Appointments
Jonah 4
We know Jonah, right? He’s the prophet who got swallowed by a whale and after three days the whale threw him up on the shore. Actually, in the story, it’s not a whale exactly but a “Leviathan,” a mythical sea beast that embodied everything ancient people feared about the seas—the unknown, the hidden depths, the belief that the sea was the edge of chaos and a boat could sail off into space, the fact that it was uncontrollable, and even, from an ancient perspective, kind of a Demi-God, and God’s enemy.
The reason Jonah got swallowed by a whale, remember, was that Jonah had an appointment that he didn’t want to keep. We’ve had those kinds of appointments—an unpleasant doctor’s visit we want to avoid—a meeting that we know isn’t going to go our way—the teacher who we know will rip apart our classwork—the wedding of a former girlfriend or boyfriend—a dread meeting with a lawyer or even a judge.
Jonah had an appointment with the city of Nineveh, in the land of Assyria, modern day Iraq and Iran—Israel’s enemies. You can see why he wouldn’t want to keep that appointment. Even today an appointment between Israel and Iran is rarely kept. It’s an appointment that could easily turn deadly. Today that appointment is rarely even made.
But God made that appointment for Jonah. And Jonah discovers that God expects him to keep it.
So while Jonah is attempting to flee from God on the sea—remember, the sea was God’s enemy—GOD TAKES CONTROL OF THE SEA. As easily as riding a tricycle. Then God takes control of Leviathan and changes Leviathan’s diet to include Judean Prophet. Then God miraculously keeps Jonah alive in Leviathan’s stomach until he’s expelled onto the beach.
The point of all this? You are fearful of your enemies, Jonah. Apparently you don’t believe God can overcome your enemies. But God can control the Sea! God can control Leviathan! So certainly God can protect you from your enemies. So keep your appointment: GO TO NINEVEH!
Well, the good news from Jonah’s perspective, at least, is that the all-powerful God who stirs the oceans like a tempest in a teacup is on his side, so he mans up and goes to Nineveh and proclaims this message from his close personal friend, God, to the enemies of God: Yet forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed! It must have given him enormous satisfaction, as a proud nationalist, backed up by the power of the Lord of Heaven and Earth, to shout this message in the face of his—I mean God’s—enemies.
And then, amazingly, Good news! Nineveh repents! The king IN PERSON puts on sackcloth and ashes, the traditional signs of grief and repentance, and decrees that the whole nation do so; for as he says: “Who knows, God may yet repent and turn from His fierce anger, so that we perish not” (3: 9).
And that’s what God does. God forgets His appointment to destroy Nineveh. God, says the Bible, REPENTS of the evil He said He would do to them.
So Good News, right? God acts in love and forgiveness and saves those who were once God’s enemies, but are now God’s friends. It’s an amazing moment of grace—God changes God’s mind because humans change their minds. Instead of an appointment with destruction, the Ninevites end up with an appointment with the grace of God. Everyone’s happy, right?
Wrong. Not Jonah. It offends Jonah. Jonah is offended by God’s grace. It offends Jonah’s theology—God should be unchanging!
It offends Jonah’s belief that God chooses sides, that God is exclusively his nation’s God, and no one else’s.
It offends Jonah’s sense of integrity. By gum, I went to Nineveh and said that God will destroy Nineveh because I thought it was true, and I’m not going to let the facts get in my way—I still believe it’s true!
It offends Jonah that God isn’t always ready to press the nuclear button.
“That’s why I ran away in the first place!” Jonah says while stamping his feet and pouting. “I knew that thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and repentest of evil!”
He’s angry, you see, because God doesn’t keep His promises. God expected Jonah to keep an appointment—but now God won’t keep His appointment. Makes sense right? You want your God to be consistent!
Except that God broke His promise out of love, and grace, and forgiveness. God changed His mind out of love, and grace, and forgiveness. And wouldn’t you prefer a God who would choose mercy over consistency?
So Jonah sets himself up a nice lounge chair on a hill and stubbornly waits, arms crossed and chin tucked against his chest, for God to destroy Nineveh, like He first said He would, and now says He wouldn’t. And of course, it’s the desert, and Jonah starts to get hot. So God APPOINTS a tree, whose job it is to grow a gourd, who job it is to give Jonah shade. And Jonah is grateful for the tree—until God APPOINTS a worm to eat the gourd that is shading Jonah. Then God APPOINTS “a sultry east wind, and the sun beat upon his head that he might faint,” and he wishes he were dead.
And God says, “You pity the gourd; and should I not pity Nineveh and its people, and for goodness’ sake even its animals more than you pity a gourd?”
We don’t know how Jonah answers. The story ends there, and here’s why: because it’s not Jonah who answers the question—it’s us. Do we love things more than we love people? Do we love being right more than we love being merciful? Are we so sure that God is on our side that we can’t even imagine a God who is merciful to those we consider God’s—and our—enemies? Are we so sure that God hates who we hate? What if God doesn’t? And by the way—God most certainly doesn’t!
This is a story about appointments. God made an appointment to destroy Nineveh. God appointed Jonah to go preach to Nineveh. God appointed a Leviathan to swallow Jonah, a tree to grow behind Jonah, a worm to eat the gourd, and a sultry east wind to make Jonah miserable. These things God appointed to do God’s will and they could not resist God’s will—they couldn’t even imagine resisting God’s will. The Leviathan swallowed, the tree grew, the worm ate, the wind blew. God made them do it.
But in this story there were two things God didn’t make do what God wanted. The people of Nineveh—and Jonah. God influenced the things around them in hopes of influencing their decisions, but ultimately God didn’t make them do anything. They made choices. Even after being swallowed by the Leviathan, Jonah had the ability to say “no”—and in fact, he ultimately does.
This is a story about free will, and about how much God is willing to bend in order to convince us to change our ways, and about how our decisions can even, incredibly, change God’s mind. The reason for that is simple: it’s because at the core of God’s nature is love, forgiveness, mercy, and grace. That never changes—it’s just the appointments that surround it change. So today, it’s not the Ninevites that we think God hates—but maybe it’s gays and lesbians, or maybe it’s protestors, or maybe it’s police officers, or maybe it’s the One Per Cent, or maybe it’s Muslims, or Jews, or maybe it’s democrats, or maybe it’s republicans.
Or maybe, awfully, it’s someone like you—and you can’t believe God would actually love anyone like you. Someone told you somewhere that the Bible says God hates people like you. And you know, if it’s written in the Bible that God hates it when you mix wool with linen, which it is, then it’s fixed forever, and it never changes.
Don’t be ridiculous. It’s the nature of God that never changes. All the appointments, all these things we imagine limit God to making only certain decisions—none of that matters. It’s grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love that matter to God. All the rest are just appointments. Whether they are Leviathans or whether they are worms, they are completely subject to the will of God, and that will is grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love. And that, that is what never changes.
The choice—the only real choice—is ours. Do we believe that grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love are the true nature of God—that they are so powerful that they can change EVERYTHING, even the creatures of our nightmares, even the enemies of our very souls, even our own flawed natures? That grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love can cancel humanity’s self-made appointments with despair, enmity and perhaps even destruction?
That’s the choice we each have—and all of humanity has. We must either believe in and practice God’s grace, mercy, forgiveness, and love–or keep that dread appointment.
Let’s pray the Jonah can change his mind.