Wednesday, March 2 (Ash Wednesday, Lent Week 0)

 

 

 Jonah and the Whale (1621) by Pieter Lastman

The story of Jonah is a familiar one: God commands Jonah to go to Nineveh to “preach against it” because of the sin endemic in the people there. But Jonah is afraid and he runs away, jumping on a ship to get as far away as he can. But though he runs from God, God pursues him; he sends a great storm and the other people on the boat, realizing that Jonah and Jonah’s God is the reason for the storm, throw Jonah overboard. Jonah is swallowed by a huge fish and we hear his prayer from inside its belly, where he remained for three days and three nights. Jonah prays and he is spat out by the fish onto dry land.

And this is where we meet Jonah in our reading for today. He has been through this great tribulation and he has come out the other side alive, having been sent down into the water and lifted out again, like a great baptism in the sea. In our baptisms, of course, we are baptised into the death and resurrection of Christ, and the three days and three nights that we hear of in this story are often connected to the culmination of Holy Week by Christian commentators of the Book of Jonah. So, we might think of the Jonah we meet in chapter 3, in our reading for today, as a Jonah who has come through a great struggle with God. He tries to flee from God’s will, but, pursued by God, he has come to a point of surrender, to a point of obedience, where he is now able to say with full integrity, as he does at the end of his prayer in the huge fish, “Salvation comes from the Lord.”

Surely, all is well with Jonah now, we might think to ourselves. How could one go through such a trial, and be saved by God, and then not be willing to do whatever God asks?

God asks him again, “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you”. And this time, as we are anticipating, Jonah goes to Nineveh. But when he goes and when he proclaims God’s dissatisfaction with their sinful ways, he gets a response that he was not expecting. The Ninevites believe Jonah, and they believe Jonah’s God, and the whole city - every last one of them - repents. They don’t eat or drink; they put on sackcloth; and they sit down in the dust.

But this story is not really about Nineveh. This story is about Jonah. Because, even after everything that God has done for him, even after God has compassion on him and saves his life when he repents, Jonah is angry when God offers the same compassion to the people of this city. Jonah is angry. And then, just when you think Jonah has reached his ultimate low, he takes things even lower: he tells God, “see, this is why I didn’t want to go in the first place! I knew you were a God of compassion! Now let me die!” (I paraphrase).

Today we hear the words, “you are dust and to dust you shall return”. It is a reminder of our mortality and it is a reminder of our sin. And it is also a reminder of our created-ness (God breathes life into dust, after all) and that we rely on God wholly, not just for our creation, but for our ongoing relationship with God, with one another, and with ourselves. Because sin, the brokenness of humanity, has this ability to mess all of the goodness of our created-ness up. Unable to heal this brokenness ourselves, God’s great love and compassion overflows to us once again, and, just as he created us out of his abundant love, so he heals us.

But what Jonah failed to see was that God’s compassion on him, God’s willingness to step in and save him from certain death in the belly of a fish, was not an incidental decision. It wasn’t something that God could do or not do, depending on how God was feeling in the moment. This compassion was and is who God is. As Christian readers of this Hebrew text, I think we tend to see the moment that Jonah comes out of the fish, after his baptism in the sea, as the moment at which he has become a believer, because it is the moment at which he receives the great compassion of God, even though he didn’t deserve it at all. But what the story as a whole suggests is that this is only part of the story: there was more that God had for him. For Jonah to truly know this God, this God of grace and compassion, he needed to know this truth as one that was not just for him, but that was also for everyone else that God would call too.

We often think of the Lenten journey as one that is solitary - a chance to look inward and to examine ourselves. But I want to challenge us to see that this is only part of the story, only part of the journey that God has for us. Because the story of Jonah teaches us that we only fully come to see the love and mercy and compassion of God when we are able to see it and to want it not just for ourselves, but also for all the others that God will call into this great family. 

 

I said in my sermon last Sunday that we don’t walk this path alone because we walk it with Jesus, having returned from the mountaintop to the plain. But we also don’t walk this Lenten path alone because we walk it together. I hope that this series of reflections from members of this church community of St. Augustine’s will be a reminder and an encouragement to you of the family that walks alongside you this Lent. And I encourage you, as you walk through the coming days and weeks, to be open to the prompting of God, to that small voice inside who is asking you to learn to see the love of God not just by receiving it yourself, but by desiring it - really desiring it - for those around you, even those who appear to be beyond all hope of salvation. Even those in the belly of the fish.

 - Rev. Gillian