In Ninevah

Haiku of the second chance

Tried to avoid it,

but Jonah decides it’s time

to do what he’s told.

He’s still reluctant,

wants God to punish them all;

it’s what they deserve!

God is generous,

gave Jonah another chance.

This time he obeys.

Goes to Ninevah.

Nearing its centre, he cries:

You’ve got forty days!

Unexpectedly

the people pay attention,

believe God’smessage.

Proclaiming a fast,

they dress themselves in sackcloth,

show they’re serious.

Seeing them repent,

turning from their wicked ways,

God had a rethink.

A calamity

had been planned for the city,

but God called it off.

This Old Testament

God can be problematic,

but here we see grace.

© Ken Rookes 2023

 

Jonah's hard way

Several years ago Michael Lerner wrote a book called “The Politics of Meaning.” Lerner said that too often we give up on our deepest held values of compassion, caring and community because they do not seem practical in the real world. Instead, an ethos of selfishness and materialism prevails by default. These are the values that we settle for when our deeper values seem out of reach. Selfishness and materialism erode community and make it less possible to live the life we want. It puts us more out of purpose. Jonah’s way seems easier at first, but in the end we will get thrown overboard and end up in the belly of the whale.

And so we lose our perspective so easily on what God is really calling us to.
In the church there is a relentless battle for the orthodox high ground. Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans and Presbyterians don their traditional  denominational colors to joust back and forth.
The most contentious issues relate to baptism (when and how), the nature of biblical inspiration and authority, the limits of the atonement, the creation debate, not to mention sexuality .
Somebody said of Church people that “we would rather be right than nice,".
While I'm not sure being a Christian equates with "nice," the point is well-taken. Although Paul maintains that while faith, hope and love abide, "the greatest of these is love," I believe that many Protestants have decided that the greatest of these is actually faith—as in "orthodoxy" of one sort or another—and that little else matters, least of all incarnation.

S.T. Kimbrough suggests that evangelism is increasingly difficult not because our pluralism, consumerism or attention span makes us resistant, but because we fail to incarnate the love we preach. We can't persuade others that we are people of peace because there is so much strife and contention among us—and we are often more eager to be right, or to win, than to be loving. We offer forensic invitations to discipleship—come think like us—instead of a mutually transforming hospitality: come be with us; let's learn together.
https://www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2009-01/greatest-these-being-right

We are Jonah

Please read the whole of Jonah this week. It is not that long and it is rich and full of the radical message of God's grace and of our need to live graciously and mercifully. This is not just a story about a whale and a reluctant prophet, or merely about Ninevah. It is about us.

We are Nineveh. We are Jonah. We don’t know what it was that Jonah did. Maybe they polluted the environment, maybe they oppressed the poor, maybe they worshiped false Gods. The point is that they repented of their actions and then God repented of Gods.

A story, but very real. Grace was there for Nineveh, even though they had done great wrongs. Grace was there for Jonah when Jonah was at his lowest. But the real challenge of Jonah is to see the grace and activity of God being present not just for ourselves but also for even those we regard as our enemies. This book is about the presence of God’s grace and the absence of Jonah’s.