So, I was invited to share the message at Community UMC this past weekend on the Jonah 3:1-5, 10; I’d love to be in dialogue with you about it. Peace …
The Reluctant Prophet
I come before you today as a reluctant prophet.
Not because I don’t feel welcome.
Not because I don’t think I have something important to share.
But because I think reluctant prophets, as we understand them, are the proper kind.
What is a prophet?
If we examine popular portrayals of prophets today, they are mostly unflattering, encompassing things as diverse as the man in the flowing robes with long hair and a beard wandering the streets carrying an “End times” or “Repent” sign or sandwich board, people who try to read hidden meanings into the Bible to predict the Second Coming, and recently, the groups that misinterpreted the Mayan calendar to fix 2012 as the end of the world. (Looking around) We're still here.
According to Wikipedia (and I have a confession: while I don't recommend it as an academic source for my English students, for our general purposes it will work today) "In religion, a prophet is an individual who is claimed [or who claims] to have been contacted by the supernatural or the divine, and to speak for them, serving as an intermediary with humanity, delivering this newfound knowledge from the supernatural entity to other people." In Hebrew, it translates as seer or spokesperson (literally "mouth of God" ). There are many examples of prophets in the Christian tradition:
In the Old Testament, we find Moses, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha and many others.
In the New Testament: John the Baptist, Anna, Simeon, Ananais, Paul, John of Patmos – and Jesus, technically, though his divinity muddies the waters a bit. Old Testament prophets are also referenced in the New, particularly where Jesus fulfills their prophecies.
There are also modern-day examples of prophets; among them are Joseph Smith of the Latter Day Saints and Michel Potay of the Pilgrims of Ares in France.
Other religions have traditions of prophets: One example – Islam, recognizes not only Muhammad, but also includes the Judeo-Christian figures of Adam, Abraham, Moses and Jesus (as prophets).
So why are reluctant prophets the “proper kind”? I offer three criteria:
They are often called into discomfort, living in caves, being shunned by the general populace, eating interesting menu options, facing physical challenges – it’s like “Survivor” without a million shekel prize at the end.
Their story doesn't always end well. Today’s Gospel starts with John the Baptist’s arrest – bad enough – but doesn't get as far as his death at Herod’s hands; we have to skip ahead to Mark 6 for that outcome. There’s not a good history of prophets in retirement (although once in a while they do get a fiery chariot ride into the heavens).
They are usually called to speak to power – and have to be careful not to become it. Be wary of the prophet who offers revelation to be shared through his or her exclusive book available for only $19.95 + S/H.
How does Jonah fit into this description? Let's start from today’s text and work outwards.
3:1 The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying,
3:2 "Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you."
3:3 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.
3:4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
3:5 And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
3:10 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 he did not do it.
Sums it up quite tidily, right? God sends Jonah, Jonah delivers the message, the people of Nineveh get the message, REPENT, God sees that things are fixed and everyone goes about his or her business. Nice. Except it’s not.
What came before today's selection in Jonas's story?
Jonah I: 1 The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai (Hebrew for “truth”): 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh [the capital of Assyria – this is not an internal Israelite issue] and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” 3 But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish [geographically, the opposite direction from Nineveh].
Jonah 1:3b-16
Jonah caught a ship from Joppa to get to Tarshish, boards it, and promptly goes to sleep in the hold. Above decks, a storm breaks out, and the crew members, in the midst of attempting everything they know to do to avoid a wreck, discover Jonah and determine by casting lots that he is the cause of the calamity.
Jonah tells them that he is running away from God, whereupon they consult him about what they should do to avoid God’s wrath. He suggests that they throw him overboard. After a failed attempt to row back to shore, the crew does just that, but only after praying for forgiveness for doing so.
It is interesting to note the lengths to which Jonah is willing to go to avoid delivering God’s message. At this point, his water-bound escape having failed, he is willing to take his chances with a raging sea rather than go to Nineveh. Clearly, he has some great fear of delivering the warning to the Ninevites.
As soon as the sea is calmed, the sailors offer a sacrifice to God and “made vows to him.” The exact meaning of “vows” is not certain here, but there is a possible secondary effect of Jonas's aborted escape here: Jonah may have picked up some converts along the way.
Jonah 1:17 – In the belly of the Beast. God sent a whale/fish (I’m not going to get into that discussion here) to swallow up Jonah, and he stayed there for 3 days (one of our usual Holy numbers – clearly it's an important stay whether it’s factual or not).
Jonah 2:1-9: Jonah’s Prayer
In essence, Jonah offers a mea culpa in the form of a quickly executed prayer as he is falling ever-farther into the depths of the sea inside the whale/fish.
It is a combination lamentation/admission of guilt, a cry for help, and a shout of praise and thanksgiving (with a promise of an offering of atonement thrown in) for the help that has come.
Jonah 2:10 - "And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land." Problem solved. Right? Now we’re caught back up to today’s scripture: Travels made, message delivered and received, city saved. “My work here is done,” says Jonah. Except not really.
It’s worth exploring why things didn't just occur this way in the first place.
I don’t think it was for lack of clarity about what God expected Jonah to do.
I don’t think it could have been due to a lack of an example of how the process worked: Jonah would have known of the prophetic traditions in the Torah.
I think it was because Jonah was afraid.
What was Jonah afraid of?
If it were me, I'd be afraid that:
I’d get lost – there was no GPS, and refolding stone tablet maps is even more difficult than the paper ones we have today.
I wouldn't know whom to talk to – do I go straight to the person in charge? Do I need an invitation? Do I just stand on a corner and start shouting? Who needs to hear this message?
I wouldn't know what to say. What’s the message supposed to be? What did God want the Ninevites to do about their “wickedness”? Sometimes the right words are really hard to come by.
I think the biggest thing I’d be afraid of would be the Ninevites reaction to me. Let’s assume I found the right place, I figured out the right person to talk to, I was inspired with the right words, and I delivered them as assigned. What then?
Interestingly, only one of these options seems to have entered Jonah’s mind. His concern was that last one – that he’d do what God asked, and the Ninevites would repent, and God would forgive. This was the issue?
The distance didn't really become an issue until Jonah RAN IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION.
The message got to the right people. The whole distance issue actually reared its ugly head at this stage, as Jonah spent 3 DAYS traveling through Nineveh with his warning. Jonah 3:6 tells us that the Ninevite king himself heard (God’s word reached him somehow, whether directly from Jonah or by popular acclimation we aren't told, but it got there) and DIRECTLY responded to God’s call to action delivered through Jonah ….
… which CLEARLY means that Jonah “found” the right words. Funny how that’ll happen when God is involved.
And OH that response from the Ninevites. Verses 7-9 continue the story of how they did turn from their wickedness. But even more than that – because sure, the king and all the people could PROMISE that they’d never be bad again (whatever they were doing), and then 3 months down the road they’d be right back at it – no, by order, and by example, of the king they got into sackcloth, got down into the ashes, fasted (animals included!), and “cr[ied] mightily to God.” They did this, mind you, not knowing if it would make any difference, but trusting – hoping – that God might hear and relent. And as we heard in verse 10, God did just that.
Jonah’s reaction. In which we throw a tantrum and lessons are learned.
Chapter 4 really turns the narrative on its head. If we stopped at chapter 3, everything could be wrapped up tidily: Jonah made the trip, God’s message got to the Ninevites, and they repented and were saved. QED.
But right away in verse 1, we find that Jonah is not pleased. He basically has an “I told you so” conversation via prayer with God, trying to excuse his diversion to Tarshish as a logical response to his knowledge that God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing” (Joel 2:13). He declares that he would rather die than to continue on, knowing that the warning he delivered was heeded … WHAAAT? Hold on here.
We need to revisit the attributes of the reluctant prophet for a moment.
Jonah does become uncomfortable – but it’s through his own choices. If he doesn't turn and run the other direction, there’s no storm at sea, no overboard, no belly of the whale/fish. A long walk perhaps – but couldn't we all use some more exercise?
Jonah’s end – to this point – is not too dramatic, except again, for the drama he adds himself. He’s the one who wants to die; no one has asked him to.
Now, he did speak to the Ninevite power, but I think where he gets into trouble with our third criteria is that he somehow assumed some power for himself as well. He makes the situation – the delivering God’s message – about him, not about God or even the message. In taking that burden on himself, it became too much to bear when what HE said, that the end for Nineveh was near, did not come to pass, and he felt that he could no longer go on after his “failure.”
There is an important fact to note particular to Jonah in his “lineage” – remember that his father’s name means truth in Hebrew. Jonah is the son of truth. One understanding of this leads to the conclusion that seeking and honoring the truth was paramount to Jonah and those like him. What is revealed to us then is the message that our understanding of “truth” is sometimes clouded by our humanity and can interfere with the larger truths that need to be shared.
How does God handle all this? God gives Jonah an object lesson in what is worth caring about, and being angry over, and dying for, in the form of a bush that God causes to be raised up and then withered in the course of a day. God extrapolates Jonah’s caring for the bush (without any investment in its creation or upkeep) to God’s caring for Nineveh because of God’s nurturing of that "great city" of 120,000+ people. And we are left there at the end of chapter 4, I think with the implication that Jonah got the message – or at least no further indication that he didn't.
So what do we do with Jonah? What should be our modern-day “prophet motive,” as it were? Without claiming any direct revelation from God, other than what my Wesleyan Quadrilateral leads me to (through Scripture, Reason, Tradition and Experience), I think that there is definite good news here for us – not that we should expect hidden messages in our alphabet soup or voices in the middle of the night. We are tasked though, with sharing the love that has been shared with us so that others can know the fellowship and communion we are all privileged to be a part of. I won’t speak for anyone else, but for me the reluctant prophet model for sharing that message is a great place to start:
One more item I'd like to add to our discussion of prophets: I need to remember that I am always a prophet, whether I'm intending to be or not. Sometimes what I don't do or say speaks just as loudly as - or perhaps louder than - those things that I do. I am witnessing every day; I need to be aware of that.
So I pray that we are all able to hear and share God’s good word, lifting up one another as we journey in this community we hold so dearly, knowing that we are lifted up by the God who has created us and nurtures us and continues to grow us even as we carry one another. Peace …
P.S. Here's the Benediction from service's end:
May the God who has caused us to be, and has therefore caused us to be in this place together, and the Son who has brought us into communion, and the Spirit who keeps us connected - may they continue to Grace us with the gift of sharing that message of love and community so that others may come to know through our words and through our lives that we are all loved, that we are all forgiven, that we are all one. Until we meet again, go in peace. Amen.
I come before you today as a reluctant prophet.
Not because I don’t feel welcome.
Not because I don’t think I have something important to share.
But because I think reluctant prophets, as we understand them, are the proper kind.
What is a prophet?
If we examine popular portrayals of prophets today, they are mostly unflattering, encompassing things as diverse as the man in the flowing robes with long hair and a beard wandering the streets carrying an “End times” or “Repent” sign or sandwich board, people who try to read hidden meanings into the Bible to predict the Second Coming, and recently, the groups that misinterpreted the Mayan calendar to fix 2012 as the end of the world. (Looking around) We're still here.
According to Wikipedia (and I have a confession: while I don't recommend it as an academic source for my English students, for our general purposes it will work today) "In religion, a prophet is an individual who is claimed [or who claims] to have been contacted by the supernatural or the divine, and to speak for them, serving as an intermediary with humanity, delivering this newfound knowledge from the supernatural entity to other people." In Hebrew, it translates as seer or spokesperson (literally "mouth of God" ). There are many examples of prophets in the Christian tradition:
In the Old Testament, we find Moses, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha and many others.
In the New Testament: John the Baptist, Anna, Simeon, Ananais, Paul, John of Patmos – and Jesus, technically, though his divinity muddies the waters a bit. Old Testament prophets are also referenced in the New, particularly where Jesus fulfills their prophecies.
There are also modern-day examples of prophets; among them are Joseph Smith of the Latter Day Saints and Michel Potay of the Pilgrims of Ares in France.
Other religions have traditions of prophets: One example – Islam, recognizes not only Muhammad, but also includes the Judeo-Christian figures of Adam, Abraham, Moses and Jesus (as prophets).
So why are reluctant prophets the “proper kind”? I offer three criteria:
They are often called into discomfort, living in caves, being shunned by the general populace, eating interesting menu options, facing physical challenges – it’s like “Survivor” without a million shekel prize at the end.
Their story doesn't always end well. Today’s Gospel starts with John the Baptist’s arrest – bad enough – but doesn't get as far as his death at Herod’s hands; we have to skip ahead to Mark 6 for that outcome. There’s not a good history of prophets in retirement (although once in a while they do get a fiery chariot ride into the heavens).
They are usually called to speak to power – and have to be careful not to become it. Be wary of the prophet who offers revelation to be shared through his or her exclusive book available for only $19.95 + S/H.
How does Jonah fit into this description? Let's start from today’s text and work outwards.
3:1 The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying,
3:2 "Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you."
3:3 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.
3:4 Jonah began to go into the city, going a day's walk. And he cried out, "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
3:5 And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
3:10 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 he did not do it.
Sums it up quite tidily, right? God sends Jonah, Jonah delivers the message, the people of Nineveh get the message, REPENT, God sees that things are fixed and everyone goes about his or her business. Nice. Except it’s not.
What came before today's selection in Jonas's story?
Jonah I: 1 The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai (Hebrew for “truth”): 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh [the capital of Assyria – this is not an internal Israelite issue] and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” 3 But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish [geographically, the opposite direction from Nineveh].
Jonah 1:3b-16
Jonah caught a ship from Joppa to get to Tarshish, boards it, and promptly goes to sleep in the hold. Above decks, a storm breaks out, and the crew members, in the midst of attempting everything they know to do to avoid a wreck, discover Jonah and determine by casting lots that he is the cause of the calamity.
Jonah tells them that he is running away from God, whereupon they consult him about what they should do to avoid God’s wrath. He suggests that they throw him overboard. After a failed attempt to row back to shore, the crew does just that, but only after praying for forgiveness for doing so.
It is interesting to note the lengths to which Jonah is willing to go to avoid delivering God’s message. At this point, his water-bound escape having failed, he is willing to take his chances with a raging sea rather than go to Nineveh. Clearly, he has some great fear of delivering the warning to the Ninevites.
As soon as the sea is calmed, the sailors offer a sacrifice to God and “made vows to him.” The exact meaning of “vows” is not certain here, but there is a possible secondary effect of Jonas's aborted escape here: Jonah may have picked up some converts along the way.
Jonah 1:17 – In the belly of the Beast. God sent a whale/fish (I’m not going to get into that discussion here) to swallow up Jonah, and he stayed there for 3 days (one of our usual Holy numbers – clearly it's an important stay whether it’s factual or not).
Jonah 2:1-9: Jonah’s Prayer
In essence, Jonah offers a mea culpa in the form of a quickly executed prayer as he is falling ever-farther into the depths of the sea inside the whale/fish.
It is a combination lamentation/admission of guilt, a cry for help, and a shout of praise and thanksgiving (with a promise of an offering of atonement thrown in) for the help that has come.
Jonah 2:10 - "And the Lord commanded the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto dry land." Problem solved. Right? Now we’re caught back up to today’s scripture: Travels made, message delivered and received, city saved. “My work here is done,” says Jonah. Except not really.
It’s worth exploring why things didn't just occur this way in the first place.
I don’t think it was for lack of clarity about what God expected Jonah to do.
I don’t think it could have been due to a lack of an example of how the process worked: Jonah would have known of the prophetic traditions in the Torah.
I think it was because Jonah was afraid.
What was Jonah afraid of?
If it were me, I'd be afraid that:
I’d get lost – there was no GPS, and refolding stone tablet maps is even more difficult than the paper ones we have today.
I wouldn't know whom to talk to – do I go straight to the person in charge? Do I need an invitation? Do I just stand on a corner and start shouting? Who needs to hear this message?
I wouldn't know what to say. What’s the message supposed to be? What did God want the Ninevites to do about their “wickedness”? Sometimes the right words are really hard to come by.
I think the biggest thing I’d be afraid of would be the Ninevites reaction to me. Let’s assume I found the right place, I figured out the right person to talk to, I was inspired with the right words, and I delivered them as assigned. What then?
- They might ignore me. No harm, no foul, but that’s an awful lot of traveling for a “no response” answer.
- They could attack me or run me off. First of all, we just discussed the long distance thing, and I wouldn't want to run back all that distance. If I got attacked instead, we’re potentially talking about a serious injury, and I’m quite sure that any doctors would be out of network in Nineveh.
- They would laugh (and in the laughing at way, not the laughing with way). This would probably be my greatest fear. I’m thinking back to the whole Noah-and-the-300-cubit-boat-on-dry-land episode and the reception he got from the locals – his own people nonetheless! In Nineveh, we’re talking about language barriers (and doom and gloom never translates right), and there are egos involved – and again, we’re back to the distance issue.
- They might actually get it, and they’d do what they needed to to correct the problem, and all would be well. Unlikely. Except, well – it did.
Interestingly, only one of these options seems to have entered Jonah’s mind. His concern was that last one – that he’d do what God asked, and the Ninevites would repent, and God would forgive. This was the issue?
The distance didn't really become an issue until Jonah RAN IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION.
The message got to the right people. The whole distance issue actually reared its ugly head at this stage, as Jonah spent 3 DAYS traveling through Nineveh with his warning. Jonah 3:6 tells us that the Ninevite king himself heard (God’s word reached him somehow, whether directly from Jonah or by popular acclimation we aren't told, but it got there) and DIRECTLY responded to God’s call to action delivered through Jonah ….
… which CLEARLY means that Jonah “found” the right words. Funny how that’ll happen when God is involved.
And OH that response from the Ninevites. Verses 7-9 continue the story of how they did turn from their wickedness. But even more than that – because sure, the king and all the people could PROMISE that they’d never be bad again (whatever they were doing), and then 3 months down the road they’d be right back at it – no, by order, and by example, of the king they got into sackcloth, got down into the ashes, fasted (animals included!), and “cr[ied] mightily to God.” They did this, mind you, not knowing if it would make any difference, but trusting – hoping – that God might hear and relent. And as we heard in verse 10, God did just that.
Jonah’s reaction. In which we throw a tantrum and lessons are learned.
Chapter 4 really turns the narrative on its head. If we stopped at chapter 3, everything could be wrapped up tidily: Jonah made the trip, God’s message got to the Ninevites, and they repented and were saved. QED.
But right away in verse 1, we find that Jonah is not pleased. He basically has an “I told you so” conversation via prayer with God, trying to excuse his diversion to Tarshish as a logical response to his knowledge that God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing” (Joel 2:13). He declares that he would rather die than to continue on, knowing that the warning he delivered was heeded … WHAAAT? Hold on here.
We need to revisit the attributes of the reluctant prophet for a moment.
Jonah does become uncomfortable – but it’s through his own choices. If he doesn't turn and run the other direction, there’s no storm at sea, no overboard, no belly of the whale/fish. A long walk perhaps – but couldn't we all use some more exercise?
Jonah’s end – to this point – is not too dramatic, except again, for the drama he adds himself. He’s the one who wants to die; no one has asked him to.
Now, he did speak to the Ninevite power, but I think where he gets into trouble with our third criteria is that he somehow assumed some power for himself as well. He makes the situation – the delivering God’s message – about him, not about God or even the message. In taking that burden on himself, it became too much to bear when what HE said, that the end for Nineveh was near, did not come to pass, and he felt that he could no longer go on after his “failure.”
There is an important fact to note particular to Jonah in his “lineage” – remember that his father’s name means truth in Hebrew. Jonah is the son of truth. One understanding of this leads to the conclusion that seeking and honoring the truth was paramount to Jonah and those like him. What is revealed to us then is the message that our understanding of “truth” is sometimes clouded by our humanity and can interfere with the larger truths that need to be shared.
How does God handle all this? God gives Jonah an object lesson in what is worth caring about, and being angry over, and dying for, in the form of a bush that God causes to be raised up and then withered in the course of a day. God extrapolates Jonah’s caring for the bush (without any investment in its creation or upkeep) to God’s caring for Nineveh because of God’s nurturing of that "great city" of 120,000+ people. And we are left there at the end of chapter 4, I think with the implication that Jonah got the message – or at least no further indication that he didn't.
So what do we do with Jonah? What should be our modern-day “prophet motive,” as it were? Without claiming any direct revelation from God, other than what my Wesleyan Quadrilateral leads me to (through Scripture, Reason, Tradition and Experience), I think that there is definite good news here for us – not that we should expect hidden messages in our alphabet soup or voices in the middle of the night. We are tasked though, with sharing the love that has been shared with us so that others can know the fellowship and communion we are all privileged to be a part of. I won’t speak for anyone else, but for me the reluctant prophet model for sharing that message is a great place to start:
- I shouldn't worry about the distance traveled as I go to deliver the message. Sometimes, like with the sailors aboard the boat, some of the message gets delivered along the way. Sometimes what I think is the destination may simply be a stopping point; that doesn't mean that the message can’t be shared at each stop. Perhaps there may not even be an end to the journey, but instead the journey is the message.
- I really can’t worry about who hears the message, whether they are the right people or not. Because the message is the same for everyone; I have to trust that if I faithfully deliver it, it will be heard and acted upon.
- That “faithfully” part is tough, but I need to trust – not in myself, but in the source of the message – that the words will be the right ones at the right time. Careful study and good conversation will go a long way toward cultivating the probabilities for the right ones.
- I think most importantly, I need to let go of the idea that I have to be concerned with the reaction to the words I share. As a prophet, I am tasked with being the mouth of God, not the eyes or ears or hands and feet. The message – once delivered – is in God’s hands, and it’s not for me to judge what the hearer does after listening. I know that I struggle with keeping the word that I have heard straight; I don’t need to interject myself as arbiter for anyone else. Of course, if I am invited into someone else’s journey, then I will approach it with an open heart and mind – but only then.
One more item I'd like to add to our discussion of prophets: I need to remember that I am always a prophet, whether I'm intending to be or not. Sometimes what I don't do or say speaks just as loudly as - or perhaps louder than - those things that I do. I am witnessing every day; I need to be aware of that.
So I pray that we are all able to hear and share God’s good word, lifting up one another as we journey in this community we hold so dearly, knowing that we are lifted up by the God who has created us and nurtures us and continues to grow us even as we carry one another. Peace …
P.S. Here's the Benediction from service's end:
May the God who has caused us to be, and has therefore caused us to be in this place together, and the Son who has brought us into communion, and the Spirit who keeps us connected - may they continue to Grace us with the gift of sharing that message of love and community so that others may come to know through our words and through our lives that we are all loved, that we are all forgiven, that we are all one. Until we meet again, go in peace. Amen.
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