Hello, fellow pilgrims. This week, I’d like to talk about the Old Testament reading in Track 2 of our lectionary. We follow Track 1 during our Sunday worship services, so you won’t see this reading in your bulletin. But it is an important reading—a reminder of how God calls us to action and how we sometimes don’t hear God’s call or we hear it and run away from it. It is the story of Jonah. We often hear it titled “Jonah and the Whale” or “Jonah and the Big Fish.” But perhaps a more fitting title might be “Compassion and Mercy.” It is a story about how much God values all that God created, from plants to humans—every human. In the story, the people of Nineveh had strayed so far from God that they began to worship themselves, in a sense—false gods. They worshipped and boasted about their conquests and their riches, their power and their influence, and the brutality they used to acquire those things. Their false gods were arrogance, greed, gluttony, and corruption (both spiritual and socioeconomical). It was a city of moral decay, and it was the renowned capital of the Assyrian Empire—highly influential and greatly feared. Nineveh was a prime example of how deeply excessive power and prosperity can harm a society and how it can perseverate across generations and regions. Not to say that power and prosperity are inherently bad, because they aren’t. But they carry immense responsibility and can be abused, as we have all witnessed through both scripture and our lives.
God, loving all creatures and hoping for repentance and true reconciliation (return to right relationship with God), called Jonah to go to the people of Nineveh and encourage them to change their ways—to turn back toward God—and transform their arrogance into humility, their greed into generosity, their brutality into kindness and compassion, and their overindulgence into faithful discipline. Our scripture tells us that Jonah was asked to warn them to change their ways or be destroyed.
Jonah did not like that idea. Jonah (presuming to take the power of judgement away from God and declare it for himself), chose to ignore God’s call. Not only that, he RAN away from God as far as he could go—to the other end of the world he knew—to Tarshish. That would be like us running to China (the other side of the world).
It would also be like us closing our hearts to God’s call.
God calls us constantly. And the more urgent the call, the more persistent God’s call. Sometimes we hear it right away, sometimes it takes us a lot longer. And sometimes we don’t like what we hear and we run away from it. We drown it out with our own human desires for what we want or the way WE think things ought to be handled. The choice to ignore it can be motivated by a number of factors including arrogance, judgement (as in Jonah’s case), or fear (as in many of our own situations). In the story, Jonah runs and hides from God and what God called him to do. But God is everywhere and is way more persistent than any of us could ever be. Just think about all of the things God has put up with since we were first created. Talk about Love and Compassion!
The message through the story of Jonah and the people of Nineveh is as timeless as it is mysterious and awesome—awesome in the truest sense of the word. We are filled with awe as the Love and Compassion of God for God’s creatures—for us. The depth of God’s love and compassion for us, and God’s openness to forgiving us our sins is immense. WE are the people of Nineveh, and WE are Jonah. And God our Creator, our Redeemer, our Breath of Life, is an awesome God who loves us and forgives us. All we have to do is ask! THAT is Good News.
You are beautiful and Beloved,
Angela+