Picture if you can a small community of nuns in the chapel of their convent somewhere in the depths of the countryside. The early sun streams through the windows; they are reading together the morning office; reflectively chanting the psalms of the day; you get a feeling of deep peace and calm as you begin to listen to the words they are chanting and you hear this: I will pursue my enemies and overtake them; nor turn again until I have destroyed them. I will smite them down so they cannot rise; they shall fall beneath my feet. I shall beat them as small as the dust on the wind; I will cast them out as the mire of the streets. (verses from psalm 18).
How is it possible that such words could be said, by such people, in such a place? If you were to walk into a convent or a church and hear these words being said or sung you would get a very odd and rather frightening view of the beliefs of the people there.
The nuns of course could give you an explanation. They might say that they thought of the enemies referred to in the psalms as their sins with which they are always in conflict. Or they might say that the aggressiveness of the psalms puts them in touch with their own aggression. They think of the circumstances in which they might want to say such things and so get to know themselves more deeply and open up that violent part of themselves to God’s grace. Both explanations are quite sophisticated and both imply that the violent parts of Scripture shouldn’t be taken at face value as something God approves of. So perhaps we should put up a health warning at the door of the church not everything you hear in here should be taken as gospel!
Which brings us to the prophet Jonah the last in a long line of reluctant prophets. Moses produces a whole string of objections when he is called. Jeremiah feels he’s too young, Isaiah feels impure. Only Abraham replied to God instantly and unquestioningly just as the first disciples respond to Jesus. But Jonah tries to get as far away from God’s call as possible, hiring an expensive boat to take him to the other end of the Mediterranean.
Why is Jonah so reluctant? The answer is fairly simple: God wants him to go to Nineveh and tell its people they’re doomed. Nineveh is the capital of the Assyrian Empire, which cast a shadow of fear over the whole of the near east in the eighth century. We join the story this morning at the point just after Jonah has been vomited up by the whale, which had swallowed him up when the sailors reluctantly threw him over board to save themselves from drowning in the storm God sent as Jonah tries to escape to Spain. So Jonah eventually delivers his message and to everyone’s surprise the Ninevites repent and God forgives them. But Jonah is still not happy. It turns out that he has run away not primarily because he is afraid of the Assyrians but because he has guessed what will happen. And Jonah doesn’t want God to forgive the Assyrians he wants God to beat them up and grind them in the dust as in the psalm we began with. So Jonah says to God in the next chapter, I tried to run away because I know that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, generous in love, who relents from punishing.’ So clearly all the violent, aggressive, angry words of the psalms, which Jonah could chant enthusiastically, are not words that are likely to find favour with God.
This of course is only a story a kind of parable there never was a Jonah who made the Assyrians repent in this way. The story is written to question the narrow, patriotic and rigid view of God’s justice, which refuses to extend God’s patient love and forgiveness to foreigners. It reveals an outlook not a million miles from that of the disciples. Unlike Jonah they had answered Jesus’ call immediately; but then they spent most of his mission trying to persuade him to go in the opposite direction.
But can parables like that of Jonah be applied to real life – especially on Remembrance Sunday? It isn’t obvious who the modern Ninevites might be. Nor is it easy to see how this prophetic vision might relate to modern warfare. We might spend a lot of time arguing about the criteria for a just war but that doesn’t seem to be of interest to this prophetic vision. This vision relates first and foremost to the way we see our enemies. It doesn’t have anything to say about whether the Jews should have tried to resist the Assyrians and it is quite clear that God condemns Assyrian behaviour. Jonah agrees with that condemnation. What he does not see is that he should pity the Assyrians nor does he want to believe that the Assyrians might change, He doesn’t want to have anything to do with them he hardly sees them as human.
What he has to learn is the opposite of this most cherished outlook. The Assyrians are wrong that is never in doubt, but they are human, they can change, they deserve his pity and his concern concern enough to risk his life in going to them. And that it seems to me might be a set of principles that could guide the conduct of a Prime Minister or a Secretary of defence. Whether it could guide the conduct of a soldier at war I do not have the experience to say. Is it possible to cause the death of someone you genuinely regard as a human being, someone you can pity however wrong their behaviour, or do you have to put that from your mind in order to fight?
Perhaps it is possible; the war poet Wilfrid Owen died fighting in the First World War eight days before the Armistice. The preface from his collected poems contains words from a letter he wrote: Above all I am not concerned with poetry. My subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.’
Stephen Tucker