“The Jonah Syndrome”

Jonah 4:1-11

July 24, 2005

We began our sermon series five weeks ago on the book of Jonah with a description of Jonah and the Ninevites. Remember that Jonah is the representative of the insiders. He is the chosen people’s man in the story. He represents all those Israelites who are first class nationalists, who see foreigners as outsiders, as outsiders against God and God’s people. And then there is Nineveh that great city, the capital of Assyria, the sworn enemy of Israel. Nineveh was the antithesis of Israel. They were lovers of violence and terrorism. They were the ones who had pillaged and ransacked and destroyed Israel throughout history. They were wicked and evil.

These two opposing sides once again bring to the forefront the conflict that has prevailed throughout this story, the conflict between God’s will and Jonah’s will. For Jonah, the Ninevites deserved only one thing – complete and utter destruction. They were everything God was not, everything Israel was not. Even after all that happened to Jonah, Jonah’s message to the Ninevites was one of judgment. But, God’s will was for something else. God had compassion for the Ninevites so much so that God sent them a prophet so that they would repent. And they did, and they believed in God, and God did not destroy Nineveh as Jonah had hoped, instead God saved them. The conflict from the beginning is still the conflict in the end – God’s will versus Jonah’s will.

Read Jonah 4:1-11

For Jonah, it was an open and shut case. The Ninevites were a wicked people, and they deserved God’s unbiased judgment. God sends Jonah to the heart of his sworn enemy, to speak out against the wicked city, and then God changes his mind? How could God let the evil Ninevites go unpunished? How could God now offer life to a wicked people? For Jonah, this did not make any sense. This is not how God is supposed to act.

Jonah knew that God was supposed to be gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Jonah even knew that God was supposed to be ready to relent from punishing. After all, his own encounter with God taught him that God was indeed gracious and merciful when God saved Jonah’s life by sending the big fish. So you would think Jonah would have rejoiced at God’s gracious and merciful action toward the Ninevites, but no. Instead, Jonah became angry.

If God cannot play by Jonah’s rules, then Jonah does not want to play. Jonah wants no part in what God is doing. He would rather die than to live with the fact that wicked people are saved. He would rather die than live knowing that now Nineveh is the recipient of God’s promises. And with that, Jonah storms out of the city and climbs a hill overlooking the city. There he builds himself a little hut, pulls up a little stool, and sits down to await the coming light show of fire and brimstone raining down from the sky.

But God does not let Jonah get away with his anger. However, instead of giving Jonah another taste of grace as God had done with the big fish, God decides to give Jonah a taste of judgment. So God sends a plant to grow up next to Jonah to protect Jonah from the heat of the sun. And, as expected, Jonah responds with great joy, after all God is playing by Jonah’s rules and delivering him, and not the Ninevites.

But as the sun rises the next morning, a worm comes and eats the plant away. God then calls upon the sultry, east wind and temperature reaches triple digits. The sun beats down on Jonah’s head as the wind and heat suck the very life from his body. God’s judgment has now come in the form of destruction, not upon Nineveh, but upon something that had become very important to Jonah, something which had brought him great joy. Jonah is given a little taste of what it is like to experience God’s unbiased judgment. Maybe now Jonah will come to understand just how God feels about the Ninevites and how terrible God’s judgment and destruction would be, and he will want no part of it, not even for his enemies.

But Jonah does not get the message. In fact, Jonah’s anger burns against God who not only breaks Jonah’s rules, but who now can no longer be trusted to give preferential treatment to one of God’s own elect. You see, Jonah had no claim on the plant whatsoever. He neither created it nor nurtured it, so he had no right to make any claims regarding it. And if Jonah was in no position to make any final demand or judgment about the plant, then neither was he in any position to make any ultimate demand or judgments about Nineveh. God and God alone has the final say. God and God alone has the right to do what pleases God regarding Nineveh, or any other city or nation, or people for that matter.

But for Jonah God could only be gracious, merciful, and loving towards Israel, not to any other group of people. It was apparently all right for God to be merciful to him, but to extend that same mercy to the wicked Ninevites is quite another matter. Jonah’s anger with God does not lie in the fact that God was merciful, but rather in the fact that God was indiscriminate in the exercise of his mercy. For Jonah, God is too lenient a judge. God stands too ready to forgive the guilty and let the wicked go unpunished. For Jonah, the logic is simple. If you are wicked then you deserve punishment, and there is no people more deserving of God’s judgment and destruction than the Ninevites. “Come on, God, how dare you let the evil Ninevites live when they turned from you and ran away.”

In the end, Jonah becomes very person that he had praised God for not becoming toward him. He has completely failed to understand that the events in his own life have revealed that he, himself, is alive only because of the same grace and mercy that God has given to the Ninevites, even though like the Ninevites, he too deserved only punishment.

Jonah, not God, is the one who has become quick to anger and abounding in judgment, who has shown no mercy, no grace, and no love. What Jonah fails to understand is that God is not an unbiased, neutral God. The God of Scripture, the God of both the Old and New Testament is not a blind God who judges without prejudice or favor, but a God who judges out of a self-giving, forgiving love.

Our God is a God who deeply cares for all of God’s creation, whose scales of justice tips in biased favor for the poor, the oppressed, the broken, not only economically and socially, but also morally and spiritually. Our God is a God who sees and knows every repentant heart and every repentant mind, and judges us by God’s own loving justice that is for us and not against us, and by a just love that calls us and helps us to live genuine human lives.

And so the book of Jonah comes to an end, but the story of Jonah does not. God leaves a question for Jonah to answer. “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals”?

How did Jonah answer God’s question, we cannot finally say. Did he remain angry and unrepentant, or did he come to recognize the wideness of God’s mercy, grace, and steadfast love? Did he continue to have judgment in his heart for people not like him, or did he finally come to see others in a different light, as people for whom God is for as well? Did he remain captive by the chains of hatred and prejudice for outsiders, or did he finally discover the joy of knowing that the loving and just God does not judge us by what we deserve, but instead gives us what we need.

Maybe in the end, God’s question is not so much a question for Jonah to answer, as much as it is a question for us to answer. Maybe we need to take a long hard look at ourselves and be able to recognize those times, those feelings and thoughts, when we too have the symptoms of the Jonah syndrome. The Jonah syndrome that believes God should act according to our will, that God is for us insiders only, that outsiders are beyond the reach of God’s saving grace and mercy and forgiveness.

Jesus once told a parable about workers in the vineyard, who had worked all day, but became angry when others were hired at the end of the day and received the same pay. That parable also ended with a question by the vineyard owner, “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

Maybe in the end, the story of Jonah is a story about ourselves, and a reminder about the God in whom we worship and service. Through the story of Jonah, we too know just how much God has done for us, how God has shown us over and over again God’s steadfast love and amazing grace through Jesus Christ in spite of our own attempts to flee from God’s presence. This is why this story of Jonah is such a special story.

This story is the great reminder that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God we know in the person of Jesus Christ, is the God who has compassion, not only for us insiders, but for all people in the world. This story is the great proclamation that God’s will for all of God’s creation is to save it.

Whenever you read this story, and I hope you read it over and over again, be sure to talk off your shoes, for you will be standing on holy ground. Amen.