Thursday • 10/17/2024 •
Proper 23 

This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 18:1-20; Jonah 3:1-10; 4:1-11; Acts 27:27-44; Luke 9:18-27 

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 8 (“The Song of Moses,” Exodus 15, BCP, p. 85); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 19 (“The Song of the Redeemed,” Revelation 15:3-4, BCP, p. 94) 

As you finish this reading of Jonah, I hope you will appreciate these four points the book makes. They have struck me in a fresh way.  

God appoints. The Lord appoints “a large fish” (1:17). The Lord God appoints “a bush” (4:6). God appoints “a worm” (4:7). God appoints (even though NRSV uses a different word, the Hebrew does not) “a sultry east wind” (4:8). Throughout the story, God is orchestrating things according to his will. That’s what the Bible’s God does: orchestrate. As Creator and Lord of the entire universe, he works all things according to his good pleasure.  

We may not always be able to discern God’s hand. Indeed, it’s almost as though Jonah resists discerning God’s hand. I’m sure I do the same. But the hand is always there. And the way of wisdom is to look for, and to be ready to yield to, that hand.  

God is merciful. The portrait of Jonah in this account is intended, I am sure, to serve as an unflattering mirror for a proud and self-important Israel. The pathetic picture of Jonah stands in complete contrast to the very nature of the God who has revealed himself as Yahweh, the “I AM,” who pities and delivers the enslaved, and who then calls upon those so delivered to extend his pity to others.  

When Jonah finally does go to Nineveh to deliver his prophetic message, he pronounces only doom, nothing else: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4—the message is even more concise in the original, consisting of but five Hebrew words). There’s no call for repentance. No hint of there being any “out.” Just five words of doom and gloom. It’s the Ninevites themselves—led by their king—who, “believing God,” take it upon themselves to fast, to put on sackcloth, and to “turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands” (Jonah 3:9). All this, just in case God might have a change in heart: “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind?” (Jonah 3:9).  

Know what? God did “change his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it” (Jonah 3:10). I’m pretty sure the point isn’t to present a logical puzzle—i.e., how can a sovereign God who has ordered all things from the beginning of time be induced to change his mind? I’m pretty sure the point is to shine a light on the essentially merciful nature of God. As the Prayer Book’s Prayer of Humble Access puts it: “But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy.” God is, as Jonah begrudgingly (!) acknowledges: “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing” (Jonah 4:2).  

Never forget that. Never, ever, ever.  

God cares about his whole creation. Doesn’t it catch your eye that the Ninevite king decrees that animals as well as humans shall fast in repentance, and that along with humans, “animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God” (Jonah 3:7-8)? That’s a clue to a larger theme in Jonah. Puzzled as to the reason for the storm that has come upon them, the sailors ask Jonah who he is and where he comes from. He answers: “I am a Hebrew. … I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land” (Jonah 1:9). Yahweh, the Lord of heaven and the earth and the seas, puts in play a storm, a fish, a bush, and a worm to accomplish his purposes. And the sackcloth-covered animals are a nice touch in demonstration of “creation’s groaning” while it waits to be “set free from its bondage to decay and … [to] obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).  

In his notes in the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, Kenneth M. Craig, Jr., sagely observes:  

By the book’s end, the Lord emerges as a God of compassion, for Jonah and his people, to be sure, but also for other peoples and for animals. The book’s concluding rhetorical question—“Should I [the Lord] not be concerned about Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons … and also many animals?”—deals less with repentance and more with creation (animals and humanity).  

God delights in the beautiful. All these truths could be set out as cold propositional statements. In the Book of Jonah, though, they take the most artful form. Again, this from Kenneth Craig: 

The tale of Jonah is one of the Bible’s literary gems. Marked by symmetry, balance, word-play, irony, and surprise, the book purports to teach Jonah (and all readers) about the problem of a gracious acceptance for one’s own people (“Deliverance is from the Lord,” Jonah says in 2:9) while churlishly resenting similar treatment for others (4:1-5).  

The book is one of the most delightful reads in all of Scripture. Take time, if you are able, to read back through it, looking for:  

• parallels (e.g., the ship captain in chapter 1, and the Ninevite king in chapter 3; or “Perhaps the god will spare us a thought” in 1:6, and “Who knows? God may relent…” in 3:9),  

• irony (e.g., creation and even the Ninevites respond to God more appropriately than his prophet),  

• and even “Easter eggs” anticipating the coming of Christ (e.g., salvation-via-drowning, three days and nights in a kind of grave).  

May Jonah, through his hard-earned lessons, teach us that God is both absolutely trustworthy and consummately beautiful. “O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness” (Psalm 96:9 KJV).  

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+