Jonah 3.1-10
In August 1960, not long before he was featured on the cover of Time Magazine, the renowned Swiss theologian Karl Barth met the still-more-famous American preacher Billy Graham while they both vacationed in the Valais region of Switzerland. According to letters Barth wrote to friends, their meeting— arranged by Barth’s son Markus— was a friendly one. “He’s a jolly good fellow,” Barth wrote of Graham, “with whom one can talk easily and openly; one has the impression that he is even capable of listening, which is not always the case with such trumpeters of the gospel.” Two weeks later, Barth had the same good impression of Billy Graham after they met for a second time at Barth’s home in Basel. It was during that second visit that Graham invited Barth to be a guest at the revival he would be preaching that night in the city.
Over 15,000 showed up at the St. Jacob Stadium. in downtown Basel. It was only an eighth the size of Nineveh but it was still a massive crowd. Hearing Billy Graham preach his message and witnessing his influence over the mass of young people, Karl Barth was not impressed. He was outraged. “I was quite horrified,” Barth wrote to his son.
Barth continued:
“Graham acted like a madman, and what he presented was certainly not the gospel. He preached the law, not a message to make one happy. He wanted to terrify people. Threats– they always make an impression. People would much rather be terrified than be pleased. The more one heats up hell for them, the more they come running. But even this success did not justify such preaching. It was illegitimate to make the gospel law or ‘to “push” it like it is an item for sale…We must leave the good God freedom to do his own work. What Graham presented was the gospel at gunpoint.”
In the end, God gets what God wants.
The son of Amittai’s sin is no match for the unthwartable will of God. Whether the LORD answers the self-deceived, self-absorbed petitions that Jonah prays from within the fish or whether the LORD ignores Jonah altogether and does what he intended all along, the text does not say. Regardless, the LORD of heaven and earth and sea speaks torah to the fish, and the creature obediently belches the obstinate prophet onto dry land— some five hundred miles from his destination. While he still reeks of whale vomit, the Word of the LORD comes to Jonah a second time.
As my teacher Robert Jenson reminds readers of the scriptures:
“When the Bible introduces prophecy with the locution, “The Word of the LORD came to…” it does not refer to a set of words provided to the prophet on one occasion and a different set provided on another occasion. The Word of the LORD is a single reality, that comes to and addresses the prophet. That is, this Word is a person. This Word, this person, the singular and constant reality that comes to the prophets, is none other than Jesus the Christ, whom the church knows to be the second triune person, the singular Logos of God. This personal Word comes to someone who is so opened to him by the Holy Spirit that the Word can speak not only to the prophet but from him.”
That is, the prophets do not merely repeat verbatim words the LORD has dictated to them to utter on his behalf; but rather, the words the prophets declare just are the LORD’s words by virtue of the Word coming to them.
This is why the scriptures do not specify the exact message the LORD imposes on Jonah, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” So conscripted by the Word, whatever words Jonah preaches to Nineveh will become the word of God for them. Like the diviner-for-hire, Balaam, who every time he opens his mouth to curse discovers blessings pour out instead, the one who speaks for God cannot speak against what God has chosen. The prophet’s mouth is no longer his own possession. The words Jonah speaks to Nineveh will be the LORD’s own word even if the son of Amittai selected those words. And the words will work the Word’s will even if it is at odds with what the prophet wants.
And the LORD hints at what he wants in his second summons of Jonah. Notice— back in Galilee, the Word of the LORD had dispatched the reluctant prophet “to call out against Nineveh on account of their evil.” But after the LORD delivers him from the whale’s digestive tract, he now imposes a slightly different call upon Jonah, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call to it the message I tell you.”
Against is now to.
And no longer does the LORD mention their evil.
Sodom and Gomorrah were great cities too. As a consequence, God rained down burning sulfur— brimstone— from the sky upon them. That Nineveh is a great city to God means her sins are significant. That their sins are sins against him, whether or not they worship him or call upon his NAME. But notice, on the way to Nineveh, already the Word of God speaks to Jonah of Nineveh’s sins in the past tense, “Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city.”
Her sins were exceedingly great.
And against is now to. Just so, Jonah ventures a day’s journey into Nineveh. Having been swallowed up by a whale, Jonah is now swallowed by the pagan city, surrounded by enemies. Technically the son of Amittai is finally obedient, but you can surmise from his brief, laconic sermon that the will of Jonah and the will of his LORD do not align. The words the prophet selects to say sound like a turn-or-burn threat, like fire and brimstone, like the gospel at gunpoint, “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overturned!”
Jonah’s sermon amounts to only eight words— five words in Hebrew. Certainly only a handful of the hundred thousand residents heard him. Probably more wanted to laugh at him or lay hands on him before he preached. But then the prophet’s lips unleash the LORD and the word of God hits the city like a tsunami. Jonah’s words work not what Jonah wants; his words work what God wants.
“Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overturned!”
Those little words fell them all.
In response to Jonah’s eight words, the scriptures report, “The people of Nineveh believed God.”
Not: they believed Jonah.
Not: they believed what Jonah said.
They believed God.
Nineveh is like Abram times one hundred and twenty thousand.
The ungodly all of them believe God.
While they were yet enemies of God and his elect, they believed his word.
And God credits it to them as righteousness.
As though their belief alone undoes all their sins.
A contemporary of Karl Barth— and sometimes his cheerful opponent, Helmut Thielicke was a Lutheran theologian at the University of Hamburg. Like Barth throughout his own career, Thielicke often preached at a prison chapel. He kept a photograph in his office from his time preaching to those whose sins were exceedingly great.
In the Reflection in a Dark Glass, he writes:
“Opposite my desk there hangs a small photograph of which I am very fond. It is certainly not a work of art. Someone had merely snapped a picture of a scene in a Nativity play. The picture shows a company of men in long white robes, moving toward an altar with candles in their hands. At this altar four men are seen. One of them is holding his hand before his eyes as if he were blinded, another appears to be trying to hide, and a third is making a gesture of surrender. It is clear what is meant: the white-clad figures are the heavenly angels and the men at the altar are the terrified shepherds.
It is a photograph of a Christmas celebration in a prison. Some time ago I visited them in their cells. They listened— well, I can only say, like hungry and thirsty men. The chaplain then gave me this picture.
“‘Look at this young fellow here,’ the chaplain said. “He killed his friend in a fight over a wrist watch. Year after year he has always been entrusted with the same part. He kneels before the manger and says: “I lay in death, in darkest night; You were the Sun that brought me my life, my light, my soul’s delight.”
This is the miracle which is caught in this picture. Here are men walking out of a dark and murky past to the manger, and the light of Christ falls upon their lives. But as it falls upon them, it transforms them and makes them shine. For though they come from locked cells and afterward will return to life under lock and key, they are now permitted to stand beneath the heaven which is open for them and unbarred to them. Now they are no longer acting a play; they are in dead earnest. Nor are they merely reciting some verses which have been drummed into them; they are confessing their faith.
The Word of God comes to us down in the depths. I do not need to have some kind of religious feelings or to have accomplished something inwardly or outwardly in order to have him come to me. Long before we began to ask whether there was still any hope and meaning in our lives, Someone was already on his way to us. He comes to the stable, to the comfortless, the sick, and the despairing. He came down even to the dark valley of death. Crib and cross are both of the same wood. Christmas tells us that God comes to find us no matter where we are. The Word of God is the great leveler.”
The Word of God is the great leveler.
In an essay on the sacraments and the Christian life, Robert Jenson posits that the word of God attaches to external creatures like loaf and cup and font precisely to rule out all illusions that you contribute anything to your salvation.
Jenson writes:
“In the providence of God, it is to secure this externality of the word, that the word binds itself to uncompromisingly external acts; to a bath with water, to a meal with bread and cup, or to a gestured sign of the cross. Because the gospel-word binds itself to baptism’s bath, I am prevented from persuading myself that I have the gospel in my head, and don’t need to hear it anymore. For there is no way I am going to get that tub of water into my head. By being the word with that water, the baptismal promise secures itself against my inveterate urge to incorporate everything into myself and pretend it came out of me all the time, pretend that the new self born of the word is a self I brought forth, that I was potentially a saint all the time.”
You cannot squeeze bread through your earballs and into your brain.
The tub of water will fit neither beneath your cranium nor in your heart.
All of which is to ensure you never forget your only hope comes extra nos.
Outside of you.
You need a preacher bearing the word.
Or rather, you need the Word riding a preacher.
“Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overturned!
Jonah does not dialogue with his pagan hearers. Jonah does not offer them any stories from his scriptures. Jonah does not even testify to his harrowing sojourn in the stomach of a fish. The prophet gives them no chance to inquire about his identity or the God he serves.
He just preaches.
“Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overturned!”
And the word Jonah uses in Hebrew (hapak) is every bit as ambiguous as his motives. It can mean overturn as in destruction; in such manner is the word deployed in the annihilation of Sodom and Gomorrah. But it can also mean overturn as in the transfiguring of curse into blessing; such is the case with Balaam: “But the LORD your God would not listen to Balaam; instead the LORD your God turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the LORD your God loved you.” In all likelihood, the prophet wanted the former, but Jonah’s mouth no longer belongs to him. The preacher’s words work not his own will but the Word’s will. And though he is the speaker of those words, all of Nineveh believes not him but God.
And the Word of God works far more than mere faith. Indeed— take note of how Jonah disappears entirely after his eight word sermon in the fourth verse. Jonah does not appear in the rest of chapter three of the Book of Jonah.
Everything after the preacher speaks is attributed to the Word of God.
Suddenly, everyone believes. The people organize a city-wide fast. Somehow they find over a hundred thousand potato sacks, and everyone from the Chief of Staff down to the sanitation worker wears them. The word— not Jonah, the Word— even reaches the king of Nineveh, who responds by descending from his throne and into ashes. Thereby the king humbles himself, placing himself not only amidst his people but at their station of need— at the end of their rope.
The Word of God is the great leveler.
Against becomes to.
Literally all of Nineveh follows the king’s cue. Everyone and everything repents. Even the cows and the goats, the cats down to the caterpillars (and maybe that whale too), they all repent. They all hapak; they all turn to the LORD. They all cry out mightily to God. Jonah’s eight little words fell them all. And, as a result, his words of threat become gospel— turning his curse into blessing. God grants them a merciful surprise.
When the sailors on the ship from Joppa came to fear Yahweh, offered sacrifice to him, and made covenant with him, Jonah was oblivious. But now, no one is unhappier with the fruit of the preaching than the preacher.
The prophet who knows God best cannot bear what God is like.
“The more one heats up hell for them,” Karl Barth wrote to his son Markus, “The more they come running. We must leave the good God freedom to do his own work and not present the gospel at gunpoint.”
Later, Barth clarified his complaint, “If the gospel is to be delivered with a gun, then let the preacher make clear that he too is in its sights. Woe to the preacher who neglects to announce that the gun has already been fired and another has leapt before us to receive its fatal shot.”
The Word of God is the great leveler.
Of course, not everyone enjoys the experience; Jonah is hardly the only one who finds it intolerable.
In spite of its reputation as a children’s story, I have been surprised by the amount of feedback the Book of Jonah has generated. Last week I received an email from a woman who worships with us remotely from out west.
Sharon wrote:
“Dear Jason,
This series through Jonah has hit a little too close to home; I’ve been hunkering down in the bowels of the whale.
I am truly blessed that I haven’t really struggled with my faith since age 13, when Jesus met me at a Christian camp in Colorado. I arrived filled with shock, shame, and a sneer only a 13-year-old girl can proudly wear. And Jesus met me there — in a class about the dangers of rock and roll music. In the middle of a sort of silly message, He made me want Him. I got to my room, kneeled on the hard wood floor beside my bunk bed and prayed, “God, I don’t know why you want me, but I want you.”
Ever since that day I’ve known deep in my bones that I have been the Ninevites — mired in teenage turmoil, or later ensnared in the far more deadly grip of addiction. I knew I needed a God who would never ask me to give an answer for my sins. From that 13-year-old turning point I have wanted grace, needed grace, received grace.
And then this year my brother stole all my parents’ money. Smoking meth, skipping out on family and friends, and lying about everything.
All of a sudden grace does not seem like such a good idea.
For him.
So I decided to be the hero protagonist in my family’s story. I sent my brother a brief email reminding him that the Good Shepherd’s love smells like smoke because He will descend into Hell to find us. I wrote, “Jesus loves you, black sheep.”
And he wrote me back. Mind you, he’s still smoking meth. He just set up a GoFundMe claiming he has cancer (he does not) and that his parents are dead (they are very much alive). He wrote, “Neither of us have any room to judge. We both are qualified, though, to embrace the love of God which comes not through what we have done, but by all that has been done for us in Christ. Grace, not disgrace.”
Are you effing kidding me??
And then you start this series on Jonah. And I hear it’s not really about Jonah. It’s not about the Ninevites. It’s not about the whale. It’s about God.
My brother’s self-absorbing, self-justifying story has catapulted me into the Law. I’m self-absorbed, self-justified, and self-deceived— swallowed by the whale, flailing in self-righteous protest, raising a clenched fist toward this merciful God I have known since I was 13, demanding that he withhold grace from sinners like my brother.
I know the truth that permeates the belly of this whale: when I don’t trust God with my brother, I can’t trust God with me. Either God is everything or God is nothing.
Either there is grace upon all, or there is grace upon none.
It’s been forty days since I last tried to engage with my brother.
Forty days and Sharon has been overturned.
In other words, I believe the gospel.
— Sharon”
A dozen years ago, a family member of mine pretended to be dying of Hodgkins Lymphoma, not for money but attention. She had all of us— her friends and coworkers, our family, even my mother, who was a critical care nurse— harried and hoodwinked. Eventually cracks appeared in her story and the truth spilt out. Just a few months later I learned I had stage-serious, incurable cancer.
I know what it’s like to want to stew in the whale’s juices.
Instead of proclaim an all-inclusive pardon.
I know what it’s like to want to be the one pointing the gun.
Rather than another sinner spared the bullet.
I know what it’s like to be offended.
Over his “amazing” grace.
I know we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. But let’s not kid ourselves— we can measure distances— some are further away than others, right?
I smell like whale vomit too, and if compelled to walk five hundred miles, I would drag my feet every step of the way.
The Word of God is the great leveler. And, honestly, I don’t much like the company in which the word puts me. Where the gospel ceases to offend, the Triune God of the gospel is no longer believed.
Just so, admit it.
You would never concoct this message.
You would never conjure this pardon.
You would never invent a God this reckless with his merciful surprise.
You all have at least one Ninevite in your lives!
You would never choose to believe the gospel anymore than I chose to preach it. The justification of the ungodly!? Such a word— the word— does not arise from within any of us. Instead it arrives and confronts us. In a tub you cannot fit into your head. In a loaf and a cup you cannot squeeze into your ear-canal. In a preacher you can neither hold in your hands nor fit inside your mouth.
Even those who know God best cannot easily bear what he is like. Just so— take it from Jonah— the LORD is nothing if not persistent. He shows up, again and again, with the same promise.
Shorter even than Jonah’s sermon to Nineveh: “…given for you.”
And not for you alone.
So come to the table.
Eat the irony.
While you cannot fit the tub into your head or me into your hands, you can swallow up this gracious God into your belly.
