When I was being trained for ordination I remember being asked by a fellow student which book of the Bible ends with a question mark. Unable to answer I was told that it had to do with directionally challenged quadrupeds. The clue was not helpful so I had to be told the answer. It is the book of Jonah where God says in the last sentence, ‘And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?’ Whenever I read that sentence I have this image of God tying different coloured bows to the front legs of a cow so that it can remember which is its right hoof and which its left.
The Book of Jonah is one of the strangest books in the Old Testament. We should perhaps think of it as a novel with a particularly strong message. Yet, nowadays Jonah has been reduced to a figure of fun, a Disney character who gets swallowed by a big fish – something for Sunday school children but not worth the attention of grown ups. In Judaism, however, the chapter from Jonah we heard as our first lesson is read on one of the most important days of the Jewish year, the day of atonement. In order to understand why this chapter is so significant we have to look at the whole book.
The story begins with God telling Jonah to go to Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, the epitome of inhumanity – the first great power to exert control by displacing whole populations. And Jonah’s first audience would know that the King of Nineveh was responsible for the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
So God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh in the east and Jonah goes instead to Tarshish probably in southern Spain far to the west. Jonah hires a whole boat manned by some rather admirable sailors. When they discover that Jonah is to blame for the storm that threatens to engulf them all, they are rather reluctant to throw Jonah over board. When they do so and everything calms down they are so overwhelmed that they instantly begin to worship Jonah’s God. So, ironically, while Jonah runs away from God he inadvertently converts a group of sailors to the God he is so scared of.
Once inside the whale Jonah prays a great prayer, but somehow manages not to acknowledge that he is in the wrong. It’s clear what the whale thinks about this disingenuous piety – he throws up – and Jonah finds himself vomited onto the shore. Continuing this vein of self indulgent piety Jonah sets out for Jerusalem to offer a sacrifice which is why at the beginning of tonight’s chapter God has to call to him a second time – reminding him that Nineveh and not Jerusalem, is where he’s supposed to be going.
When Jonah finally gets to Nineveh and proclaims his message, the Ninevites respond in a way that contrasts ironically with Jonah’s own behaviour. Whereas Jonah had sort to get progressively further away from God the Ninevites come progressively closer. From the greatest to the least, they put on sack-cloth and ashes, including the king himself. And then the ritual response turns to a moral response as the king orders everyone to turn from his evil ways and the violence which is in his hands. And so God forgives them.
Which is where Jonah gets really angry – he goes out of the city, builds himself a shelter and sits down waiting for the destruction of Nineveh which he still believes ought to happen. God questions him, and Jonah – says in effect, ‘I knew that’s what you’d do – go all soft on me and forgive them when they don’t deserve it which is why I didn’t want to come here in the first place.’
Jonah is so angry he wants to die – he feels his whole life has been made pointless by God’s not behaving according to Jonah’s understanding of justice. And then the story gets even more bizarre. So far God has used a violent storm and a big fish to bring Jonah to his senses; now he uses a castor oil plant, a hot dry wind and a worm. Jonah is glad of the plant’s protection from the sun but then when a worm attacks the plant so it withers and a hot dry wind beats down on Jonah, he again wants to die. He’s sorry for the plant but only because it did him a good turn. He cannot see that God can take pity on a city full of people even though they haven’t done anything for God, except repent. And so the book ends with its famous question mark and we are left wondering how Jonah will finally respond.
Why should this text be read on the Jewish Day of Atonement? Firstly I think because the Ninevites not only repent ritually, they also change their evil ways and it is the moral rather than the ritual act to which God responds with mercy. And then the story also shows that Jonah’s ritual correctness and pious orthodoxy are not enough. God doesn’t correspond to our expectations. God does not isolate us from an ambiguous and uncomfortable world – a world where the people we least expect to have moral scruples may actually be ready to be warned about the moral danger they are in. God confronts us with the limitations of our understanding. God often achieves his ends in spite of his servants rather than because of them. God is not narrowly nationalistic or kept by the past from doing a new thing. The Ninevites may be cruel and hateful, but it is just conceivable that they might repent and Jonah has to learn that the anarchic love of God may go far beyond Jonah’s limited sense of mercy. This deeply disturbing love confronts Jonah with the possibility of change. God is extraordinarily patient with Jonah but as we leave his story we do not know how it will go with Jonah.
Now it may be that in considering our reaction to Jonah’s story we don’t have too much difficulty identifying with Jonah’s God. Jonah’s God might seem rather liberal, even postmodern. Jonah’s God is patient and witty and of course we get the joke. Jonah’s God is subversive of narrowness and of course we are not narrow minded. Jonah’s God is forgiving and open to outsiders and we want to think of ourselves as tolerant and inclusive not like those bigoted self righteous Christians over there, the modern day Jonahs who want a rigid and exclusive church and who can’t live with ambiguity like we can.
But perhaps we should remember that it was the Pharisee in our second reading who stood up and prayed, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men…’ If Jonah’s story leaves us feeling comfortable with our own rightness, we haven’t appreciated the force of that final famous question mark, ‘Should I not pity?’ The anarchic, unpredictable love of God breaks every boundary we set upon it – it questions every Pharisaic comparison we make in our own favour. This patient love of God knows no bounds not even with those we might want to condemn or find difficult to love. The question mark hangs over us as over Jonah and all those heading away from our inscrutable God. ‘Should I not pity…’