“Cows in Sackcloth”
By Rev. Dr. Jason Byassee
Sunday, March 8, 2026
Reading: Jonah 3-4:1
One of the most outrageous things we Christians believe is that God chooses a people and cannot un-choose. We call it the doctrine of election. For whatever reason the God of heaven and earth repairs creation by binding himself to one people, choosing them, and not the others. The goal of this choice is to bless all the others and heal everything through that chosen people. But it’s awfully hard on the chosen people themselves.
Scholars describe this as “the scandal of particularity.” Modern people assume God should play fair, not have favourites, deal with people equally, like we think we would. That God does not, seems wrong to us somehow. Hence the scandal of particularity.
Karl Barth was the greatest theologian of the 20th century. One of his students was an Orthodox Jew named Michael Wyschogrod. When his fellow Jews asked why he studied with a non-Jew, Wyschogrod said, ‘Barth believes God elects Israel. That’s all I need.’
So, here’s a question. Is the doctrine of election good news for those not-chosen? And if so, how so?
That question is what the book of Jonah is about. If you know about the book of Jonah that’s probably because Jonah gets swallowed by a whale. We are happy about the animal and put the story in children’s books. I’m not 100 percent sure this story is child-suitable, to be honest. In the actual story the whale is a sidenote. It’s not even a whale to be honest, it’s a fish, Hebrew has another word for whale. See in Jewish thinking, the sea is chaos. Monsters are there. Enemies sail from there. The sea where you drown. Other ancient peoples loved the sea, adventured on it, told great seafaring tales—like the Phoenicians and the Greeks. Not the Jews. We’ll stick to the holy land, thanks very much. Just look at what happens when you go to sea!
Jonah is a prophet to the northern tribes of Israel who are later destroyed by Assyria in 722 BC. The book is written much later, and in the story, God appears to Jonah and commands him to go to Nineveh to preach. And Jonah won’t do it. He books passage on a ship going to Spain, the opposite direction from modern-day Iraq where Nineveh is. See Jonah knows that if God sends a prophet to a people, God means to save them. And Jonah wants no part in the salvation of his enemies. He wants them destroyed. So, if God is going to save Ninevites, he’s going to have to find another prophet. Jonah sets sail and God sends a storm.
Now, what do you know about sailors? They’re not usually thought of as pious, right? Girl in every port, cuss like a sailor, all the cliches. Well, they also say if you want to learn to pray, go to sea. Facing a storm, these pagan sailors are all calling on their gods. But Jonah is asleep in the hold. The sailors ask him to pray too. Jonah says:
I am a Hebrew, I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land... Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quiet down for you, for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.
The pagan sailors don’t do it! They row against the sea. They don’t want to murder someone to save their skin. But finally, they relent, throw Jonah overboard, and the sea stops, and scripture says, “Then the men feared the Lord even more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.”
These pagan godless sailors have gone from each praying to their god for fear of the storm to fearing the Lord, the God of Israel, and making vows to him. This is Jonah’s first but not last act of accidental evangelism. Jonah knows who the true God is, and is actively disobeying him, not praying, running the other way. Do you see? The not-chosen people here are exemplary. The chosen, Jonah, is a self-centred snot. And he becomes fish food for it.
So, the fish vomits Jonah up on the land. Look at the sea beast’s blast of breath as he belches up the prophet. And God says okay, where were we, oh right, you were going to Nineveh. Jonah goes. He marches into Nineveh and preaches this sermon,
Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!
I taught preaching for seven years. If a student turned in this one sentence sermon, I wouldn’t even flunk it. I’d hand it back as an incomplete and tell them to start over. I mean usually in preaching you’re supposed to establish a connection, get people smiling along, then romance them into something more substantial ... none of that. Jonah just says, “God hates y’all and is fixing to kill y’all.” That’s my southern translation.
It’s hard to blame Jonah. The Assyrian empire that Nineveh is the capital of is Israel’s historic enemy and Nineveh would eventually destroy the ten northern tribes, swallow them up like a giant monster and digest them so they don’t exist anymore. Israelites would feel toward Nineveh the way our ancestors felt about Berlin. I want them destroyed, not saved. Jonah then is like a surly teenager. Told to load the dishwasher he crashes the dishes, slams the door closed. Okay fine he’ll do it, but he’ll do it wrong and break something important.
And the Ninevites listen. And repent. Just like Jonah knew they would.
And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
I’ve told you before about the kids in my college town who responded to the death of Osama bin Laden with a parade, they tore down the football goal posts, celebrating with chants of “OBL, you’re in hell.” This is nothing to celebrate. Even the death of a mass murderer is just more death. Something to celebrate would be if Bin Laden and Al Qaeda converted to a religion of peace, then it’s parade-time. The Ninevites convert. They repent: That is, beg forgiveness for being warlike. Wear sackcloth: clothes that itch and scratch so you can’t get comfortable, a way of doing penance. Even their animals are in sackcloth, down to the goats and the cows and the bunnies. The king of Nineveh says: “Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.”
The king of Nineveh is a better theologian than Jonah and he’s not even an Israelite. He doesn’t even presume that they’ll be forgiven: who knows? Maybe God will be merciful. And that’s exactly what God does. Jonah wanted God to rain down fire on Nineveh like Sodom and Gomorrah. Instead, God rains down mercy. And Jonah is furious. He’s like Javert in Les Misérables, “I knew it!”
We Christians have our favourite verses of the Bible. Perhaps you have one. John 3:16 is pretty universal, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that whoever believes in him might not perish but might have everlasting life.” Exodus 34:6 is sort of the John 3:16 of the Old Testament:
The Lord, the Lord,
a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.
I haven’t seen it on a banner behind a goalpost at a football game yet, maybe next season (some of you have Bills tickets, right? Lions tickets? How come your preacher never sees those?!). Jonah takes this beloved verse and spits it in God’s face:
O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.
Jonah knows all about God. Knows God is merciful. And he hates that. He doesn’t want grace for his enemies; he wants their destruction. The book of James in the New Testament says something similar: ‘you believe in God? Good for you! You know who else believes God exists? The demons.’ That belief is not faith, not yet. We also must love God and neighbour and enemy. And the reason we’re commanded to love neighbour and enemy both, is they’re usually the same people. Jonah wants another sort of god altogether. Another Old Testament prophet you’ve probably not heard of. Nahum, is written against the Ninevites, the way Jonah wants:
“Woe to the bloody city, all full of lies and booty ... all who hear the news of your destruction clap their hands over you. For upon whom has not come your unceasing evil?”
Now that’s what God is for Jonah says. Why couldn’t I get the God of Nahum? Instead, I get the God of mercy. Jonah is accusing God of being soft on sin. Sinners are for punishing, don’t you know that, God? God responds, but dear Jonah, what if I want to forgive sinners, like you?
So, Jonah stomps outside the city in hopes that God might still rain down hellfire on his enemies. There he is with a good vantage to watch the destruction. Here’s another vision of Jonah, burning with anger at the city and at God. God appoints a vine to shelter Jonah’s head. In a part of the world that can reach 50 degrees, shade’s a great thing (for our American listeners, that’s 122 Fahrenheit, please catch up with the rest of the world). Jonah is very happy about the vine. This is the only time we’re told Jonah is happy in the whole book that bears his name. Then God appoints a worm to chew the plant, and it dies. God sends a sultry east wind, like he did at the Exodus to dry the sea, and the plant dies, and Jonah is scorched. In the reading you heard earlier, Jonah is “very angry.” A better translation is “he burns with fury.” Jonah was burning inside, now he’s burning outside too. This is hell: witnessing the tenderness of God and roasting with fury at it. Jonah does his snotty teenager thing and begs to die. And God asks Jonah such a tender question: Is it right for you to be so angry?
One of you said in Bible study God is like a very patient teacher, trying to coax a toddler into being concerned about someone else and not just themselves. Come on Jonah, you can do it, take that happiness you had about the bush and apply it to other human beings. Another minister asked me once: have you ever known someone who was simply a narcissist, 100 percent self-concerned only? Yeah, I’ve known such people. At times I’ve been such a person. God sets up this elaborate little tango with the bush and Jonah to try and lure him out of self-obsession. It doesn’t work. And the book ends this way:
You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 11 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?
That’s it. That’s the end of the book. Two books in the whole Bible end with a question mark. One is Nahum, where the prophet denounces Nineveh. The other is Jonah where God saves Nineveh. Jonah wishes he was in the other book.
What to make of this scripture? I love it so much, I hope you can tell.
Well, one, God doesn’t choose people because they’re good. On the contrary, God seems to have chosen the worst character in the book, Jonah, to be his prophet. Jonah is an image for all Israel: Chosen not because he’s good but because he’s comically not. In this book, the sailors do what God wants. The Ninevites do what God wants. The fish does what God wants. The bush does what God wants. The worm and the sultry east wind do what God wants. The only one to disobey God is Jonah, his prophet, his people. Jonah in Hebrew means “dove.” It’s a term of endearment like sweetheart or precious. And honey baby Jonah is a detestable character. Do you see what the book is showing? Don’t think you’re good because you’re chosen. No, you’re chosen so God can show his glory. Outsiders, pagans, enemies, even worms and winds and fish might be better than you. All religions, all peoples are tempted to say we’re great others are bad. The book of Jonah turns that upside down, inside-out. Nah, we’re wretched. Everybody else is good. But just look what God can do with wretches like me.
Two, Jonah is an environmentalist’s paradise. All creation does God’s will except God’s chosen creature Jonah. The fish, the worm, the wind, the bush, the cows all models of obedience and repentance. A friend runs one of the most interesting ecological ministries in Canada. She told me recently of her biggest obstacle in fundraising: the word “ecology.” We’re in a moment of political backlash against environmentalism. People hear the “e” word and figure she’s a crazy hippie tree hugger. Truth: she is a crazy hippie tree-hugger, she just hugs trees for Jesus. This political backlash runs face-first into Jonah in the Bible. God loves everything God has made. Every particle in creation exists to sing God’s praise. And non-human creation often does God’s bidding better than we do. Whatever’s popular or not, God loves created reality, matter, enough to become matter in Mary’s womb, enough to save matter one day soon. This series in Lent at TEMC is on how to repent. If you want to learn how to repent watch Nineveh’s cows. They do it better than anybody. And the Bible is an ecologist’s book—because God is the first ecologist.
Third and finally, what an enemy is for. There is religion, including in our Bible, which thinks an enemy is just cannon fodder, there to burn. God does not. God cares about the Ninevites and wants them saved, not condemned. There’s a famous story about a woman upbraiding Abraham Lincoln because he wanted to have mercy on the defeated South. Perhaps she’d lost a husband, sons, nearly everyone had. “Sir we must destroy our enemies!” Lincoln responded with so much gospel. How did he do this when he was the only US president yet never to have joined a church? And yet the best theologian that office has produced by a mile. He said, “Madam haven’t I destroyed my enemy if I’ve made him my friend?” My fellow Americans are at war in the middle east again, seems cyclical and predictable. During one of the previous Gulf wars a pacifist teacher of mine was asked what a more Christian response to Saddam Hussein might have been than bombing. Why don’t we drop 50,000 missionaries on the place? Then when the military tries to bomb, they’ll say wait, uh, there are all these missionaries running around, we can’t fire. The interrogator objected: our church isn’t capable of that. My teacher responded, we used to. All the time. Send kids all over the world at risk of their lives to save people who might reject them or worse. We ask soldiers to sacrifice all the time; how come we don’t expect the same of our fellow Christians?
I was in South Sudan once during a break in the fighting there. Another place where everyone has suffered, under a genocidal regime in Khartoum indiscriminately dropping bombs on civilians because they’re a different race and religion. I asked a bishop what hope he had? That a newly independent country would garner international support and stop the violence? Doesn’t seem likely, he said. Well, what then? ‘Well, I hope we’ll convert Khartoum. That they’ll repent. It’s already starting you know. Brave people risking their lives to evangelize in that city of terror.’ Now that’s a Jonah-sized hope. You hope they’ll die? Stand down from fighting? Nah, we hope to convert them. And if it’s the book of Jonah we’re talking about, that’ll mean our conversion as well.
Fourth and finally, Jesus loves Jonah. One could argue Jesus only knows who he is because of this book that Mary taught him bouncing on her knee. Jonah comes from a town walking distance from Nazareth. When Jesus is asked for a sign, he won’t do it. All he’ll do is point to Jonah:
He answered them, “An evil and adulterous generation asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. 40 For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth. 41 The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah, and indeed something greater than Jonah is here.
I’m not sure what Jesus means at all. Except that God has a soft spot for outsiders and loves to save the unlikely. God isn’t there to zap enemies. But to suffer and save us.
I’ll conclude with this. The church has often seen Jonah as a sort of model for preachers. Here’s one such image. I don’t like it. Looks pious. I’ve already told you what a snot Jonah is. Don’t make him a saint. God doesn’t use Jonah because he’s good, he uses him because he’s not. This might be better. There’s a tradition in central eastern Europe of building pulpits that look like fish. I see that and I immediately commit the sin of covetousness. We wants it. Can’t we make me one of those? For real, we got artsy types in here. What’s this mean? I guess the person talking up here is Jonah. We smell like fish guts, not at all happy to be here. Who’re y’all? Ninevites surprised to find yourselves forgiven. And who is God? The One who likes to save all the wrong people in all the weirdest ways. Thanks, be. Amen.