Jonah 3:1-10; Matthew 12:38-42
We have arrived at the third chapter of the Book of Jonah, and when we last left our dubious hero he had been barfed out on to the beach by the fish—this after his self-justifying prayer in chapter 2 and his flight from God’s presence and his mission in chapter 1. Here Jonah sits on the beach, his skin likely bleached white from the stomach acid in the fish’s belly, seaweed wrapped around his head, smelling like—well, you might imagine what he smelled like. Likely you would have smelled him before you saw him.
But there on the beach, the writer tells us that, “The Lord’s word came to Jonah a second time.” As we learned in the first sermon, you really can’t run away from God’s call and as we discussed last week, neither God nor his creatures can stomach self-righteousness. If you’re going to make an impact as an exile in the prevailing culture, you have to engage and you have to get real about who you are and who God is.
And so God’s word comes to Jonah again, ordering Jonah to “Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and declare against it the proclamation that I am commanding you.” This time, Jonah actually goes. If the fish coughed up Jonah back where he started, back in Joppa, then Jonah had a 550 mile journey ahead of him to Nineveh, which probably took him a month or more. My guess is that his camel was always downwind in the caravan.
When Jonah arrives in Nineveh, he sees that it’s a huge city. It would take three days to walk across it, particularly since Jonah had to stop periodically to preach his one sentence sermon (actually just five words in Hebrew): “Just forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown.”
Now, as sermons go, this one is pretty lousy. I mean, the speaker still looks like fish barf; he’s speaking a language the Ninevites don’t understand; he repeats the same sentence over and over. And, by the way, is this the “word” that God actually gave him for the Ninevites? There’s no call to repentance, no identification of Israel’s God, no probing evangelistic question, like, “If your city were to be overthrown in 40 days, where would your soul spend eternity?” Jonah’s preaching is the equivalent of a homeless guy walking around with a “The end is near” sandwich board hanging around his neck.
And yet, his terrible preaching actually works. In an amazing turn of events, the Ninevites, these enemies of Jonah’s people, these cruel and unusual ancient terrorists, actually repent—even the king repents and even the animals repent. How did this happen?
Well, first we have to recognize how people thought in the ancient near east. In that world, where people believed in many gods, the use of signs and omens was very common. Pagan cultures practiced what is called “divination,” or cutting open an animal and examining its entrails to see what shapes they form. Good shapes meant good omens, bad animal guts meant that you were soon going to experience a gut-wrenching event, that sort of thing.
Now, imagine the pagan priests of Nineveh cutting open a series of animals and getting the message of impending bad news all around. And then, into that environment, walks this albino, fish-smelling, foreigner shouting jibberish on behalf of a foreign god. What do you do? Well, you can’t ignore that sign. Better do something. Better repent, even if you don’t know what exactly you’re repenting from!
See, it wasn’t Jonah’s message that made the difference so much as it was that presence of Jonah himself. He was the sign, the marker of the word of the Lord. When he shows up, at the right time and at the right place, things change. Now, notice that the Ninevites didn’t convert to Judaism, nor did they begin to worship Israel’s God. Rather, it was the simple appearance of a reluctant prophet that got them thinking in a different way. The messenger was the message.
This is the most shocking moment of the Jonah story, and those exiles who heard it for the first time no doubt understood the irony of it. Those exiles in Babylon had had a long history of prophets coming to them, prophets from among their own people, proclaiming to them God’s warning about what would happen to them if they didn’t change from their ways. But the people and their kings refused to listen and found themselves scattered, broken, and enslaved. Here in the Jonah story, on the other hand, it’s the pagan enemy who actually repents. It’s a commentary on their situation and it poses a question: what will you do if you encounter another prophet with a word from the Lord? What do you do with that sign?
This was the question the Pharisees and other religious leaders were asking Jesus in Matthew 12. After a series of encounters with Jesus where he challenges their obsession with determining who was in and who was out, the Pharisees finally ask Jesus to give them a sign—a sign that what he is doing and saying is actually coming from God. Give us convincing evidence that you are speaking a word from the Lord!
Jesus’ response is to call them back to the Book of Jonah. You’re just like those pagans, looking for a sign, says Jesus. But the only sign you’re going to get is the sign of Jonah. “Just as Jonah was in the whale’s belly for three days and three nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights.” Just as Jonah went down to the depths and emerged three days later, so will Jesus go into the deep darkness of death and, after three days, be raised up again. Just as Jonah appeared from the belly of the fish, announcing the overthrow of deadly Nineveh, Jesus will appear from the belly of death and announce that death itself had been overthrown. Jesus isn’t giving signs because he is the sign.
The Ninevites changed their hearts and lives because of Jonah and his message, said Jesus, but one is here who is greater than Jonah. As messed up and evil as they were, at least these pagans recognized a sign when they saw it and repented. The queen of Sheba, another pagan, recognized Solomon’s wisdom and traveled a long way to see him. And both the Ninevites and the Queen will rise up at the end and condemn those who had the sign and missed it. In fact, in Matthew’s Gospel, a very Jewish gospel, the first people to worship Jesus are the Magi, pagans from another country. They recognized the sign—that the messenger is the message. The word of God is best made known when it comes in the flesh (John 1).
If the book of Jonah is largely a commentary on Israel’s inability to heed the prophetic signs given to them, Matthew’s Gospel may be a commentary on the church’s failure to read the signs of the times while acting like rule-making, religiously upstanding Pharisees. We look for signs to indicate our success as Christians—large church buildings, large Bibles, moral superiority, lots of people in attendance, tons of programs—but those are the signs and measurements of Christendom, signs that ultimately haven’t done much to impact the wider world. We miss the fact that the message is embodied in the messenger, that until the word of the Lord for the world becomes enfleshed in people, in people who have encountered the risen Christ, then all those other signs point to nowhere.
We live in a foreign culture, like Nineveh, that’s looking for signs—looking for authenticity. It’s interesting that the number one trending hashtag on Twitter this week was #ThingsJesusNeverSaid. I found that interesting. You had a wide variety of people, the vast majority not Christians, who were speculating about Jesus (even if their speculation was inherently irreverent) in a way that argued from absence. Most of these people don’t know what Jesus actually said and, likely, don’t care that much because they’ve never seen what Jesus actually did and said embodied in his supposed followers. Christendom sold Jesus as an idea, a theological concept, a dispenser of good advice that, if followed, would get a person into heaven. But while Christendom was selling a self-help Jesus, the real, risen Christ was actually looking for a few good men and women who would actually live like him—messengers who would embody his message and good news to all creation.
We’ve been too much like Jonah: running away, failing to repent; but now God says again to the church, “Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city; get up and go to the foreign culture in which you find yourself, and declare my word to it—not just through your words, but through the word made flesh in you. Like Jonah, you may not be the best preacher, but you can be the sign that others are looking for; you can be the sign of God’s grace that changes someone’s life.
It’s fascinating to me that one of the signs that Christians use in our culture to indicate their faith is putting a fish ornament on their car and yet most of them don’t know where it comes from. In the Greco-Roman world, the fish, the ichthus in Greek, was a symbol of fertility and the word connects with the idea of the womb. The early Christians borrowed the symbol, which was more socially acceptable than the cross (which was like making the electric chair your primary symbol). In fact, they used the word “ICHTHUS” as an acrostic- “Iesous Christos Theou Uios Soter” – Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior. According to legend, a Christian would scratch an arc in the ground and if the person they were talking to completed it, then they knew they were meeting a fellow Christian.
But the symbolism was greater than that. It wasn’t merely a marker, a symbol to insiders and outsiders, it was a way of life. It symbolized baptism and mission. As the early church father Tertullian put it, “We, little fishes, after the image of our ichthus, Jesus Christ, are born in the water.” We are baptized, marked, commissioned, given new birth, to embody Christ and his mission. We are signs of grace to others—the message bound up in the messenger.
Problem is that some of the people who slap these fishes on their cars will go to church on Sunday morning and, on they way, get cut off by someone on the highway and flip them the middle finger of fellowship. And then, after church, they will go to a restaurant, act rudely, and give their server a lousy tip (ask any wait staff person—Sunday after church is the worst time of the week for tips).
Point is, if you’re going to slap a fish on your car you had better be living like one of Tertullian’s “little fishes.” You represent Christ. You don’t need a bumper sticker to do that. You’re already baptized. Like Jonah, you’ve been fished from the water and put on the beach to go and reengage God’s mission—to be a sign of what God can accomplish when he gets hold of a sinner like you.
People in this culture are not used to seeing good examples of Christians who embody the way of Jesus. They’re used to being disappointed. They need the sign of Jonah—the sign of resurrection people who live in a way that is truly reborn, resurrected, and representative of the Christ within them. You are the sign. That’s a full-time mission.
The Ninevites repented when they saw Jonah, even if it wasn’t the result of his dynamic preaching. But their repentance was short-lived. Within a few decades, Nineveh was indeed overthrown by the Babylonians and Medes. It happened so quickly and so completely that when the Greek historian Xenophon traveled by their some 200 years later, he asked the locals what those massive walls were and they couldn’t tell him. Nineveh was no more.
You have to wonder if things would have turned out differently had Jonah stayed with them, got to know them, instead of finishing his preaching and then heading out of the city to sulk in chapter 4 because his preaching actually worked.
The gospel does actually work, you know, but it takes a people who are living it out and living within the world to make it stick. It takes a fish-powered people who are always swimming against the stream, a people whose lives have been overthrown by grace.
“Get up and go to Nineveh;” get up and go to Monument, to Colorado Springs, to Denver, those great cities, to the world and proclaim God’s word for it. That’s the mission. Time to reengage. Amen.
