Word of Salvation – June 2024

 

The Call

 

Sermon by Harry Burggraaf B.D. on Jonah 1:1-17

Scripture Reading: Jonah 1 & Matthew 12:38-42

 

“...And the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai: "Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me."

 

[This month I want to commence a series of reflections on the book of Jonah.]  Jonah is probably one of the most well-known stories in the Bible and perhaps one of the least understood.

Even people who know very little about God, know about Jonah and the whale.  Jonah is the butt of jokes and ridicule and scepticism; and a great source of entertainment.

Just imagine it: the word of the Lord came to [name of your congregation] go to Tehran, capital of Iran, the country every western nation loves to hate at the moment and preach against it.  Tell those fellows, Ayatollah Khamenei and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that their number is up.  Interesting reception you'd get I would imagine.

Someone has suggested that the God's commissioning of Jonah to go to Nineveh would be like telling a Jew to go to Berlin and preach judgement to the Nazis in 1942.

So the book of Jonah is certainly about a challenging call, a very uncomfortable commissioning, and I want us to reflect on that a bit.  But it is also about the character of God, the one who commission; and about his care.

So, for those who need some structure to a sermon:
            -  The Call of God.
            -  The Character of God
            -  The Care of God

The Call of God

You won't find it in your English Bibles, but the book of Jonah starts with the word 'and'.  AND the word of the Lord came to Jonah.

It's the little Hebrew grammatical device, the ‘vaw consecutive’, that says 'this is not a standalone story; this is a continuation; this has a context; this belongs to a body of literature.

The book of Jonah is not an allegory like 'The Hare and the Tortoise'; it’s not a parable like 'How the leopard lost its spots'.  It has an historical and a redemptive context.  From the book of Kings we learn that Jonah ministers somewhere around 750BC in the 30 year reign of Jeroboam II, the ruler of the northern tribes, who did evil in the sight of the Lord.

But neither is Jonah straight history.  The author certainly believes that what Jonah experienced happened.  But it is not part of Israel's regular history.  Otherwise it would have been with the books of Samuel, Kings and Chronicles, Ezra and Nehemiah.  Jonah is grouped with Amos and Hosea, Obadiah and Micah – into the 12 minor prophets.  So it is didactic history or 'prophetic story'; with all the colour of a story – plot and character, tension and climax, humour and metaphor.  Some scholars see Jonah as a comedy, and in a sense it is – Jonah is such a screw up.  So 'story' yes; but prophetic.  As prophecy it has that triple dimension of an immediate horizon (the here and now), a mediate horizon (a time in the future) and a distant horizon.  It’s like standing on a mountain top — you see the mountain immediately in front of you, then the rolling mountains beyond that, and then, in the hazy distance more mountain tops barely visible.

The word of the Lord came to Jonah.  Actually it says, 'the word is to Jonah', the 'dabar Yahweh', 'GO...!’  It has all the power of a train smash.  Bam!  Jonah GO!  Because the word is from 'Yahweh', the LORD, in capital letters.  The author uses the covenant name of God.  So holy that Jews, even today, do not pronounce it but use the substitute, 'Adonai'.  It is the God who meets Moses in a burning bush, Yahweh, the 'I am who I am'.

And so God calls.  He is a calling God.  God always calls and commissions his creatures.

From the beginning of history: 'God blessed them and said to them... be fruitful and increase, fill the earth and subdue it.  Rule over everything.’  The Great Cultural Mandate.

Right through to the end of history: 'The Spirit and the bride say come... whoever is thirsty let him come, and whoever wishes let him take freely of the water of life.'  The Great Communion.

And all the time in between - 'Love the Lord your God, with all your heart and soul and mind, and love your neighbour as yourself'.  The Great Command.

'Go and make disciples of all the nations.'  The Great Commission.

The Great Cultural Mandate; the Great Command, the Great Commission, the Great Communion; the Call of God on our lives.

And the call comes to individuals:

 -  Abraham leave your cushy home and lifestyle in Ur of the Chaldees and go to the land I'll show you.

 -  Moses leave your luxurious life in the splendid court of Pharaoh and go lead this ragtag bunch of slaves and nomads through the wilderness.

 -  Isaiah, 'whom shall I send?  And who will go for us?'

 -  Jeremiah 'I appointed you as a prophet to the nations... you must go to everyone I send you.'

 -  Simon, Andrew, John, 'come follow me and I will make you fishers of men.'

The call of God is continuous, relentless, persuasive, compelling.  Jonah presents us with that challenge.  Are we hearing the call of God on our lives?  To be stewards of God's creation?  To be lovers of others?  To be signs and messengers of the Kingdom?

When I was a younger child, as migrants my parents were fairly busy, getting established, growing a business, building their own house and us kids all had jobs to do.  One of mine was to look after the chooks and clean out the chook pen.  I hated it with a passion.  The smell, those stupid cackling birds, chookie poo oozing through your toes.  Yuk...!

‘Harry go and clean out the chook pen!’  ‘Yes dad!’  And I'd go and hide in my favourite little cubby hole under the house to hide.  Anything but do the chooks.  We all know what it means to avoid unpalatable obligations.  As adults we have all sorts of sophisticated ways of not fronting up.

Nineveh was Jonah's ‘chookie poo’.  Why would any self-respecting Jew go to Nineveh?  That godless, cruel, barbaric, enemy of everything that Israel stood for.  Why, fifty years later the troops of Tiglath-pilesar, the ruler of Assyria, would come marauding, destroying, killing, raping Israel's countryside and take the population into exile.

So Jonah runs to his cubby hole.  A ship from Joppa to Tarshish, probably a port in Spain, as far away from God as possible.

Remember Jonah is prophetic story, or didactic history.  What is going on here?  Prophecy operates over several horizons.

Firstly of course God's call is to Jonah, to go to Nineveh and preach repentance.  God's heart is to see his kingdom come everywhere, even at the capital of an evil empire.

At a prophetic level it is a challenge to the nation of Israel to fulfil its calling.  They were meant to be a light to the nations.  God had promised that 'in Abraham and his descendants all the peoples of the earth would be blessed'.  Their very reason for being; the reason why they were chosen from all the nations of the earth, was to draw people to God.

In the time of Jeroboam II Israel was very prosperous, life was good, business boomed, the borders were expanding.  But society it was rotten at the core.  You just have to listen to the prophet Amos:- immorality, economic injustice, disparity between rich and poor, exploitation, violence, abuse.

Hardly attractive to outsiders.  Why would we want to serve the God of those people?

And so, through the story of Jonah God challenges Israel.  'You can't put me in a box; I'm not just some little tribal god you can use for your own convenience; I am Yahweh, the Lord of all the earth and it is my purpose and passion for things to be put right throughout the earth; even in Nineveh, the heart of darkness.  Israel, fulfil your calling.

But there is a second prophetic horizon.

It is fascinating that the book of Jonah is read at the festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

So even for the Jews today who don't recognise Jesus as the Messiah, there is sense that Jonah has a messianic message.

And of course Jesus himself affirms this.  We read in the passage from Matthew.  In his conversation with the Pharisees, when they demand that he show them his credentials; give us a sign, do a little miracle; Jesus says 'I'll give you a sign, the prophet Jonah... and a greater than Jonah is here.'

So embedded and laced in the Jonah story is the promise that God will provide his own Jonah.  The vacillating character we call Jonah son of Amittai (which by the way, means dove/peace, son of truthfulness), who refuses to respond to God's call, is prefigured in another Jonah, who will fulfil God's call to bring restoration and shalom.  Not just to Nineveh, but to every nation and to all people.

The church fathers sometimes have a funny, exaggerated habit of allegorising the Old Testament.  And so Augustine suggests that the timber of the boat Jonah is on represents the wood of Jesus' cross from which he descends into the whale of hell and separation from God and is spat out in the resurrection from the grave.  Obviously too fanciful; but you get the idea of Jonah as a sign of the Messiah to come.

At a third prophetic level the call of Jonah is a challenge to us, to the church today.  Just as Jonah challenges Israel's particularism; the God in our box syndrome, so the story challenges our calling and mission to be God's kingdom ambassadors.  The church exists for others.  In being the servant of God it serves the world.

The apostle Peter writes of the church, "you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God (all the things that Israel believed about itself) that you may proclaim the praises of him who called you out of darkness."

Jonah, go to Nineveh.  Harry, Peter, Michelle, Corrie, go to Nineveh.  Dandenong Congregation go to Nineveh.

I think that congregations like Dandenong and many others try to do 'Nineveh' well.  I think this church has a servant heart.  But if the word of God needs to challenge us on this, it will do so through the story of Jonah.

If I look at some of the business being discussed at our next Synod, about our little squabbles and disagreements and in-house concerns I wonder if as a denomination we need to hear the call of Jonah; go to Nineveh; go where the real problems are; go to where people are hurting; engage with a secular world that desperately needs God.

I personally find the call to Nineveh quite difficult.  Our church has a lovely ministry to marginalised and often quite broken people at the Shawlands Caravan Park.  The place you go when you've run out of all the other housing options.  I'm not all that involved because I find it very confronting; I just can't do it; listening to people's stories of misery.  Mixing with those who've made a mess of their lives.  So I do a twisted version of the Isaiah response when God says 'who will go for me?'  'Here I am Lord, send Henni (my wife).'

Each of us, in our own ways needs to grapple with how we respond to the Nineveh call.

But we need to know that that is where God's heart is.  God's heart is for the world - the sinful, the broken, the dysfunctional, the poor, the outs, the rejected; whether that be people or institutions or structures, or political systems.  God's heart is for the shalom of the world.  Troubled people need God's shalom.  That is his character.  Jonah exposes us to the character of God.

The character of God

If you read through the whole book you will notice that Jonah starts with a call and finishes with a question (Jonah 4:10,11).  "Should I not be concerned about that great city?"  And in that question you hear the father heart of God.  Oh, how I long for my world to be whole.  For family relationships to be rich and wholesome; for governments to serve their people well; for economic justice for all.

In Jonah we are confronted with the difficult questions of the character of God.  If God is sovereign why is there sin and brokenness?

How can a just God be merciful?  How can God be gracious and yet punish sin?  If God elects a certain people, how can his love be universal?  How can justice and mercy both prevail?  And Jonah gives us glimpses of an answer by way of a story.

When I was doing my theological training we had to read Berkhof's 'Systematic Theology' which starts with the attributes (the character) of God.  One attribute is God's immutability, he doesn't change.  Yet in Jonah God changes his mind several times.  God's compassion seems to win out over his justice.  And Jonah doesn't like it.

In Jonah 1 we see God interacting with his rebellious prophet.  The chapter doesn't give a theology, but a relationship.  Jonah is in dialogue, even in debate with God.  God calls, Jonah resists.  Jonah flees, God sends a storm.  Jonah jumps, God sends a fish.  Somehow God seems to work through inadequate, recalcitrant human beings.

And once again we get these prophetic horizons.  At an immediate level we have Jonah and the sailors.  Pagan men who begin by praying 'each to their own god' and end up 'offering a sacrifice to THE God, the Lord, as a result of their interchange with Jonah.

What irony that is.  Here is the man who refuses to go to Nineveh, witnessing to these pagan men: "I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the land."  And they end up worshipping.

At another prophetic level God uses Jonah to reveal the way that his justice and his mercy will embrace.  Jonah takes responsibility for the calamity the men face; 'I know it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.'

And he takes on the role of a scapegoat, a substitute for the doomed men.  'Throw me into the sea and it will become calm.'

When Jews heard this read on the Day of Atonement they understood the language of scapegoat and substitute.  They experienced the temple sacrifices where an animal is offered for the sins of the people.  Yearly they went through the ceremony of the two goats, where one is slaughtered and the other, the scapegoat, with the sins of the people symbolically on its head is driven into the wilderness, like Jonah thrown into the depths of the ocean.

And so Jonah is a messianic sign.  God will provide an offering for sin.  His son Jesus will suffer the separation and alienation of death and three days in the tomb before rising to a glorious resurrection so that we might experience calm from the storm, peace, restoration.  In the words of Cameron Semmens' poem:

            "Judgement is Jehovah's jurisdiction, not Jonah's;
             I, Jehovah, always judge justly."  (Jonah in the Giant Dugong)

And there are touches of such supreme irony in the story.  As the sailors take Jonah, who IS guilty, and toss him overboard they pray, “O Lord please do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man."  When the crowd before Pilate are calling for the crucifixion of Jesus, who is innocent, they shout 'Let his blood be upon us; you can hold us accountable.'

And so in the death and resurrection of Jesus, God's mercy and justice embrace.  Jonah can preach against the Ninevites AND he can trust the God of compassion to act rightly.

The care of God

Jonah is thrown into the sea.  He sinks.  'But the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah.'

God provides; God cares.  We can go to Nineveh, we can serve the world wherever God calls and trust that he will take care of the details.

When I reflect on Jonah, the words of Tolkien in the 'The Lord of the Rings' come to mind.  Frodo, the Hobbit, is given the unenviable task of despatching a ring that can be used for evil, to Mount Doom in Mordor, heart of the dark empire.

And like Jonah he says: "I am not made for perilous quests.  I wish I had never seen the ring.  Why did it come to me?  Why was I chosen?"

"Such questions cannot be answered," said Gandalf.  "You may be sure it was not for any merit that others do not possess; not for power or wisdom, at any rate.  But you have been chosen and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.”

We have been chosen; we have been called and we must use whatever wits and strength and abilities the Holy Spirit gives us to be ambassadors and witnesses for God's kingdom.

Gospel and Grace

[Today we are starting a series on the book of Jonah.]  One of the central themes of Jonah is that of calling.  We are called in many ways...
 -  Our cultural calling; called to have dominion over the earth; called to be stewards.
 -  Our vocational calling; called to architecture, nursing, plumbing, socio-biology, preaching.

We are called to various roles - mother, husband, daughter, carer, opa, student!

We are called to be kingdom witnesses and servants to the world.

Sometimes these callings are difficult.  Often we fail and fall short.

From Jonah we see it easy to evade our callings and serve ourselves.

And yet the Gospel and God's grace redeems our calling too.

Let’s join in prayer as we place our calling before God and ask to receive his grace.