Jonah 3:1-10

I don’t suppose it should surprise anyone here who knows me that this Mother of four would be drawn instantly to that passage from Second Isaiah.

I love Jonah and I don’t love Jonah.

I love when Jonah comes up in the readings. First, the book is blessedly short—you could go home tonight and finish it in the time it would take to read an op-ed piece.

Second, it is refreshingly comic. Nowhere do we see that well than in the history of art. Just recently I saw a slide, a tiny motif on the border of an otherwise solemn fresco. Jonah is pictured two thirds of the way into the fish’s mouth. His feet, larger than life, like a jester, are flailing for all they’re worth. Giotto has captured Jonah looking mighty like a spoiled boy.

Jonah is a most unlikely prophet. When Yahweh points him in the direction of Nineveh and says, “Go,” a defiant Jonah hires sailing ship and a crew and heads as fast as he can to the opposite end of earth to southern Spain.

You know the story. God sends a “great” storm. The sailors figure out it is Jonah who is the problem. Jonah offers to jump overboard to redeem the day. After all, wouldn’t anything be better than going back to Joppa and facing God and the task God has chosen for him?

God positions at the side of the boat a “great” fish to catch Jonah. (The word “great” is all over the book of Jonah. It’s as if the writer is giving us clues that this is definitely a larger than life story, and we’d do well to not limit our understanding by reading it literally.) And that’s another thing I love about Jonah. It’s packed with symbolism and irony.)

Once inside the fish, Jonah recites a pastiche of about 6 psalms. As Ignatius would say in his Spiritual Exercises, “A lot of talk, but no action.” In fact, Jonah uses his time in the fish to plan his return to the temple Jerusalem to say a proper thank you is God. But God has other plans.

Tonight’s reading picks up after the fish, at God’s command, delivers Jonah to dry land. There God finds Jonah and tries again. Now you would think that after being wrapped in kelp for three days, Jonah would now be, as 1st Peter says, “Wrapped in humility?” But he is only marginally less perverse. He goes, but only a third of the way, through the city. His oracle, “forty days and Nineveh will turn,” only five words in the Hebrew, is the shortest oracle on record. But God has a strange way of working with the anemic efforts of his human partners, whether they be Jonah or ourselves.

The Ninevites fall to their knees as quickly as the fish swallowed Jonah. But if you think the Jonah in that fish is the big miracle of the story, look at this chapter we just read. The text tells us that Nineveh as an “exceedingly great City.” And this we know to be factual. It was the capital and the largest city of the entire Assyrian empire, probably the site of today’s Mosel in Iraq. We should note too, that this story is set in the eighth century, when Assyrian power was at its height. Remember that the Assyrians had been pummeling the Israelites not for years, for generations, but for centuries. Besides the Assyrians were non Jews, oppressors of the most violent type.

So for the people of this city to undergo such an instant turn around strains any image we might have of the wideness of God’s mercy. And that is exactly why the author uses the Assyrians—to remind us of the unpredictability of God, to recall to his readers that God’s forgiveness is not limited to the “in” crowd.

I would like to report that in the following chapter Jonah embraced his God humbly and praised God for the success of their joint venture, but no. To be sure, Jonah was astoundingly effective. But we find him on the edge of the city, sulking under a withering bush, wishing he were dead. Why? Because God did not keep his promise to destroy the city. Jonah could not rejoice. He could not move beyond his narrow definition of himself, of God. He preferred to isolate himself than to move to that place where he did not wish ill on his enemy.

The King we hear about in this reading is the exact reverse of Jonah.

And this is what I don’t love about Jonah. Jonah is a caricature of a bad tempered prophet who can’t move beyond his own bias. Maybe that’s why we identify so closely with him! But he hogs the stage in the book—and in the tradition. So the story of the conversion of the sailors in Chapter 2 and the King in tonight’s chapter get totally eclipsed by Jonah’s vaudevillian antics--and they don’t make it into Giotto’s frescoes.

So I suggest we take a look at this king. Yes, he is the reverse image of Jonah. He LISTENS to what his people are experiencing. Then he does that wonderfully humble thing for a leader—he begins the reform with himself. He puts aside his royal cloak and covers himself with sackcloth. He sets an example for his subjects. It is as if he can hear first Peter’s words “Wrap yourselves in humility, that you might serve one another (1 Peter 5:5).

Then he uses the truth of who he is –a king--to turn the city around and make the penitence of his people total. He proclaims a serious fast. The fast is to be so total that even the sheep get little coats of sackcloth. (A striking image of how pervasive should be our submission to our God).

And here is the part that brings my prideful knees to the ground. The king attends to the ridding of the city of its violence, because he senses it to be what is needed. And only then, almost as an afterthought he adds, “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind and save us.” You can almost sense his giving God the freedom to do what He wills. How many of us can really let God be free? Not me, certainly not Jonah.

It occurs to me that this King is truly a humble man--as many great leaders are. But this humility word bothers us. It evokes old church baggage of being a doormat and “I’m not good enough to do that.” It’s what we call in our house” martyr points” meaning, “Oh, I’ll make the coffee, I’ll do the dishes” Even in a wider context we hear that we are a humble country and proud of it which makes me know we are for starving for a new language.

St Ignatius in his spiritual Exercises, tells us that in pride and humility lies the difference whether or not we reach for life or for its opposite. Knowing human nature, Ignatius says that most of us can’t even desire humility. How does he handle that? In characteristic pragmatism: If you don’t desire it, trust me that it is worth desiring and pray for the desire to desire humility.

Now certainly Ignatius has the vision. But the vocabulary still needs to be brought up to date. Certainly humility has less to do with viewing ourselves as lowly than it does with seeking to bring into our full consciousness the truth of who we really are. But at the same time, like the king in the story, we need to be open to the “more” that God may be calling us to.

So we need to look for humility in new places. Maybe less on the religion pages and more in the Style section. For example, last Saturday in a tribute to the playwright Arthur Miller in the Post, the writer noted that Miller was one of the three great American playwrights of the twentieth century. This critic believed that Eugene O’Neill wrote to exorcize his own demons. Tennessee Williams, he said, wrote to give expression to the power of memory. Miller’s work, the writer observed, was shaped by a responsibility he felt to society. “The idea of a communal bond,” the critic wrote, “the fealty a person owes to something more important than himself or herself, courses through the work of Arthur Miller.”

.A communal bond? The fealty we owe to something more important than ourselves? I think that’s getting close.

To wrap ourselves in humility? Maybe that too great a leap.

But what about just trying humility on for size this second week of lent.

Find new words for it.

Look for examples of it

Listen in conversations for it.

Catch ourselves and laugh when we when we look more like Jonah than the king

Dream about what it might look like around our kitchen tables and in the boardrooms.

Lastly, pray for it, pray to feel its power drawing us deeper into this joyful season.