Epiphany 3, Year B | Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
January 21, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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“Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” – Jonah 3:2[1]
Jonah, better known from Sunday School than from the Revised Common Lectionary of Bible readings that we follow, is one of the Bible’s stranger books. In fact, passages from this particular Minor Prophet appear only twice in the course of our three-year cycle of Sunday readings—the 3rd week of Epiphany in Year B (aka today) and early autumn during Year A.
For those who may be unfamiliar with the story, the overall plot is:
God tells the prophet Jonah to leave his home city in Israel[2] and go to Ninevah, the capital of the brutal, oppressive, and despised Assyrian Empire. Jonah doesn’t want to, so he slips onto a ship heading to the far reaches of the western Mediterranean Sea. A terrible storm arises. Jonah admits to running from God and tells the sailors to throw him overboard. They initially refuse but eventually comply when the storm grows even worse. Jonah hits the water and starts sinking. The storm stops. The sailors worship Jonah’s god. A giant fish swallows Jonah. Sometime later the fish spits Jonah onto dry land in an unspecified location.
At this point we jump into our reading, where God again tells Jonah to go to Ninevah. Jonah finally obeys. About 1/3rd of the way across the city, he announces, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”[3] The king and all the people listen to Jonah’s message and repent, with everyone from the royal family down to people’s livestock holding a fast and wearing sackcloth to demonstrate their penitence before God. God decides not to destroy them after all. Jonah is very angry about this and wants God to kill him. He climbs a nearby hill to view the coming devastation (that he knows God isn’t going to do). God shelters him from the sun with a fast-growing plant. That night, a worm eats the plant, and it shrivels away. The next day, Jonah sits in the same place until he gets heatstroke. God gently reprimands him for expressing more concern for the short-lived plant than for all the people and animals continuing to live in the city below.
The end.
Now, people have argued over this book for ages. Is it factual history? Where exactly is Tarshish?[4] Was it a fish or a whale? How long would it have taken Jonah to walk to Ninevah? Does the fact that the Ninevites worshipped a fish-type deity[5] have anything to do with what happened to Jonah earlier in the story? Under which particular emperor did Ninevah repent? What kind of plant was it? And what’s with the worm?
Questions can fly until we all go blue in the face. But to be honest, every single one of them is nothing more than a distraction. They hold little to no significance in understanding the point of the book, so feel free to think whatever it is you want to think. Jonah is structured as wisdom literature,[6] and wisdom literature exists not for the sake of perfectly reflecting reality, although it can, but for passing an important message or set of messages to later generations. And the story of Jonah finds its purpose in illustrating both the persistence of God’s call and the continuing reality of God’s overwhelming love and mercy.
Last week we talked about the idea of “calling.” Despite how we as Americans tend to understand a “call” as a specific message or mission God has laid out for me as an individual, in reality, the Bible tends to call in a collective fashion. The call isn’t to me; it’s to us. On the rare occasions the call is to an individual—like in today’s story—the point of the call remains collective. I might be called, but only for the good of those around me, not just for my personal benefit or happiness.
In light of that, one of the questions Jonah brings up for me is, how do we respond if God is calling but we simply don’t want to listen?
Both ancient narrative and historical evidence point to Assyria being a truly brutal empire. They swept across Mesopotamia like locusts, leaving death and barrenness in their wake. For the people of Northern Israel, like Jonah, Ninevah stood as the ultimate “them”—the human embodiment of evil, cruelty, and sin. It isn’t any wonder he tried to escape this call. The simple existence of this oppressive foreign capital would have threatened to destroy his family, his homeland, and his region’s cultural practices and traditions. The powers at Ninevah even sought to undo his understanding of the Divine. “Get up, go to Nineveh” would have been an absolute nightmare of a call.
But despite Jonah’s efforts, God persisted, going to comically absurd lengths to make sure the people of Ninevah received the message from this particular prophet. No matter how fast or far Jonah tried to flee or how miserable an effort he gave the job once he finally did undertake it, no matter how truly awful the recipients might be, God called Jonah to call to those specific people. And to misappropriate Paul, “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”[7]
So again, what are we supposed to do if we really don’t want to follow God’s call, either as an individual or as a group? For that, we turn to our Gospel passage.
Mark is a fast-moving book. Less than halfway through the first chapter, we’ve already encountered the whole of John the Baptist’s ministry, everything from his preaching to Jesus’ own baptism. The wilderness temptations have already flown by. At this point we hear Jesus utter his first words—the primary message of both the book and the rest of Jesus’ own ministry: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”[8]
And there’s our solution: “Repent, and believe in the good news.”
We’ve talked about both repentance and belief before. When Jesus calls people to “repent,” he’s calling for change. Not just a change of thinking. Not just a change in the way we understand God or morality or the world around us. He’s asking for measurable, physical, whole-life change. Anything less is simply imagination, wishful thinking, or self-deceit.
And what we read as “belief” isn’t the simple mental process we interpret it to be. When the Bible was first translated into English, to “be-lief” wasn’t simply to assent to a truth but to swear one’s fealty, to pledge one’s allegiance—to be faithful. And like change, faithfulness can only be proved through action over time.
As Christians we like to think that we’re already okay: we trust or “have faith in” God; we participate in church whenever we can; we take communion and read the Bible and pray; we try to be productive, responsible citizens; we go out of our way to be nice to people, even when they don’t deserve it; sometimes we even talk to other people about Jesus! Surely we must be on the right path. We’ve already accepted Jesus’ words. We follow him to the best of our ability. God can’t possibly expect more from us! The Gospel, Jesus’ call…all that is for other people—for sinners, for them, for Ninevah—not for me! Not for us!
But no matter what we might want to think about ourselves, Jesus’ Gospel is for us—especially when we don’t want to respond to God’s call. When we don’t want to work beside someone because their background is strange to us. When we want to flaunt our advantages or manipulate the world around us to make things go our way. When we don’t want to embrace Ninevah—whatever group of people that might be to you—as God’s beloved children, as Images of God. When we get stuck and demand that our way is the right way and our thoughts are God’s thoughts. When we entrench ourselves in dogma and other theological bunkers. When we refuse to share God’s table. Jesus is calling us to change. God is inviting us to walk in continuing faithfulness, even though that path may be new or confusing or even dangerous.
God isn’t simply calling Ninevah—calling them—to repentance. God is calling the prophet. God is calling all their children. God is calling us to grow, to change, to be faithful in walking this path of radical love laid before us.
Jesus is calling us…to
“Get up, go to” Las Cruces, or Mesilla, or Vado, or Mesa, or wherever you may find yourself, “and proclaim…the message that” he has given to us: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent”—continue along the paths of love, and mercy; continue to change—“and be faithful to the good news.”
[1] All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[2] Joppa was on Israel’s central coast. It is currently known as Jaffa and is considered a district of Tel Aviv
[3] Jonah 3:4
[4] The common answer is somewhere in Spain, but the location has never been solidly identified.
[5] Dagon, by name
[6] The form is properly identified as a novella.
[7] Romans 11:29
[8] Mark 1:15