all about the grace and mercy of God. I’d be saying, if you repent and beg for mercy, God might just relent from punishing you.

            But Jonah doesn’t get into any of this. He doesn’t tell the Ninevites what they’ve done wrong or mention any possibility of grace. All he says is that in 40 days the city will face judgment. I think Jonah is doing the bare minimum possible because he doesn’t really want to succeed in his prophetic mission. What he really wants is for the Ninevites to face judgment and be punished for all their evil. So, he gives the world’s worst sermon, thinking that that will ensure that nobody listens and they will all reap what they’ve sown.

            And perhaps Jonah thinks, “Why should I waste time crafting a persuasive prophetic message anyways? There’s no way anyone will listen… If their violence was not halted by the screams and cries for mercy of those they conquered and deported, if that did not soften their hearts, then what could?” He must have thought, “Surely their hearts are as hard as Pharaoh’s, and I’ll have no more luck than Moses did when he asked Pharaoh to let God’s people go.”

            But, after giving the world’s worst sermon, all of a sudden unexpected success happens. The text details to us that Nineveh was a big city. Jonah was going to have to walk around for 3 straight days to be able to spread his message to all parts of the city. But no sooner than he had walked just one day proclaiming his message and all of Nineveh was already repenting and believing in God. He didn’t even have to complete his 3-day journey. After just 1 day his message must’ve spread like wildfire as those within the town shared it with their friends and it spread like gossip until news even reached the king. And all of Nineveh started fasting, and putting on sackcloth; from the king himself down to even the animals, they all were repenting in this way, holding out hope that their prayers and their relenting of their evil ways would cause God to have mercy on them and no punishment would be brought upon their city. 

This is absolutely incredible. I think it would have been an unqualified success if Jonah had just found a few righteous people in the town to be able to save from the coming calamity. But for the entire city from great to small to all be humbling themselves to listen to the halfhearted message of this foreign prophet, to believe in his God, and to repent, that is simply unheard of. I mean the prophets of God were often the subjects of scorn and ridicule even in Israel, even when ministering to the people of God. But this Gentile nation known throughout the ancient world for their atrocities was going to be more receptive to God’s message than God’s own chosen people! This wild phenomenon reminds me of Jesus’ words in which Jesus told the chief priests that the tax collectors and prostitutes would enter the kingdom of God ahead of them. Sometimes it is the most unexpected people who are most eager for God’s mercy. Sometimes it is those who are most wicked, who most understand their great need for grace.

            But Jonah’s unexpected success from his half-baked sermon, I think it can teach us that sometimes the success of a prophet has far less to do with how well-crafted their message is, and far more to do with God choosing to be at work in the message. For example, preachers often talk about how it is sometimes the sermons that they feel least confident in that end up touching people the most. As preachers, we can sow the seed of God’s word, but it is God alone who can give the growth. This means that as much as I labor diligently to prepare the best sermons I possibly can, sometimes more important than anything I say in a message, is my prayers before a message that God would use my words powerfully. The most eloquent message in the world cannot change a single hard heart if God is not there softening the soul.

Well how does Jonah respond to the unexpected success he has in Nineveh? How does Jonah respond to being able to lead a whole city into repentance and belief and to help save the lives of 120,000 people? We would expect Jonah to be on cloud 9, feeling really good about himself. I mean, you know that feeling in sports when in a very important playoff game, a person sinks the buzzer beater shot to win the game, and they sort of let out this roar of excitement, maybe they dance a little because they’re really feeling themselves. That’s what Jonah should be feeling! He did the seemingly impossible. Right when the clock was running out and Nineveh was about to face judgment, he saved them!

But as we move into chapter 4 it tells us that Jonah responded in the exact opposite way. Jonah was not on cloud 9, Jonah was very displeased and very angry that God had mercy on the Ninevites after they repented. Because Jonah never hoped to be successful, Jonah never wanted the Ninevites to live and be spared, Jonah wanted them to be punished and die. And even though Jonah has already heard from God that God had relented and was no longer going to bring calamity upon them, Jonah nevertheless set up camp outside the city to sit and wait and see what would happen to the city. He was holding out hope perhaps that day number 40 would come, and Nineveh would in fact be overthrown, or that maybe, their repentance was merely an insincere show and that they would quickly revert to wickedness and thus face punishment after all.

Jonah was so angry about Nineveh not facing punishment that it says that he was angry enough to die. It’s unclear why he would be so angry as to no longer want to live. But I think it’s mostly that Jonah didn’t want to have to share a world with people he deemed as evil as the Ninevites. He wanted a world of swift justice where evildoers are punished and the righteous rewarded. I think we can sympathize with that dream a little. I think we can all think of someone in history or in our lives who has done such bad things that we recoil at the thought that even they might be shown mercy. Mercy for them!? Do you know what they did!? All of us, like Jonah, might sometimes despair when God seems to allow things to happen in this world that we think we would never allow if we were God. Sometimes it feels like it’s not worth living in the world if it’s a world without justice.

But Jonah, in wanting a world of swift and merciless justice, he of course forgot that he too was a recipient of the mercy of God. Were it not for God’s mercy, Jonah, as a result of his disobedience, would have drowned from the storm or died in the belly of a whale.

Sometimes we struggle to make the leap where we are able to offer the same mercy we want for ourselves to other people. And often we justify it by saying things like, well, our sins were small sins, not like theirs. You see, Jonah probably thought, “I did disobey, but it was an incredibly difficult thing God called me to do, who would’ve obeyed that? And it’s not like I actively hurt anyone... Look at the Ninevites, they tortured people, they slaughtered people!” And Jonah was probably right, what they did was worse, but Jonah, just like the Ninevites, had broken God’s holy laws, they had all disrespected the same holy God who deserved unending praise and obedience. They had all sinned, they all needed mercy. And if it is to God’s glory to forgive a small sin, is it not also to God’s glory to forgive a big sin?

The abundant mercy that we have received from God in our own lives should cause us to be abundantly merciful to others. But so often we want mercy for me, but not for thee. We come up with all sorts of reasons of why we deserve second chances, of how our sins weren’t quite as bad as the sins of others, as how our sins were really just a momentary lapse into temptation, but they don’t reflect the core of who we are. After all, we think, we’re mostly good people. But for others, we assume that they’ll never change, that if you give them a second chance they’ll abuse it, that they’re so clearly wicked that they must be punished severely.

The second chance with the storm and the whale should have been enough to teach Jonah mercy. But God gives Jonah another lesson, this time with the shade of a bush, of a bush that God causes to grow up from the dirt. And Jonah very much enjoyed the shade from the bush. Assyria is in what is modern day Iraq. And to give an example of how hot it gets in Iraq, the average high is above 100 degrees for 6 months out of the year. So you can imagine how nice shade would be. But then God appoints a worm to eat the bush and take away the shade. And Jonah again grows very angry, angry enough to die. So God cross examines Jonah about his anger. You are angry about this bush, and perhaps rightfully so, even though this bush you did not grow or labor for, even though this bush existed only for 1 day. If you have such great concern for this bush, should I not have greater concern for the 120,000 people of Nineveh, the people that I created and have sustained, should I have not also concern for the animals in the city? Surely they are of greater importance than one small bush. 

When I think of how important that shade was to Jonah, I think of how much more important humans are to God. Each human is a beloved child of God. Each human is a masterpiece that God is proud to have created, and a being that God delights in. Humans do so much more than fulfill certain functions like providing shade; they have hopes and dreams, they have personalities. No wonder God seeks every way possible to keep us from facing punishment but to instead find ways for us to experience life. No wonder God is so merciful.

But the lesson of the shade bush, was also a lesson in our selective anger. We pick and choose what we care most about. Jonah cared more about a shade bush than he did about a hundred and twenty thousand lives. Sometimes what we choose to prioritize with our emotions may not actually reflect the most pressing issue of the day. Sometimes we make mountains out of molehills while forgetting what things are actually most important to God: things like mercy, justice, and love. This doesn’t mean we should not care at all about smaller things, but we must make sure we have the big things in place if we’re going to nitpick smaller things.

In the end, the story of Jonah flips a lot of our expectations on their head. The whole story we are thinking about just how lost and depraved the Ninevites are, and yet, by the end, it seems like it is Jonah, the prophet of God who is truly lost. The Ninevites repent and find mercy, and yet Jonah is seemingly unable to learn how to be merciful. When are we like Jonah? When are we so focused on the sins of other people that we don’t take a close enough look at our own sin? Are their certain people who we think are beyond redemption? Who do we need to widen our circle of empathy and mercy to include?

The book of Jonah ends on a cliffhanger of sorts. It never says if Jonah finally learned his lesson or not. But this is done intentionally. Because the most pressing question is not, “Did Jonah learn his lesson?” The most pressing question is “Will we learn Jonah’s lesson?” Will we learn the mercy that Jonah so misunderstood?

            Lord, teach us mercy. And we pray that even in our own day and age, your gospel might yield massive unexpected success in places where we thought the soil the rockiest. Lord, soften the hearts of the most wicked among us, and show us that your mercy is wide enough that any of us can be saved if we but repent and believe.