“Jonah Retold”
A sermon by Sid Burgess for Edgewood PC, Third Sunday after Epiphany
January 25, 2009
Texts: Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Psalm 62:5-12; Mark 1:14-20
Gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins. Pride, envy, lust, anger, greed, sloth, and gluttony. Gluttony is the inordinate desire to consume more than one requires. This term has Latin origins, from a word meaning to swallow or to “gulp down,” as in a big fish who has just recently gulped down a reluctant prophet.
Perhaps you will recall the storyline. Jonah has been summoned by God to preach repentance to the brutal Babylonians. Those greedy people had marched across the Fertile Crescent gobbling up first one little nation and then another, ancient Israel among.
Fast forward a couple of thousand years to April, 1941. The second world war is raging across Europe and is soon to engulf the United States. The NEW YORKER magazine runs a poem by Trwin Edman, entitled, “Note on Jonah and the Whale.”
The whale swallowed Jonah,
So the story runs,
A very small mouthful,
The whale weighted tons.
But Jonah, though tiny,
Disturbed the great fish;
Eaten raw, Jonah
Made a (tough) dish.
The whale belched forth Jonah,
After two days or three;
The tale has a moral,
Which Hitler can’t see. 1
This six-decade-old poem has helped me to see the familiar story of Jonah from an entirely new vantage point. I have always identified with Jonah in this story. Even seen similarities between Jonah’s flight from God’s call to preach, and my own reluctance to accept God’s call. But Edman’s poem has me looking at this story from the perspective of the whale--a whale who has “bitten off more than he can chew.”
That certainly proved to be the case with Mr. Hitler. By the time this poem was published in the spring of l941, Hitler and his armies had swallowed up Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. They had gulped down Holland, Belgium, and France. It would take four long and bloody years but a gluttonous Germany would eventually be forced to give them all up. At war’s end this once-giant-fish of a nation would be split in two, it’s cities reduced to ruble, and its surviving citizens on the verge of starvation. By the end of l945, with both Germany and Japan defeated, one might have thought gluttony itself had been conquered.
Now fast forward sixty years to our own time and place. Consider the “beached whales” of Enron, HealthSouth, Lehman Brothers, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Freddy and Fannie Mae. I’m no expert, but I wonder that each may have failed because they swallowed more than they could comfortably digest. I’m no expert but it appears to me that our nation’s current financial crisis has been intensified by the conspicuous consumption of millions of Americans--buying ever-larger houses and cars, cramming closets and stuffing mini-warehouses, piling debt upon debt. Perhaps, even now, in the bloated belly of ‘consumer country,’ in the distended stomach of ‘entitlement nation,’ with our puffed up, America knows-best foreign policy . . . . Perhaps, even now, is a restless little Jonah, yet to be expunged.
We would do well to set the little fellow free and listen to him. We’ll have to listen carefully because Jonah doesn’t speak very loudly. He is still the reluctant prophet. Even after a storm at sea . . . . Even after being thrown overboard by frightened sailors. . . . Even after three days in the belly of a big fish . . . . Even after being set free, and given divine instructions for a second time, ‘Get up, go to Sin City, and preach repentance. . . ..’ Even now, Jonah is reluctant. He ventures only 1/3 of the way into the huge city before delivering his one-line sermon: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is more direct: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
In both stories--in Jonah and in Mark--we are given models of faithful response. In Jonah:
5 And the people of Nineveh believed God;
they proclaimed a fast,
and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
In antiquity, sackcloth, usually made from coarse, black goat’s hair, was a symbol of deep repentance and humility.
Give Mayor Langford benefit of the doubt. When he called on Birmingham clergy last April to don burlap bags as a sign of repentance for the City’s extraordinarily high crime rate, perhaps the mayor was also repenting from his own profligate spending on clothes.
In any case, we would all--all of us who have been guilty of one excess or another. . . . We would all surely welcome a response similar to what the ancient Ninevites received:
10 When God saw what they did,
how they turned from their evil ways,
God changed his mind
about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them;
and God did not do it.
In the next chapter of Jonah, when God ask the prophet why he was so reluctant to preach repentance to the wicked City of Ninevah, a pouting Jonah responds:
for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love,
and ready to relent from punishing.
In other words, ‘Dadgumit, I knew you’d let those so-and-so’s off the hook.’
In first the story of Jonah, then in the Gospel of Mark we see what repentance looks like. Public displays of humility and regret in Jonah. Immediate “re-tooling” in Mark, where Jesus promises to teach eager Simon and Andrew, quick-to-respond James and John, how to “fish for people.”
Comes now the question what would repentance look like in our time and place? If not sackcloth and ashes, if not quit your job take off on a mission, what would our repentance look like? Our repentance as a nation? As a church? As faithful disciples of Jesus Christ?
I seem to always have more questions than answers, but our psalm for today, Psalm 62, does have some very good suggestions. The poet urges us to place full confidence in God: Trust in God at all times . . . . Because God is good and God is love, trusting God means trusting in goodness and love. Because God is merciful and because God calls for peace on earth, relying on God means trusting in mercy and peace. To trust exclusively in God--would require that we repent, that we surrender our trust in military might; that we give up our blood-lust for capital punishment; that we reject the notion that ‘good guys finish last;’ that we deny wealth as the measure of ultimate value.
What is your only comfort in life? Presbyterians respond: “That I belong body and soul, in life and in death, not to myself, but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”2 In other words. . . . . Comfort foods? Don’t need ‘em! All my stuff? Let it go! My team on top? It’s only a game. My country always prevailing? “Let justice roll down . . . .” For God is my comfort, the only comfort I truly need!
According to Psalm 63, “trust in God at all times” also means to reject the passions and prejudices of the “low estate,” and pay no heed to the tempting favors of the “high estate.” In the end, says the poet, they cancel each other out, and evaporate like the mist. Thus, the people of God are to place ultimate reliance on no other help, we are to yield unconditional obedience to no other power, and we are to love no one or anything more than we love God.3 And, says Jonah, we’ve got to “get our act together” in 40 days or else! Each new president gets 100 days to make his mark. We ‘Ninevites’ get only 40, says Jonah.
One of my sources tells about a conversation she had with one of her colleagues in ministry. She told this friend she was suffering burn out. The friend caught her up short when she responded, “Burnt out? Why, you ain’t even been lit!”4
Listen again to our Lord Jesus. Hear the urgency in his voice.
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near;
repent, and believe in the good news.”
Finally, listen once more to the assurance of Jonah:
for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love . . . .
Blessing and glory and wisdom
and thanksgiving and honor
and power and might
be to our God forever and ever. Amen.
1Edman, Trwin, “Note on Jonah and the Whale,” THE NEW
YORKER, April 26, 1941, p. 45.
2Heidelberg Catechism, Question 1, PCUSA “Book of
Confessions, 4.001.
3Ibid., I.6.
4Schaper, Donna, “Pastoral Perspective,” Third Sunday
after Epiphany, Jonah 3:1-5,10, FEASTING ON THE WORD, Year B, Volume
1.