Jonah and the Need for Real Repentance

Jonah 1:17-2:10; Luke 18:9-14

Jonah barfedSo, let’s catch up on the story of Jonah. Last week we talked about Jonah as an advice tale for people in exile, living in a foreign culture and we learned that Jonah has a lot to say to us about how we Christians should live in a post-Christendom world. We looked at the first of four potential responses to being in exile—the first one being to run away. But we learned that you really can’t run away from God or God’s mission. Sooner or later, we have to go to Nineveh.

When we left Jonah, he was undergoing the involuntary baptism of being thrown in the sea by his shipmates. It’s hard to imagine a more frightening and lonely thing than to be taking your last breaths before going under the water in a raging storm. But at the end of chapter 1 we learn that even there in the chaos of a heavy sea, God provided for Jonah—he “provided a great fish to swallow Jonah” and, amazingly, Jonah lived in the fish’s belly for three days and three nights.

This, of course, raises questions. Is this even possible? It would make a great Mythbusters episode. There are some old sea stories of this actually happening, but most historians think they’re simply the tall tales of sailors. Most people look at the story and think, no way!

It’s like the teacher who was telling her class that it’s physically impossible for a whale to swallow a human because even though it’s a large mammal, it’s throat is very small. A little girl in the class raised her hand and said, “But Jonah was swallowed by a whale.” Again the teacher reiterated, “No, that’s an old tale. It’s just not possible.” “Well,” said the little girl, “when I get to heaven I will ask Jonah.” The teacher asked, “But what if Jonah went to hell?” The little girl replied, “Then you ask him.”

You can debate the physics and biology of whales swallowing humans, but that’s not really the point of the story. Indeed, the irony of the story is that, for Jonah, getting swallowed by the fish was it’s own form of hell, a form of death while still living. And in the face of death, as we see here in chapter 2, Jonah can do nothing but pray. From the inside of the whale’s belly, he gets a different perspective and it’s here that he finally begins to reflect on his situation.

At first glance, Jonah’s prayer seems pious and penitent. As we heard a couple of minutes ago, Jonah cried out to God in his distress. He relies on God to save him, and then he makes promises to God that he will keep if he is able to get out of this mess. On the surface, it looks like the runaway prophet has gotten the message and, at the end of chapter 2 when the fish vomits him out on the coast where he came from, it looks like Jonah is ready to go and finally do what God called him to do—the reluctant prophet turned repentant prophet.

But if we read Jonah’s prayer from the context of the whole story, we get quite a different view of it. Rather than a pious prayer from a penitent prophet, we see that it’s actually the self-justifying prayer of a man who still doesn’t get it. Look at the text:

Verse 2: “I called to the Lord in my distress.” Actually, no, Jonah didn’t call to the Lord when the ship was going down. The pagan sailors were doing all the praying then. Jonah doesn’t speak to God at all in chapter 1. It’s only when he’s underwater and in trouble that he engages God.

Verse 3: “You cast me into the depths.” Jonah blames God for his predicament, even though Jonah told the sailors that he was the cause of all their problems in the first place. They threw him overboard only after they tried every other alternative. Jonah absolves himself of responsibility for his predicament and puts the blame on God.

In fact, it’s interesting that Jonah uses the personal pronoun “I” or “me” 26 times within just 8 verses of this prayer. It’s supposed to be a prayer to God but Jonah talks about himself and none of his self-talk is self-effacing. There’s no trace of guilt or regret for what he has done. Contrast that to another one of these diasporic advice tales from the book of Daniel where, in chapter 9, Daniel uses “we” in his prayer of confession. He includes himself as being responsible for not following God’s law and God’s way for this people.

Jonah, on the other hand, says he has offered prayers to the temple, the dwelling place of the presence of God, but the reader already knows that Jonah actually did the opposite and fled from the presence of God!

Then Jonah takes a shot at the very people to whom God sent him to preach. Verse 8 – “Those deceived by worthless things [by idols] lose their chance for mercy.” He’s talking about the Ninevites but also about the sailors on the boat. We know, however, that it was the sailors who came around to offer praise and sacrifice to the one true God and later we’ll learn that it was the Ninevites who actually repented. Jonah, however, remains unrepentant. He compares his righteousness to that of these pagans, but ironically, they are more righteous than him.

Lastly, Jonah proclaims, “Deliverance belongs to the Lord!” But Jonah remains undelivered in the belly of a fish. His prayer, his reality, is distorted. It’s the backhanded prayer of the self-righteous.

Parable-Pharisee-TaxCollector-778x518Reading this took me to the New Testament and Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. People in Jesus’ day would have seen the surface contrast between the two: The Pharisee, upstanding, a biblical scholar, a righteous man, versus the tax collector, a sinner, a cheat, a shill for the pagan Romans. But here’s the contrast that Jesus sets up. The self-righteous Pharisee’s prayer is longer and it includes the personal pronoun “I” or “me” 5 times within two verses. Notice how he prays about himself: “God, I thank you that I’m not like everyone else—crooks, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and I give a tenth of everything I receive.”

Contrast that to the tax collector: “God, show mercy to me, a sinner.” Which one is a prayer of repentance? Jesus says that it is tax collector who actually goes home justified because he got real about his own sin. That’s real repentance.

The writer of the book of Jonah, I think, is trying to teach people in exile how to pray in a way that actually recognizes their situation. They are in exile because they themselves have sinned against God, thus they have no reason to be self-righteous. At the end of Christendom, we find ourselves in a similar place—we’ve been so busy blaming the culture that we fail to recognize the ways in which we’ve contributed to its demise by our own self-righteous, judgmental arrogance.

Like Jonah, we have tended to be pleased with ourselves and our progress. We’re quick to blame others for our predicament. We might even blame God for putting us in this mess. Like the Pharisee, we love to compare ourselves to others and point to our own religiosity as evidence that we are better people than those who thrive in a sinful culture.

We love to use the phrase, “Love the sinner and hate the sin” as a way of excusing our judgment of others who are clearly less righteous than we are.

Real repentance, on the other hand, is about getting real with ourselves and with God. The word “repent” actually means to change one’s mind, to get clarity about who we are and who God is and then to act accordingly. Because when we orient our attention toward God and away from ourselves, it’s our own sin that gets exposed, and when our own sin is exposed then we can begin to see others in a different light as well. We can learn to love the sinner and hate our own sin because the only chance we have, as the tax collector reminds us, is the mercy of God.

This is Paul’s point in Romans 1 and 2. I encourage you to go and read those two chapters together. We tend to only read Romans 1 and Paul’s list of sinful behaviors which includes issues of sexuality but (and we forget this) also includes behaviors like greed, jealousy, gossip, slander, rudeness, and pride among others. We’ve looked at the culture and said, “See, they do all of that. Isn’t it disgusting?” And we say with the pride of a Pharisee, “I’m so glad I’m not like them!” But then Paul turns around in chapter 2 and says, “Hold on a minute. You condemn yourself when you judge another person because the one who is judging is doing the same things…If you judge those who do these kinds of things but you do the same things yourself, think about this: Do you believe that you will escape God’s judgment?” (2:1-4).

As Shakespeare put it, “We doth protest too much.” Chances are that the person who is railing against some culturally approved sin is actually the one who is doing that very same thing in secret. We don’t have to go far to see that that’s the case. We see that hypocrisy every day. The more we point out the sin in others without pointing it out in ourselves, the more it damages our witness and makes us self-delusional. Time and again the number one thing that unchurched people cite as their reason for staying away from the church is their perception of the church being primarily judgmental of their sins and the sins of others. Instead of the world experiencing the pleasing aroma of Christ’s forgiving love on us, we instead put a stink in their nostrils like we just came from the guts of a fish.

No, the lesson of Jonah is that in the face of a foreign culture, our first act should not be to take a position against something or someone, but rather to take the posture of prayer and repentance over our own sin. We remember, after all, that Jesus’ first sermon began with the word, “Repent.” That’s a word for us before it is a word for the world. We must approach the world not with a pointed finger but with bended knees.

Last week I reminded you that we Methodists believe in prevenient grace—that God’s grace is offered to everyone, even those who seem far from God. This week I remind you of another of our Methodist distinctives and that is the emphasis we have on allowing God and others to speak into the reality of our lives. I got another book this week by Kevin Watson on the early Methodist band meetings. These were gatherings of 3-5 people whose primary purpose was to confess their sins to one another. As Watson puts it, “The band meeting was the most important context within early Methodism focused on growth in holiness.” In other words, confession and repentance were the first step toward the effectiveness of the Methodist movement. It was from a place of humility and brokenness that the early Methodists began to change the culture of 18th century England, not from a place of power and protest.

We’re recapturing a version movement within our own church through the use of Huddle groups, which are a lot like the early band meetings. We use Jesus’ formula: “Repent and believe” to begin examining ourselves with those two questions: What is God saying to you and what are you going to do about it? These are humbling questions, but they remind us that deliverance does, indeed, come only from the Lord.

Jonah’s self-righteous prayer was so unpalatable that even the fish couldn’t stomach it anymore and vomited him out on the coast (there are a lot of other expulsion words the writer could have used but he chose the most graphic one). We will learn in chapters 3 and 4 that Jonah’s attitude never really changes. He is convinced of his self-righteousness all the way to the end.

But we cannot be so convinced. We can no longer look at the world around us and say, self-righteously, “There but for the grace of God go I.” That is a pious fiction. Instead, we must hit our knees and say with the tax collector: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Only then will we be able to engage with the world in a way that leads them to Christ, knowing that the one who has delivered us can deliver them, too.

Scroll to Top