“Who Saves Creation?”
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Text: Jonah 3:1-10
I have always had a great affinity for the story of Jonah in the Old Testament. It probably goes back to my childhood days when our Sunday school superintendent thought that it would be a wonderful idea to have a pageant depicting the story of Jonah. Trust me; it wasn't like a pageant at Timothy Eaton Memorial Church! It was far more bare bones than that. They asked us to audition for the parts, and of course, I wanted to be Jonah. Who wouldn't want to be Jonah? Jonah is the star. It is named after Jonah. Jonah is the one who proclaims the Word of God. I wanted to be Jonah.
The Sunday school team did an interview of all the candidates and concluded that I would make a good head for the whale! So, with papier mache and canvas, they made me the head of the whale. Jonah jumps into my big head, stays in my stomach for three days and I get fed up with him and spit him out. It must have been a foretaste of the fact that I would become a minister, I think. Anyway, I played the part and I loved every minute of it. I loved the story. I thought it was funny. I thought it was engaging. I got the humour of it.
Many years later, in a completely separate and totally different experience, I realized for the first time in my life the sheer power of the big fish of the sea. This was no longer a laughing matter. A friend of mine and I had decided to go fishing off the coast of South Africa in a place called Knysna, which is in the area that is known as the Garden Route, a beautiful part of the world. We went out in this fishing boat through the lagoon through the Knysna Head out into the ocean and we fished.
After a little while of fishing and feeling good about ourselves, we felt this most amazing thud on the bottom of the boat. We thought we had hit some kind of rock and that we should move on, so we went a few metres in another direction. Later on, another tremendous thud at the bottom of the boat! We were petrified! We just sat with no idea what was happening until, in the distance, we saw a dorsal fin out of the water. Then we realized our boat had been bumped by a great white shark.
We immediately went back into port. You have never met two young teenagers who prayed the way we prayed when we finally got onto the dock. And it took us days to get over it. We knew that the great whites of the Indian Ocean take many, many people, but we never dreamt of the power and the thunderous sound of being hit by one of these behemoths. It was scary! It gave me a great love, it gave me a great passion, it gave me a great understanding, I think, for the beasts of the sea, and how in awe we fragile human beings should be.
It is therefore with some surprise that many years later, this time at Harvard Divinity School with a Professor called Francois Schussler Fiorenza teaching Old Testament, I encountered Jonah again. He had covered the background of the story of Jonah, the different ways in which it is interpreted, where it came from, the timing of the date and, in the middle of the lecture made two earth shattering statements.
The first of these statements was that the Book of Jonah was more about cows than it was about a big fish. My whole world was shattered! He had lost his mind! I had played the big fish. I am sure it was about the big fish! Isn't it the story of Jonah and the Whale after all? He reminded us that the whale is never mentioned in the story. Big fish, leviathan maybe, is mentioned in the story but not a whale necessarily. Then he went on to suggest the story has more to do with cows than it does with a big fish. Why?
Well, let me just briefly tell you the story of Jonah. This is Jonah in the speed dial! This is the story: Jonah, man of God, is chosen by Yahweh to go and preach to Nineveh. Nineveh is the capital of Assyria, the greatest enemy of Israel, and Jonah is from Israel. Jonah concludes that he doesn't want to go to Nineveh. He gets in a boat, goes as far away from Nineveh as he can. He starts to go to Tarsus across the Mediterranean. He thinks that he is getting away from God. God has other plans!
The boat he is on hits a storm. The men on the boat with Jonah think that Jonah, the Israelite, is to blame for the storm. They conclude they must throw Jonah overboard and the boat will be safe. Jonah goes into the sea and is eaten by a big fish. The fish holds him in his belly for three days. The fish gets sick and tired of Jonah and spits him up on land. Jonah is in a state of shock and God tells him, “I told you I want you to go to Nineveh.” Jonah reluctantly agrees to go to Nineveh.
Jonah then has to proclaim a message to Nineveh. The first message was that if they don't repent, Nineveh would be destroyed. He doesn't really like that, but he goes and he preaches it anyway. To his absolute amazement, the citizens of Nineveh repent! Jonah is angry. After all, this means now the people of Nineveh are going to be saved. Jonah doesn't want them to be saved. They are Assyrians, and he wants them to die!
He gets mad with God. God gets mad with Jonah. God says, “Surely, Jonah, I can show compassion to whomever I want. ” He sits Jonah under a tree where he gets sunburned and angry. God lets him know what it is like when he gets angry with people, and Jonah thinks, “Oh dear me, that's right, I had forgotten! I had been in the belly of the fish. You are God, and that is all right.” Nineveh repented. God saved Nineveh. End of story. There you go!
Now, what have cows got to do with this? Well, here is a fascinating thing. In this story of Jonah, after he went to Nineveh and the people repented, all the animals repented as well. This was in our scripture passage today. There is a Hebrew word, “behemah” and as David McMaster explained to me, in the Book of Exodus it means both humanity and beasts, but most of the time when you read it within the Hebrew scripture it means “cows.”
Finally, at the end of the story when the cows and the other animals and people have repented, and God had forgiven them, they were ultimately saved and forgiven by God. Why is this important? It is important because it shows in very early literature how God sees the world. This is after all the Creator from the Book of Genesis.
This is a story about God's redemptive power. God is not only concerned with the salvation of human beings who were made in his image and who, by the way, are his primary concern, God is also concerned with the salvation of creation as a whole. God wants the whole of the creative order to be redeemed. The problem is that in our sinfulness as human beings, with our myopia, we often do not see the needs that are around us for creation as a whole.
That is why at the earlier service this morning, for those of you who missed it, we had the Blessing of the Pets. This is not, as one person said to me a few years ago, some trivial idea just to try and bring people into the church. If you came to the service you would know that. It is recognition that all of God's creation is valuable in his eyes. It is for the whole of the created order that God decides to redeem. It is for the beasts, the animals, the herds, the creatures of the earth that God is also concerned.
In our sinfulness, we break up the world into parts. We categorize, we limit, we classify, and when we do, we dismiss God's role in the salvation of the created order. That is why I read the passage from the Book of Romans this morning, from Chapter 8. In the Book of Romans, Paul makes the case that through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, through the power of eternity breaking into that tomb and raising Jesus from the dead, God had not only prepared the salvation of humankind, God had prepared for the salvation of creation and the world as a whole.
God's redemptive power is not limited or restricted in the way that we often think it is, and that is why he says, “We wait for the day when creation, which now is crumbling, which is now subject to decay, will be glorified and no longer be constrained by the limitations of the natural order.” God created the world but God wanted to redeem it. God created the beasts of the world and the animals of the world and the nature of the world in order that God could save it forever more. It is from our perspective and our sinful limitations that we do not see the big picture. But, there is more....
Professor Schussler Fiorenza said something else. The story of Jonah is more about the Ninevites than it is about Jonah himself. The purpose of God's call to Jonah was to go and to redeem the people outside the boundaries of Israel. It is in that struggle between Jonah and God that we see God's passion for the Assyrians and the Ninevites.
First of all, Jonah is frightened about being sent to Nineveh because he knows or assumes that the Word of God will be rejected. He has made an assumption before the word has been spoken that the Word of God will not be effective. He limits the Word of God and God's power because of his own fear. He is frightened to go to Nineveh because he is frightened of failing. Then, when God finally gets his attention by putting him in the belly of the whale and saving him, and Jonah eventually goes to Nineveh, Jonah gets mad that he has been successful!
Isn't this just full of irony? First he is frightened that he might lose; then when he is successful he gets mad at God again. Why? It is because he had already made up his mind about the Ninevites. He had already assumed that they were hopeless, they were going to be dammed, there was no chance for them in earth or in sheol, that they were gone, and that nothing that he could say could make a difference.
I want to tie the story of Jonah into today, because I have a fear that there is a prevailing attitude, and it arises mainly from the study of religions, that the world and society, even our city, is just nicely, neatly carved into religious groupings. We classify and we quantify people according to their religious tradition, and we limit ourselves and we limit society on the basis of that as if somehow the faith that you were born with or the culture that you come from automatically assumes you are going to have a certain set of beliefs or a certain set of convictions.
A lot of times this is very static. It is frozen in time. Therefore, if everyone is classified, belonging to one religion or another or one culture or another or one language or another, then we basically just have everything neatly ascribed and there is no need for the Word of God to be spoken outside the bounds or the categories of what people have deemed to be religious. In other words, the Word of God is only for the Christians because we have that nicely categorized.
Yet so often the world and society and the city is much more dynamic than that. People are not static creatures any more than the Ninevites were a static group. The world changes; people change. We make assumptions about people, often on the basis of their culture. We assume that because they are from a certain place they must belong to a certain religious grouping.
I find, living in Toronto I am shocked almost every week by Christians that I find who I would never, by virtue of their culture, assume were Christian. Very often we forget, even in dominant cultures there can be minorities who still have deeply held Christian convictions. That can apply to people who live in Israel, people who live in Palestine, people who live in Pakistan, people who live in India, people who live in the north or people who live in the south, that in fact it is much more dynamic than that.
I think this static view that we have of religion actually compromises the desire to share the living, vibrant Word of God with everybody, with anybody. How it is received, how it is appropriated, whether it is accepted or rejected, is surely not the business of the Church. The business of the Church is to proclaim the Word of God and let God decide where it lands. Let God decide who responds.
That is the lesson that Jonah had to learn. He had already made up his mind. The Assyrians are bad people, they are damned, it's is over with, I don't want to proclaim the Word of God, he thought. To his absolute shock and for the humility of Jonah and the humility of the people who had sent him, the Assyrians responded and repented all as did creation.
The great Jewish scholar, Herschel, in a commentary on Jonah which is probably the greatest by any Old Testament scholar, wrote and I think this is just marvellous advice and a marvellous summary:
God's answer to Jonah, stressing the supremacy of compassion upsets the possibility of looking for a rational coherence of God's ways with the world. History would be more intelligible if God's Word was the last word: final and unambiguous like a dogma or an unconditional decree. It would be easier if God's anger became effective automatically once wickedness had reached its full measure, punishment would destroy it. Yet, beyond justice and anger lies the mystery of God's compassion.
When Jonah decided he wasn't going to proclaim the Word of God any more, God simply took him to one side and he said, “Jonah, surely you realize it is up to me on whom I have compassion, not you.”
“If I love the Ninevites,” as George Hunter III of Asbury Seminary once said, “it is not up to Jonah to decide.” If the Word of God's grace needs to be heard in the city, it is up to God to determine whether that word is proclaimed. But if people have already made up their minds, already neatly carved out who should and should not hear the Word of God, how can the compassion of God be heard by all?
What Francois Schussler Fiorenza was talking about in his lecture was that the Book of Jonah is about God's grace.
There is a marvellous story, and it is told by a Dr. Hohnsberger, of something that happened in the court of Elizabeth I, the Queen of England. There was a member of her court who despised her and decided she was going to murder Queen Elizabeth. She dressed up as a page, went up into Elizabeth's boudoir, and she planned on stabbing her when Elizabeth came to bed.
The one thing that this woman didn't realize was that many of the people who work in the household of Elizabeth always check the bedrooms before the Queen enters and hiding behind a screen they found her. They dragged her before the Queen. She pleaded with the Queen for clemency. She asked for pardon and forgiveness. This was the dialogue that took place between them:
Elizabeth said to her, “If I show you grace, what promise do you make for the future?”
The woman replied, “Grace that has conditions; grace that is fettered by precaution is not grace at all.”
The Queen, realizing she was caught in a theological bind, agreed. She said, “In that case, my grace will let you go free with no conditions.”
Here was the greatness of the story: This woman then served Queen Elizabeth with every fibre in her body as a loyal servant until the day she died.
Jonah went to Nineveh and asked Nineveh to repent. Nineveh repented. God poured God's grace on Nineveh. God's forgiveness: no more conditions. Nineveh was to be saved. Jonah, the man of faith who had delivered the Word, was so overwhelmed by this and at the end of the story, you are left realizing that the great Jonah was the humble one and the Ninevites were the ones lifted into the hands of God.
May Toronto, Nineveh, know of God's compassion! Amen.