Counternarrative
Jonah 3:1-10
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The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, 2 “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” 3 So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. 4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” 5 And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.” 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.
In our first reading this morning from the beginning of Mark’s Gospel (1:14-20), we heard the story of Jesus on the Galilean seashore calling his first disciples. Simon, Andrew, James, and John hear Jesus’ invitation to follow him and immediately drop their nets, leave their boats and their livelihoods, and walk away from their lives as fishermen to follow this Jesus who they didn’t know much about into a future they knew even less about.
Their quick boldness and devotion is inspiring!
But to be honest, I often feel like I resonate more with Jonah’s story.
When God called Jonah, instead of being like the disciples who immediately left their boats to follow and become fishers of people, he instead quickly ran to escape in in a boat where rather than catching fish, he was swallowed by one.
Jonah offers us a counternarrative to the way we’re used to hearing the story told in Scripture. Here, the prophet is the unfaithful one and the enemy is the one who receives mercy. Everything is upside down.
We might get so caught up on the being-swallowed-by-a-big-fish part of the story that we miss the humor of Jonah’s subsequent lame attempt at obedience to God’s call when he only walks a third of the way into the great city of Nineveh and preaches a horrible one sentence sermon about its imminent demise with no word of hope or suggestion to repent. He calls out “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” --It’s more like he’s gloating than preaching.
And what might be more unbelievable than the part about the big fish, is the part where despite Jonah, and to his great disappointment, the empire of Assyria, from the greatest to the least, hears the message of this weak prophet from some backwater town and they repent in sackcloth and ashes.
The story of Jonah is a comedic gem in our canon. As a satire, it intends to make you laugh but also invites you to see the world through a different lens. Comedy has a way of speaking truth in ways that other genres cannot. We laugh at all that is ridiculous in this story, and at the same time we recognize timeless, deep truths about what it means to be human and who God is.
Jonah crumbles old biases and collapses entrenched assumptions.
We are asked to rethink our lines between insider and outsider, to set aside the belief that we are God’s favorite, to challenge our toxic expectation that God hates all the same people we do, and to understand ourselves in the context of all creation where God can appoint anyone and everything from a whale to a worm to fulfill God’s purposes which are always beyond our complete understanding.
The short comedy of Jonah really packs a punch with a message that resonates even in the very serious moment that we find ourselves in today.
Most of the time when I read this short book, I find myself drawn to the character of Jonah – it’s hard not to be with all his foibles and drama! But today I find myself more curious about Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire, known for its brutality and widely feared across the region. Nations in their path were decimated – the people either massacred or dispersed. The prophet Nahum described Nineveh as the city of bloodshed, full of deceit and plunder where you hear ‘the crack of whip and rumble of wheel, galloping horse and bounding chariot. Horsemen charging, flashing sword and glittering spear. Its military leaving behind dead bodies without end. It’s to this heavily militarized, powerful, ruthless empire that God calls Jonah to proclaim his message.
Jonah initially runs away not because he’s afraid for his safety, but because he’s afraid that God might possibly grant mercy to this great enemy – a fear which in fact comes true. When Nineveh avoids calamity at the end of the story, Jonah throws a temper tantrum on a hill overlooking the city, to which God responds -making known God’s care and concern for all people and creation – including the people of Nineveh, much to Jonah’s frustration.
Offering a counternarrative to humanity’s nationalistic impulses, the story of Jonah offers a crucial corrective to our tendency to place ourselves and our nation first before others. All nations, all people, all of creation is of concern to God.
But, let’s not miss the part here about repentance. Calamity is avoided by Nineveh through repentance, it’s central to this story. The people of Nineveh hear God’s message even through the prophet’s feeble words. They don sackcloth and sit in ashes, recognizing the evil of their ways. It’s through this repentance that a new story is made possible and the cycle of violence is able to be broken.
Important to notice here also, is that this repentance is not limited to one group in Nineveh, it’s not just the leaders or the soldiers, but includes all people from the least to the greatest, and the animals too!
Jonah’s hilarious exaggeration which puts images of cows wearing sackcloth in our minds, is meant to highlight the importance of communal repentance – all who have benefitted from the fruits of empire must confess their complicity in order for change to happen.
The lectionary offers us a gift in this national moment we find ourselves in by serving up this story of a nation repenting in order to avoid calamity and to end cycles of violence. We’ve all watched anxiously the past couple weeks as we’ve seen violence erupt in our capital and we’ve all held our collective breath through a transition of power. During this volatile time, many of us have looked out upon our country with shock and surprise, saying: “this is not who we are.”
Ibram X. Kendi, the director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research has pushed back against this sentiment. In an article for the Atlantic Magazine, he makes the case that this indeed is exactly who we are, and until we can admit it, it’s who we will continue to be. Denial is the heartbeat of America, Kendi argues, saying that if we were being honest, we would see the through line of racism drawn from the founding of our country, through the years of slavery and Jim Crow, through generations of racial violence, de facto segregation, and white supremacy. the kind of violence we’ve seen erupt is nothing new in the American story.
He writes, “This is America, just like the insurrection in the Capitol was America. We need to see this reality with clear eyes, because nothing has held back America more than its denial. Nothing has caused more human carnage than American denial. If you can look at the carnage and respond that’s not us, then you’ll consider it to be an anomaly. Humans – like nations – are not going to perform radical surgery on cancers that they don’t think are part of them.”
As inspiring and helpful as messages of love and unity are from our leaders this week, Repentance is what opens the door to a new story, Confession is what ends denial and makes us clear-eyed to the reality of our past and present, but also to the opportunities ahead of us. Not just repentance from those who participated in recent violence, but the repentance of all of us who have benefitted from the fruits of empire at the expense of others – like in Nineveh, from the least to the greatest. Because once we can name the cancer of racism and inequity in our national life, we can get to work addressing it in real ways. Who we are is not who we always have to be, if we’re willing to be honest and do hard, costly work.
Returning to the story of Jonah and Nineveh, we get a reality check on how hard this work actually is. Though Jonah is a truth-telling fable and not a history book, we do know how things ended up for the Empire of Assyria in the real world, and in the real world, we don’t actually see much transformation in that story. They go on to destroy the northern Kingdom of Israel, and then are overtaken themselves by the rising Babylonian Empire. Old habits are hard to change it seems, peace is a dream we’re still trying to grasp.
Jonah gives us a glimpse of what repentance and transformation might have looked like, but here we learn that what’s required is more than words, but actions that follow. And although this work is hard and can feel impossible, Jonah does point us toward hope in our God who works through all creation to achieve God’s purposes of justice and mercy despites ourselves – hope that one day perhaps an empire will actually through repentance put an end to its violence and injustice.
Going back again this morning to the opening of Mark’s Gospel, we hear the same invitation to repentance from John the Baptist who is preparing the way for Jesus. “The Kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe the Good news,” he cries out.
It’s a much more hopeful message than the one Jonah preached to Nineveh – a message not of threat but of promise. The Kingdom of God has come near, repent and trust in the good news which has broken into our world. John speaks not just of repenting from what’s in our past, but points us towards a new future we might live into. The new order of things is death and resurrection. May we hear that invitation today. May we have the courage to truly repent and the perseverance to follow it up with the work of love and reconciliation which mark the Kingdom of God.
In this season of Epiphany we celebrate the dawning of light through the Advent of our Lord – and this light, if we let it, helps us to see clearly what we have been, but also who we might become. And so, as the young inaugural poet, Amanda Gorman said so well at the inauguration this past week: there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.
May it be so. Amen.