Jonah 3:1-5,10; Mark 1:14-20
Rev. Laura J. Collins
January 26, 2003
The clear and simple message of today's two biblical readings can be summed up in a single word: repent. In these two short texts we find a whole host of repenters: Jonah repents, the people of Ninevah repent, Simon, Andrew, James, and John repent, Jesus repents and even God, creator and ruler of the universe, repents.
In case you missed all that repenting on the first read-through, let me recap the stories for you. The first is Jonah, one of the best short stories in the Bible and I would add in most of literature. It is a wonderfully comic and complex morality play, but what most of us remember is one of the less important moments of the tale, when Jonah is swallowed by a large fish.
For our purposes we need to recall that the reason Jonah is swallowed by a fish is that he has been thrown overboard by a bunch of scared sailors in a stormy sea who discover that Jonah got called by God to be a prophet and refused. Jonah, when called by God with the task of preaching to Ninevah, a great and wicked city in the Assyrian empire, takes the first boat out in the opposite direction. Thus, the storm and the decision by the sailors to sacrifice Jonah for the good of the rest of the travelers.
God, however, is not done with Jonah and so saves him by capturing him in the belly of the fish who is no more thrilled by the arrangement than Jonah and promptly vomits him up on the nearest beach. At which point God calmly reappears to the bedraggled, stinking, freshly vomited prophet and says, "As I was saying, I want you to go to Ninevah for me."
This time, Jonah does as he is told.
That is, he repents.
Not because he feels guilty or remorseful or even thankful for God's rescue, but simply because he figures he can't escape this duty and he might as well get on with it. He goes, but he does so reluctantly and performs his duties without any creativity or enthusiasm. He simply goes through the motions. But he does, in fact, go through the motions.
So here is our first lesson about repentance: repentance is not about remorse, that is, feeling bad about one's behaviors or the impacts thereof. It is about changing direction. It is about doing things differently. Instead of a boat to Tarshish, a hike to Ninevah. Instead of running from a call, fulfilling it with or without one's heart in it.
It is possible, Jonah shows us, to repent even when one doesn't feel particularly remorseful. The opposite is also true, and perhaps more common. It is possible to feel remorseful with repenting. There are plenty of us who could confess to behaviors of ours about which we feel bad, but of which we have not yet repented. My overuse of my car is one of my behaviors which would fall into that category.
Once Jonah fulfills the duty to warn Ninevah that God's going to come and destroy it, we get our second repentance: that of the city. The whole city. The king and the paupers, even the animals put on sackcloth and ashes and, we are told, repent of their wicked ways.
In spite of Jonah's lack of enthusiasm, the truth of God's word gets through to them. Now this is particularly good news to those of us who stand up here and preach for a living and something I pray for every week: God, in spite of me, please let these people hear you.
So that's another message about repentance, but perhaps the greater message here is that the whole community joins together in the repentance. The problems in Ninevah were too great to be solved by individual repentance. This was not a case of a few instances of personal sin. This was a case of corporate sin: or systemic injustice, as we in Washington might prefer to say. The whole system was caught in a pattern of abuse, corruption, injustice, mistreatment of the poor, sexuality gone astray, and so forth. Nobody was outside the influences of the broader cultural depravity. So, to return to my example of my personal sin - addiction to my car - the broader culture encourages my lack of repentance by creating metropolitan areas in which cars are almost necessary and gas is cheap and regulations on automakers are weak, so that miles per gallon and emissions are worse than they could be given current technology. You know the rap.
Such was the case with Ninevah. Personal repentance would not be enough. The whole system, from the government down to the workers, had to get on board with the change of direction. Nobody could accomplish it alone.
Now, the great line in this story comes after the communal repentance when we read that God is the next in line to repent. Our scripture says, "When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed God's mind about the calamity that God said [would happen] and God did not do it."
God repents. God changes direction. God moves in a new way. God repents from harsh justice to tender mercy.
So, lesson number three, repentance has cosmic implications. Even the force behind the universe itself can change direction if there is enough movement of energy within the world in a new way.
Now, before I move on to Mark's story of repentance today, I want to pause and consider what the Ninevah story might be saying to us in America on the 26th of January, 2003. Every one of us here today is most likely aware that tomorrow is the deadline set for the UN inspectors report on Iraq and for President Bush to decide whether the inspections have given him any reason not to proceed with war.
Let me ask you to listen to some of the biblical rhetoric used to describe Ninevah: It is labeled "vile" and "the bloody city, all full of lies and booty;" it is compared to a den of lions, a harlot, full of "unceasing evil." It is a place that nobody would care if it were destroyed, certainly not our reluctant prophet Jonah. (1)
Does it sound like rhetoric we have heard about any other place in the world recently? Well, do any of you happen to know where Ninevah is? In modern day Iraq. So, it would seem, there is some Biblical precedent for making threats of destruction against such an axis of evil.
Now, it gets a little tricky to try to compare the Jonah story too closely to our current situation. There is no sign that Saddam Hussein has put on sack-cloth and ashes to repent. It is currently our president rather than God who is threatening the destruction. And I'm not sure who among us might be the reluctant prophets called to warn Iraq of imminent destruction -- our UN inspectors perhaps?
No, the details of the story don't exactly speak to our current situation, but the bottom line does. Because what is the bottom line in today's story? God goes out of the way to find someone, even a prophet as reluctant as Jonah, who will preach to the people of Ninevah and God, in the end, shows Ninevah mercy and love. Why? Because even when nobody else in the world cares about Ninevah, God cares. God seeks the healing and the health of Ninevah -- then and now. Bush may not care about the people of Iraq. Most Americans may not care about the people of Iraq. But this story reminds us that, regardless of how vile and wicked a city or nation may seem, God cares and as God's people, we are called to care as well.
In the United States and internationally, almost every church body has spoken out about this war and across the board, with the exception of the American Southern Baptists, all have concluded that a war on Iraq would not be a just war. "Never before have the churches in America been so united on the issue of peace." (2) The problems in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East cannot be solved by bombing. Our national security will not be improved and may well be destabilized by further aggression against Arab nations.
God cared about Ninevah then and God cares about Iraq now and we, like Jonah, are called to care as well, whether reluctantly or enthusiastically. We can get on a boat to Tarshish if we wish. But the storm at sea may well keep us from reaching our beach-side resort destination.
Now just a word about the gospel text. I said earlier that Jesus repents. Before this passage, Jesus was still in Nazareth. But now, having been baptized and having been tested in the wilderness, he hears that John the Baptist has been arrested. The moment of truth arrives for him. Will he walk the road of God's anointed or will be remain safely in his hometown? He hits the road, preaching and teaching. He changes directions. He heads out. This, too, is a form of repentance. A change to bring him onto the path God has set before him.
And as he goes, he calls disciples. Each of them is faced with a choice. Stay or follow. They choose to follow. They leave behind families, homes, careers and they go. It is difficult to imagine why; difficult not to think of some cult leaders who have called people away from families and security and led them down self-destructive paths. But something in Jesus must have resonated deep within them. Some call that echoed against an aching wall in their souls. And so they repented. They changed directions.
The message this morning is one simple word: repent. But repentance takes many forms. And rarely is it simple. May we find grace together to hear this word and answer it with our lives.
(1) Limburg, James. Intrepretation Series: Hosea-Micah. (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988). p. 151. (Back to text)
(2) Wallis, Jim. Speech given at the Washington National Cathedral, January 20, 2003. (Back to text)
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