Jonah chapter 3 - unexpected repentence

I read a sermon in the week about Jonah. It was called “The God of another chance.” Let’s recap Bible Month so far. God calls Jonah to preach to the people of Nineveh, which was the capital of the Assyrian Empire. They were extremely cruel and vicious people and so Jonah ran in the opposite direction. He boarded a boat for Tarshish which was in Spain. God intervened and sent a terrible storm to rock the boat. The sailors onboard threw Jonah overboard, where he was swallowed by a big fish. He spent three days and nights inside the fish, which brought him back to Israel and spewed him out onto dry land.

Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time.

God is the “God of another chance.” The first time God spoke to Jonah he refused to accept the call. Now God gives Jonah another chance to do his mission. Jonah has thought “I got out of that mad Nineveh project, didn’t I!”  He hasn’t and God calls him again and gives him another chance.

God is persistent and so the word of the Lord comes a second time to Jonah with the same instruction to go to Nineveh. This time, somewhat unwillingly, Jonah does so. When he gets there, he cries out that the city will be destroyed in forty days.

And, astonishingly, there is an instant reaction –  The king calls for national repentance. Not only does he want all people to fast and pray and call urgently on God, but he even wanted the animals to fast as well. In the Ancient Near Eastern mindset, it was possible for animals to sin as well as humans. The repentance here is genuine. It is not just a “Yes, we are sorry for what we have done!” but it is a call to give up their evil ways and to turn from their violence. Genuine repentance is to change one’s way of living. Their hope is that God will yet relent and turn from his anger upon them.

From the king down to the animals they repent, fast and put on sackcloth, crying to God for mercy. It's a preacher's dream reaction: any preacher today likes a bit of reaction to their service, it’s usually “nice hymns” or “we could hear you” but one word from Jonah and the whole city, animals and all, is down on its knees praying for forgiveness. “Perhaps this God will give us another chance.”

You'd think that Jonah would be thrilled at his success - this surely is the preacher of the year. Nineveh was a great city, and he was ready to see it burn. He hated Nineveh, that’s why he ran from the first call, I guess the second call was obeyed because he was knackered, knackered from his sailing trip, nearly drowning, and recovering from fish smells and feeling a little sick on a beach covered in fish vomit. “Okay God, you win.” He walks for three days, sees the place and surely thinks they will be gone through his words: destruction.

The writer of Jonah sees Nineveh was not just a quantity, but a quality, not just a metropolis three day walk across with a population of over 120,000 people plus animals, but an immorality. He takes the symbol of the world’s most ancient impressive evil, magnifies and intensifies it by mass, and sends his timorous prophet into the middle of it. Why does he do that? Because the sins of Assyria – personified by Nineveh – sins such as polytheism, brutality, exploitation, witchcraft, sorcery, alcohol abuse, prostitution, and illicit sex were in abundance. That’s where the prophet of God was going. Nineveh was a walled city, probably eight miles around it. The city walls have been discovered and records have been found that reveal that greater Nineveh beyond the walls extended at least sixty miles outward.

Jonah walked into the heart of Nineveh and said that God’s going to destroy you. You’re going to be ‘overturned.’ The author gives a very interesting word usage in Hebrew. The word for ‘overturned’ is hapak. The Hebrew ear would hear this word and know that there are two distinct meanings to the word hapak.

This word is probably one of the greatest usages of irony in the book of Jonah. When Jonah said that Nineveh would be overturned, no doubt in his mind he meant “overturned” in the same way as Sodom and Gomorrah. We know the results of the overthrow of those cities. So, Jonah was all excited about going into the heart of the enemy and saying, “God’s going to get you!”

Without a divine introduction, without an indictment of their sins, with no explicit challenge to the people to repent and no offer of future hope it is amazing even one person heard him. It is clear, I think, that Jonah was not interested in God’s plan for the Ninevites, nor was he particularly interested in his enemies being spared. Jonah wanted to show up, be in and out as quickly as possible – hence only going one day’s walk into the city – and feel good that he had done what God had asked.

Yet, one sentence is portrayed as the most startlingly effective human communication in the whole Bible.

It causes an entire city to turn to God, that is, everyone in Nineveh without exception, in what can only be described as a virtual model of repentance. Which brings us to the miracle and God’s mercy on the people of Nineveh. We are told that: “the people of Nineveh believe God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.”

The first effect of their new-found belief in God is their acceptance that the judgment proclaimed by Jonah is justified.  Without this recognition, without realizing that they need to repent of their wicked ways, we are left without much of a story, and I’m standing here without a sermon. This recognition manifests immediately in a visible sign of the ritual fast that was begun with the donning of coarse, hairy garments. This is the outward and visible sign of humility and a token that the person concerned is turning their back on the previous ways of their life.

Accompanying this outward sign of humility is the renunciation of everyday food and drink. We are specifically told that each and every person in Nineveh, from the great to the small, turned away from acts of violence.  And we are told that accompanying the miracle is an outpouring of Gods mercy: “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 he did not do it.” We have heard today an out of the ordinary story of an unwilling prophet proclaiming to his enemy with the net result being that his enemy changed their ways, repented of their sins and believed in God. The God of another chance.

There is another meaning to the word hapak. It is used also in Exodus when Moses’ staff “changed.” It ‘changed’ into a snake. The water of the Nile changed to blood. In Hosea 11, that beautiful chapter about God not being able to give up on his wayward children, hapak is used to describe change in the Lord’s heart. This seems to be incredible irony in our story because Jonah walked into Nineveh hoping that God was going to hapak (destroy) the city. But what ultimately happened was that Nineveh hapak (changed).

It’s quite amazing, and it’s all down to God’s grace. It’s even more amazing that the sudden love in between President Trump and Kim Jung Un who were hurling insults and threatening bombs and more the other week, now they are best friends, and people can’t quite get what is going on. Trump said yesterday to a reporter he cosyed up to North Korea to stop nuclear weapons being launched on their family and now suddenly there is no threat from North Korea to anyone, and the reporter said “don’t you care about his human rights record?” Not quite repentance in its fullness.   

The first verse of the next chapter tells us Jonah is furious and goes on to make a fool of himself over a bush. In fact, we never hear what happens to Jonah in the end, we leave him sulking in the desert.

Did God ever get to the bottom of Jonah's anger and absolute resistance to the idea that the people of Nineveh should have a chance to repent?

And why on earth did God choose Jonah in the first place, wouldn't it have been easier to find someone less stubborn? That’s next week’s service! St Benedict reminds us, we should never despair of the mercy of God.  That's where we can differ from Jonah and we need to face our own outrageous prejudice and narrowness story sometimes and never lessen the mercy of God. Why has it now been called the Gospel before Christ, rather than almost not making it into the canon of Scripture?

I want to suggest it is about inclusiveness and a Gospel of second chances, that no one is outside God’s love if they are given a chance to respond and do respond. They, as much as we, good pious people, are given a new beginning, forgiveness, out of the grace of God. That’s the Gospel isn’t it?   Where is Nineveh today? Perhaps Nineveh says it cannot come to God because it is too far gone. Perhaps Nineveh near St Leonards on Sea has met Jonah the Churchgoer, who has said to them “repent, but if you do, I can’t really accept you!” So people who want a new beginning, hope, don’t ever find God to be real because of a holier than thou attitude. None of my churches here give me grief, but there are churches where Jonah sits on the Church Council! “You can’t do that. You can’t go to those people, they aren’t part of our church mission.”    

It’s easy if you’ve not been into church for years, or never, to think you are unworthy, you are broken and selfish. Perhaps if you live in Nineveh, you think everyone inside the church is perfect. But we have a message that we’re in life together and we all need to hear God’s grace every day, whether we are Jonah, struggling with his will, or Nineveh, needing to turn around.

There are Ninevites around who’ve never had a chance of learning a different behavioural pattern. 

“If churches saw their mission as going to those no else will go to, there is no telling what might happen. What if people were invited to come tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe?

What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination? What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?”  ― Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith

The God of another chance. I want to suggest to you this morning that the major work of the Church is this another chance mission. People are yearning for a different narrative in their lives, especially people who’ve made mistakes or who have been rubbished all their lives. Imagine being forgiven for the first time in your life. Imagine being free of guilt and living differently. Imagine being included in a fellowship you’ve never thought you were worthy of belonging to. It’s never too late. So, around us where the Church is enjoying some healthy development often in partnership with others.

Two stories this morning I thought about thinking of building up those who need a chance to rebuild, another chance. The community centre who every Monday and Friday through an organisation called Dom’s Mission opens with tables of food from supermarkets just past the sell by date and says to people you can buy 10 items for £2.50 and as much bread as you need. The same centre planning to run the local library which was savagely closed by the powers that be, despite local people from the most deprived part of town relying on it.

 That centre saying to the little church that worships in its building and does its work in its building, let’s work together on these things. It’s bringing hope to the community, and new life to that church, which believed it had a mission to the desparate folk in its context but weren’t sure beyond toddlers and Messy Church how to go about it. That’s part of the story of St Helens and Ore Community Centre working together. Some people will say “that’s not church!” I say “it’s very much church.”

Then this week we’ve seen the anniversary one year on of the horrific fire in Grenfell Tower. I heard Rev Mike Long speak at the Superintendents Conference the other week on responding to sudden disaster.  Notting Hill Methodist Church is a stone’s throw away from the Tower.  It was a place of safety, of space, of communal lament, of protest, of peace, the wall outside a vigil and a place to share prayer. A church that found itself besieged by reporters and unpleasantness. A church that was there for its context and a year on still turns outward, and the faith communities in North Kensington have come together powerfully and work together. Mike said after the fire, “There are times when all the words we can say are not adequate and sometimes words fail us because no words can do justice to how we feel, or what we have seen or what has happened. Today is one of those days. What we can simply do is look to all that we have seen today which is good, which is fabulous - people getting together. Let light triumph over all that is rotten, that is desperate and that defies our understanding."

The God of another chance. Churches looking outward, being inclusive, churches that put glass doors in like you, are reminded not only its good in here but the world is out there for us to go into too. The God of another chance offering repentance and forgiveness and a new beginning, even for the most desperate and the most alien of audiences.  

This never too late, another chance thought is the heart of what we believe, isn’t it? I return to Jonah being the “Gospel before Christ.”

The story that makes us who we are tells us Jesus was killed, put away in a tomb, and that, they thought, was that,-it was the end.  Until he died there must have been hope that he would do something to save himself. But when he died it must have seemed like that hope died with him. It was too late. But then, on the first day of the week, when some of his friends went to tend his body . . ..

Part of the story of Jesus is that it is never too late. Part of the story we're given to share is that no circumstance is beyond the power of God and that nobody is beyond the redemption we are invited to accept. The Gospel is not just for "church people" and not just for "good people," but for all of God's children. Our mistakes do not define us, and we are not trapped forever in the messes we make. By the power of God, hope does not die, and in Christ it is never, never too late. Another chance. 

That is the Gospel of Christ. It is never too late, second chances, a new narrative. It is never too late for Nineveh to turn. It is never too late for Jonah like attitudes to turn. It is never too late for people to come to the foot of the Cross and say I need to be forgiven, can you help me, I want to begin again. It is never too late. I hope our little exploration into Jonah chapter 3 encourages us to be open, to never limit God, to not be judgmental and most of all to be part of God’s amazing plans. Jonah didn’t cope with God, I pray we might be a little broader in our vision of his kingdom where all who respond are welcome, and not condemned for all eternity.