Discourse prophesied by The Revd Neil Fernyhough, 3rd Sunday After Epiphany, January 25, 2009.
Readings: Jonah 3: 1-5, 10; Psalm 62: 6-14; 1 Corinthians 7: 29-31; Score 1: 14-20
`` And the people of Nineveh believed God. ''
- Jon 3: 5
Today we take our one-year dip into the extraordinary Jonah. Clocking inward at merely 48 poetries, the brevity of the work contradicts its extraordinary literary virtue; and its cultural impact. Briefly, it Holds a great small tale. It Holds even better in Hebrew, because of all the punnings and the word-play that the writer indulges in.
Jonah is an protracted satirical parable masquerading as a prophetical text. There is justly one seer in the total work, and it comes in the 4th poesy of chapter three - which we heard read this forenoon: `` Twoscore years more, and Nineveh shall be overturned! '' The tag line, naturally, is that Nineveh is n't subverted. In point of fact, the whole book pertains the amazing lengths Jonah attends in order to avoid being a seer; then, when he eventually relents, the as amazing snit he fall under when God declines to follow through on the prognostication. The writer holds a great deal of merriment couching a morality narrative about the clemency of God in that cosmic passive-aggressive engagement of volitions.
There is rattlingly no putted upwards to God 's call in the narrative - God suddenly denotes to Jonah to proclaim this prophet, and, even as directly, Jonah jumps on a ship boundary for Espana - pointedly in the opposite way of Mesopotamia, and promptly dope off. You cognise, metaphorically asleep. A enormous storm arises, and the gobs react to the impendent disaster in a completely rational fashion - by projecting batches to chance out who Need to fault. After a short Q and A, Jonah and his middleman concur that the best fashion to halt the storm is to throw Jonah overboard.
But the lesson of this brief episode appears to be that if you wo n't travel where God desires you to locomote, God will chance a novel and perchance uncomfortable agencies of conveying you there. God `` renders '' - that is the word, `` furnishes '' - a decagram gadol
- a `` head honcho, '' not a hulk, to swallow Jonah whole. I encounter it interesting that the Hebrew locomotes from a masculine descriptor of `` fish '' to a feminine descriptor once Jonah is in its venter; pregnant, perchance, with the oracle.
Chance himself in the intestine of an tremendous aquatic brute, Jonah makes exactly what any one of us would make. He verbalize a protracted poem of kudos, utilise graphic imagination and synonymous correspondence. In it, he pre-emptively proclaims God 's merciful delivery, excoriates veneration, and unwaveringly asseverate that he will fulfil his vows. And then the fish yakeh
- literally `` barf '' Jonah onto the terra firma. Perchance this brusk spewing is a response to the seer 's facile hypocrisy - happy with his ain rescue, but content to see the nasty Ninevites destruct. Nevertheless, God does a 2nd, successful endeavour to get Jonah to express his vaticination. And this is where we pick upwards the narration.
Now, I conceive what the compilers of the Revised Park Lectionary would wish us to make today is to revolve about God 's flexibleness in response to the penance of the people of Nineveh. But I believe God cognise what the Ninevites were attending make right along. This morality drama is for the benefit of the Hebrews and for us who will hear about it, not the Ninevites, who wo n't.
What we make n't hear in today 's reading is how the Rex of Nineveh responds. He stands upwards, garbs himself in sackcloth, and orders a box of ashes to sit himself downwardly in. He enjoin a fasting, and that every dwelling thing - yes, beasts included - be garbed in sackcloth. So the Ninevites salvage themselves. And Jonah... Jonah is ashen at God 's mercy. He states God that this is why he flied to Espana, so he would n't should witnesser God 's `` unbendable love. '' `` O Godhead, '' Jonah prays, `` delight kill me now. '' The embittered oracle so heads for a hill near the metropolis to watch will occur. And over again, God toys with the pauper to exemplify a point. He holds a leafy shrub grow over Jonah to furnish him shadow, so directs a worm to kill the shrub the following day. `` Is it right, '' God enquire, `` for you to be angry about the shrub? '' `` Yes, '' tells Jonah, `` angry plenty to perish. '' Now, here comes the whole point of the Jonah - God 's response.
`` You are pertained about the shrub, for which you maked not labor, and which you maked not turn; it inherited being in a dark and choked in a dark. And should I not be pertained about Nineveh, that great metropolis, in which there are to a higher degree one hundred and twenty thousand mortals who make not cognise their right from their left, and likewise many brutes? '' Recall, there Holds all these brutes still skylark dressed in sackcloth!
Now, the Jonah motivates us to enquire what is the intent of a prophesier? A oracle is there to remind us of who we are, so that we can rediscover our God-given obligations. Jonah is so a impersonation of a prophesier; he is, in a manner, the anti-prophet. It is his actions which metaphorically remind Zion of what God 's precedencies are - and thence what their precedencies must be. This irony was likely composed simply after the return of the expatriates from Babylon in the 5th century BC, at the same clip Nebiim like Ezra and Nehemiah were naming for an cultural cleanup of Israel. Houses, in which there were assorted matrimonies, were interrupted upwards; and a stiff separation of supposed aliens from the Hebrew people was applied. Jonah is the response of the opposites of that policy.
The Jonah is about the holiness of all life. The captain of the vas edge for Tarshish desires to salvage the lives of his crew, and offers a forfeiture to Jonah 's God as an atonement for throwing Jonah overboard. The Rex of Nineveh - in Babylon, of all spots! - covers himself in sackcloth and ashes, and commands the same of every dwelling thing - homoes, donkeys, camels, and volailles. All this haps in his impossibly big metropolis ( by ancient Near Eastern touchstones ), constantly joined with the adjective ha'gadolah
- `` the great. '' And bushed response to a brief prophet of doomsday presented by a glowering alien from one of the Rex 's vassal nations, who one day plodded into the eye of his cities to present a message from the noncitizen 's tribal God.
And what is Jonah concerned about? Why, he Holds touched about the decease of a shrub that turned upward overnight and was giving him shadow from the Sun. He Holds related about himself, in other words.
But above all, Jonah is refered about upholding the image of God he holds maked - bizarrely attempting to protect his image even from God Himself. Jonah, one presumes, get on board with Ezra and Nehemiah 's cacoethes for ethnical pureness, then sardonically kvetches, `` I cognized you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and teem in stiff love, and ready to soften from penalise. '' And no, Jonah maked n't desire to be a component of that.
Yet, through this instrument of hatred and intolerance, God reminds the Israelites - and us - that we cognize the faithful because they are workers of the word, and not merely listeners. Peradventure even like the foreign mariners and the people of Nineveh, they may not even be auditors. But what they are is gracious and merciful, slow to ire, pullulate with love, seeking to uphold the lives of others; cognizing that, like the simple shrub which covers Jonah, all life is a gift of God to be valued. And that is the lesson of this short, satiric vaticination. Amen
Copyright, Richard Neil Fernyhough, 2009.
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