Matthew 12:38-41  Jonah 3:10-4:11
 
Sermon preached on Sunday, January 21, 2024, at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church by Gary Furr, pastor.
 
          The majority of discussion about the book of Jonah in, unfortunately, has been about his adventure with the great fish.  “Great fish” is actually the translation of the Hebrew, so it is not possible to say with clarity whether it was a whale or some other great fish that swallowed Jonah. I said “unfortunately” on purpose.  That focus misses the whole point of the story!

          The story of Jonah is about a stubborn prophet whose heart is resistant to God.  God calls Jonah to go to Ninevah and preach that they must repent, for judgment is at hand.  Jonah refuses and runs away.  He hops aboard a ship bound for Tarshish, as far from Ninevah as the people of that time knew about.
 
          God sends a storm upon them.  They discover that Jonah is the cause and that he is running from God.  He begs them to throw him overboard.  At first they refuse, but finally, seeing no other course, they relent and toss him into the deep, where he is swallowed by a great fish, where he resides for three days.
 
          While Jonah is in the fish’s belly, God deals with his heart.  He calls out to God and God hears him and causes the fish to vomit Jonah out upon the dry land.  Frederick Buechener wrote that “Jonah’s relief at being delivered from the whale can hardly have been any greater than the whale’s at being delivered from Jonah.”
 
          So then we come to Jesus, who steadfastly refuses every demand for “a sign” to prove who he is except one, this one, “The sign of Jonah.” And Matthew’s telling includes this description: as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth
         
          As the story of Jonah goes on, Jonah is vomited up by the fish and now turns around and does what God says. Jonah goes to Ninevah and preaches.  Ninevah, of course, was the capital of the Assyrian empire, the hated superpower that oppressed Israel in Jonah’s time.  When the people repent, God decides in his merciful love to spare them instead of sending the judgment he originally promised.  Jonah’s reaction is all too human!  He becomes angry.
 
          Jonah sits on a hill to wait and see if perhaps God might destroy the city anyway.  God then causes a plant to grow up and shade Jonah’s head from the head, and Jonah is so happy that the plant has come!  Then God sends a worm to destroy the plant.  Jonah becomes furious about the plant’s death.
          God uses the occasion to teach Jonah a lesson.  If he can become so angry about one plant’s death, why should God not care about the deaths of thousands of people in Ninevah?  The lesson is not lost on us, either.
 
          Some years ago, the Alabama Baptist carried a cartoon about Jonah.  Deep inside the whale’s belly, Jonah stood ankle-deep in liquid.  The soft stomach wall of the whale arches over him like Monstro the Magnificent in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio.  Jonah holds a candle up to a small map on the stomach wall with a large replica of a whale printed on it, an X marked in the middle, and under the whale, some words with an arrow pointing to the X that say, “YOU ARE HERE.”
 
          The first thing we can do that will make a difference is to understand where we are.  The most difficult person with whom to be truthful is myself.  To tell myself the truth is to face some things I would prefer to leave undisturbed.  For then I must do something about them.
 
          Why do our attitudes against others become so entrenched?  Everyone else in the story is more forgiving than Jonah.  God is more loving, of course.  But the foreign sailors are concerned about Jonah.  So is Jonah.  He is full of self-pity.  The people of Ninevah are willing to repent on the basis of a one-sentence sermon.  Even the great fish doesn’t begrudge Jonah a second chance and spits him up on the shore.  Everyone is willing to adjust except Jonah.
         
          Jonah’s story is more than a story about a whale swallowing a man.  It is more than a story about a man who is taught a lesson about his prejudice (which it is).  It is also a story about how difficult a task it can be for Jonah to swallow the truth.
         
          God teaches Jonah that it is possible to be swallowed by the whale without being lost.  You can forsake a shallow and hardened life for a deeper one and not lose your way.  But can we believe that?  Everything in our world says, “If you take up the way of Christ, you will lose.”  Love is too costly, we think.
 
          What has happened to American Christianity that we have turned away from the Jesus way?  I have recently read Jon Ward’s, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation. Growing up as a child of a pastor in one of the most influential charismatic churches growing out of the Jesus movement, he found himself growing up in an insulated Christian culture where only Christians were the good guys and everyone else was a bad guy not to be trusted. As he became an adult and a career in journalism he discovered the false piety of that churchy world that crushed questioners and dissenters with a sanctimonious smile and considered the victims of church politics as collateral damage.
 
“All my life I have been a mearcstapa, or a border-stalker. Mearcstapa is an Old English word used in Beowulf. Painter and author Makoto Fujimura used this term, and his modern translation of border-stalker, to describe those who “are uncomfortable in homogenous groups” and yet are still present in them, and thus they live “on the edge of their groups, going in and out of them.” (Jon Ward, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Betrayed a Generation
 
Once we step onto that border and look out at the world clearly, we see a world God still loves, loves more than we ever did. And if we love God, how can we hate the world God loves? How can we substitute power, politics, fear, anger, and tribalism for “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life?
 
          So Jonah sits under the tender plant and comes to understand the very heart of God toward the world.  Jonah detests going there.  So his dilemma is this: “I am called to something I detest.  Yet I cannot resist it. Anyone who has ever been vomited by a whale can understand how Jonah might say, “Well, I hate these Assyrians, but not as bad as I hate being whale upchuck on the beach.”  His behavior is different but his heart is not yet changed.  For when God decides to spare the people, Jonah is enraged.
 
          Thomas Merton once wrote that we must come out of the whale and the whale must die.  He meant that as long as we are spit on the shore and remain unchanged, there is always the danger that we will be swallowed again.  But there is also the danger that we will remain within the whale, and that will not do.  The whale must die, as all creatures do, so to remain there, for Jonah, was to die anyway.
 
          And that is what God knows: that unless Jonah himself dies to this stubborn self-centeredness that clutches onto his prejudice against Ninevah, he will yet be swallowed by some other whale once more.
 
          God does not ask us to predict the end of the world with our little evangelical timecharts and conferences. God only says, “Go love this world. I love it far more than you. If you love me, love it, too. Love them. Friends, enemies, immature, silly, mean, lost, saved, loved all of them. I do. They are far away from me. Tell them I love them and want them to be my children. Repent and go, not only for their sake but yours.”
 
          Jonah didn’t see how the two connected.  Until he did, he might as well have stayed in the whale. Jonah was sure that he could love God as a good Jew without loving Assyrians.  Yet all along he knew about this God of his, that God had a terrible tendency that Jonah dreaded–he was merciful and compassionate.  This Jonah did not want. Yet he knew deep within that it is the very nature of God to love, to redeem, to reclaim.
 
          Jonah’s dilemma was God’s so-called weakness. Jonah could not come closer to his God until he faced some truths about himself.  He could not move closer to his God until he allowed this truth about his God to be his truth as well.  Jonah’s dilemma is this: until he loves these Assyrians, he cannot love God. And to be able to love them, something must die.
  
          This is the one true sign Jesus saw in the story of Jonah—something must die before we can truly live. This is true for Jesus, who will literally die and be raised, but also for all of us who try to follow him.
 
          Each of us, somewhere, must come to that fork in the road where something—a cherished hope,
clutching onto something we don’t think we can live without,
a fear bigger than our faith.
Maybe a conditional faith that says, “Lord as long as life goes my way, I’m with you, but I can’t deal with this or that.”
 
          Whatever it is, it has to die for resurrection to come. And it’s painful, unbearably so, before we relinquish it, and must do so by faith in him, before the new may come.
 
          The sign of Jonah is this—only Jesus can do what we need doing, and it must be done by him but, and this is crucial, in an through each of us. The dying and the rising again must happen in our experience as well. And it does, every day in the world somewhere, when someone comes to God’s love in Jesus Christ. And Christ takes each of us with him into his death and brings forth new life.
         
          That is our memory of Jesus, who all alone entered the belly of the monster and stayed until God brought him forth on the third day. And they were so happy, impossibly so, but then he said, “Now, all of you, come with me.”
          It was love that sent him there, not despair or defeat, but love, saving love. A suffering love that understands and more. A saving love that redeems us into new life. That opens the windows of heaven to pour out blessing and new love for the world. But it only comes through the belly of the fish, this death of all of our falsehoods and sins and selfishness. It dies with him. And in baptism is raised to newness of life.
 
          So we come to this table, a perfect image of taking his life into ourselves. What holds you from letting this love enter you, your body, your heart, your mind and thoughts? Let it go, come after him, take Him into yourself, love what he loves,do what he commands you, follow him, all of Him, and all shall be well.
         
                                                         Bibliography
 
          Roberta C. Bondi, Memories of God (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), 201.
         
Merton, Thomas.  Entering the Silence: Becoming a Monk and a Writer.  The Journals of
 
Thomas Merton, volume two, 1941-1952.  Edited by Jonathan Montaldo. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.
         
          Merton, Thomas.  The Sign of Jonas.  New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1953.
         
          Pannell, William.  The Coming Race Wars.