“Hard Lessons”

Jonah 1:4-16

July 3, 2005

Last week we began our story of Jonah with the short three-verse introduction that set the stage for the entire drama that will unfold between God and Jonah. God had called Jonah to go to the capital of the Assyrian Empire of Ninevah to speak out against it, but instead of faithfully fulfilling his call as God’s prophet, Jonah went down to Jobba, boarded a ship, and headed off to Tarshish to flee from the presence of the Lord.

We ended last week with a kind of biographical sketch of Jonah and his motives for not wanting to go to Ninevah. Remember that Jonah represents all those of God’s people who have a deep and unforgiving prejudice and hatred for anyone outside the Jewish faith, especially the Assyrians. The Assyrians were the dreaded enemies of Israel. They were the pillagers, destroyers and conquerors of the Promised Land. They represented all that was against God and God’s people. There was no way Jonah was going to the heart of their empire – the great city of Ninevah that was known for its violence and terrorism.

And so we left last week with our hero becoming the runaway, who finds himself in a serious conflict of wills between God’s will and his own will. And we, the readers, were left with more questions than answers. Whose will and purpose will win out in the end? Will Jonah get away from God? Will his disobedience and flagrant insubordination go unpunished? Will God punish Jonah, or will God do something else? Will God show Jonah just what kind of God he is? Will God show Jonah the way?

Let us know continue our story of Jonah the runaway.

Read Jonah 1:4-16

Why are some of the best lessons we learn also the hardest lessons to learn? Life is full of hard lessons; those teaching moments that forever change how we view people and the world around us. Sometimes these hard lessons are painful not just physically but also emotionally and even spiritually. They confront us and expose our ignorance, self-centeredness, naivety, or even our own irresponsibility and disobedient attitude. These hard lessons sometimes leave us reeling from the experience, licking our own wounds, and wondering what in the world was I thinking. These hard lessons are not ones that should just be forgotten and chalked up to bad luck. The optimist and the spiritually and faithfully minded see the hard lessons of life as the greatest opportunities for growth and maturity.

The prophet, Malachi, had at one time spoken about the one who is coming, who he had said would be like a refiner's fire and a fullers' soap. This person would sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the people and refine them like gold and silver. Like the goldsmith who puts the precious metals back into the fire over and over again, until all the impurities are gone, until he can see the reflection of his face in the metal, Malachi reminds us that so too is God at work refining us, until he can see the reflection of his face in your face and mine, until all of us reflect the diving glory of the One who is coming soon.

These hard lessons of life are the refiner’s fire and the fuller’s soap. They are the moments when we are stuck back in the fire so that we will be made stronger and more pure. They are the moments when we are washed and sometimes scrubbed clean of all that keeps us from the right way. God called Jonah for a purpose, and that divine purpose would be carried out. But something had to be done first. It was time for Jonah to experience a couple of hard lessons.

Any storywriter will tell you that the best stories are not the ones that just have a message on the surface of the text. The best stories are the ones that also reach down deep and reveal an even more important truth. On the surface of our text for this morning, Jonah has learned a hard lesson about his vain attempt to flee from the presence of the Lord.

The Hebrew verb used that means “to flee” carries with it a more significant meaning than to just runaway from something. There is a difference between me fleeing from a snake and me fleeing from my wife. Jonah was not just trying to put distance between God and himself, he was trying break from his relationship with God in order to start over again in a new life outside that relationship. But Jonah discovers that any attempt to flee from God’s presence is an impossible task. There is no place he can go to get away from God or from the people that he is a part of. The apostle Paul reminds us that there is nothing in life or in death, no power, no place, no time that can separate us from God’s love in Christ.

What Jonah discovers is that God will pursue us at every turn, seek us out in every place, and search us out over and over again. Jonah could not run away from God anymore than he could runaway from himself. No matter where he goes he will continue to hear God’s call. No matter where he runs to he will continue to be pulled and tugged by the cry of the Ninevites. We cannot flee to a safer place from what is internal, from the conflict within us, or from our own thoughts and emotions that point us to what is right. Jonah cannot flee from the mission he was called to go on. He cannot flee from being the instrument of God’s purpose. And, thanks be to God, neither can we. For it is only in God’s presence that we can be changed and transformed and made new.

But below the surface of the text there is another hard lesson Jonah must learn before he can truly be the instrument of God’s purpose, and this hard lesson has to do with insiders and outsiders. Why does Jonah not want to go to Nineveh? Because he sees the Ninevites as a group who are everything that God is not. They do not worship the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They do not follow the commandments of the Torah. They are the ones who come from mixed races and backgrounds. They are everything Jonah is not. They are the outsiders and Jonah is the insider, and Jonah knows that God is for insiders and not outsiders. And so Jonah boards a ship with a group of mariners to go with them to Tarshish.

But it was not long before God hurls a great wind upon the sea that caused a mighty storm that was so bad that the ship threatened to break up. Without warning danger filled the air, life-threatening danger. The mariners were afraid and each prayed to his own god. They worked feverishly to lighten the ship to get it on top of the waves. They worked together, joined by a common cause of survival, each person working to save not only his own life, but the lives of the others around him.

You see, these mariners where everything Jonah was not. They did not worship Jonah’s God. They were not Israelites, but Gentiles. They probably came from mixed races and backgrounds. They were outsiders. The same kind of people that would be found in Nineveh. But when faced with a common cause and crisis, these outsiders prayed and went into action. They were the ones standing shoulder to shoulder beside each other doing all they could do to help each other. Even when they found out that Jonah was the one responsible for God unleashing the great storm upon them, instead of throwing him overboard, they kept rowing unwilling to take a life of another, a stranger to them, in order to save their own lives.

When I read this, I’m reminded of the images from that terrible day of September 11^th. On that day people from every walk of life – rich and poor, black and white and everything in between, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, male and female, young and old, protestant, catholic, Jew, and Arab, and every other kind of religion you can think of – all came together for a common purpose. Race, nationality, origin, color, creed, sex – none of it mattered on that day. All the faces looked the same. The dust and ash had erased the differences between people, and for an all too brief of time – we were one. On that day, we did not see people as a group, but as individuals, as neighbors, as brothers and sisters, as ourselves.

But in the midst of the tempest blowing around the ship, where was Jonah? Where was the insider? Where was the one who is supposed to be the one who puts faith into action? He was in the hold of the ship asleep. This insider Jonah, our hero turned runaway, was found neither praying nor acting. He could talk religion, but he could not be found practicing it. But something happened to Jonah that allowed him to see a new truth. In his personal encounter with these outsiders he saw their devotion, their heroism, and their consideration for him, and just for a moment his prejudices and hatred for all others left him and he began to see these outsiders not as a group, but as persons. For just a moment, the scales of intolerance and prejudice and hate fell from his eyes and he saw their struggles as his struggles, their sufferings as his sufferings, their hurts as his hurts. For just a moment, Jonah saw these outsiders not as a group to be hated and despised, but as persons in need of deliverance.

In the end, the mariners would pray to God, cast Jonah into the sea, and be witnesses of God’s awesome power in stopping the storm. In the end, they would be filled with awe and reverence and fear and offer a sacrifice and make vows to the God now called Lord. Through Jonah’s sacrifice, they had been saved.

Jonah learned two hard lessons that day upon the sea. He learned that he could not escape from God’s presence and purpose, and he also learned that he could no longer think about others in such broad sweeping categories as insiders and outsiders. His prejudices and hatred for all others not like himself blinded his eyes from seeing a greater vision of God’s universal concern for the world, for persons in every race and land, even for those who we insiders consider outsiders. In the end, Jonah’s arrogance and disobedience and lack of vision would cost him his life. Or so it would seem to him. But, God was not done with Jonah yet. There is one more lesson Jonah must learn if he is going to truly be a prophet of God. Amen.