On this day, we specially remember Jesus making his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, that God’s Word might be fulfilled.  Today, we also conclude our time with Jonah.  Jesus was asked for a sign of confirmation, undeniable proof.  Oh yes, of course, some were saying with a smug sneer, “Why should we believe you?” but there were others, even sincerely saying, “Give us a sign, so that we can believe.”  Always those who won’t believe and those who would, if only they could.  Jesus replied the only sign would be the sign of Jonah.

He goes on to speak of Jonah in the belly of the great fish for three days and nights, the darkest depths of death, but that’s not the only sign of Jonah.  Jesus also speaks of the repentance of the people listening to Jonah’s preaching (Mt 12:41).  That, also, counts as a sign of Jonah: God at work through Jonah.  Jesus speaks of how, at the Judgment, the Ninevites would rise to condemn God’s own covenant people, because the covenant people had not believed or received the Son of Man, the Word of God.  That, also, might be taken as a sign of Jonah.  Disobedience, incomprehension, dissatisfaction—these, too, might be signs of Jonah—poor man!—who put all that on clear display.  If we stop with the whale, we’ve left out half the story.  If we stop at the tomb, we haven’t followed Jonah all the way.

When we left Jonah last Sunday, he was not happy.  Repentance was all around him, lives turning to God, seeking forgiveness, wickedness wasting away and righteousness blooming.  Jonah was furious.  God had sent him on a fool’s errand: to proclaim Nineveh’s destruction.  Here were the Ninevites, experiencing salvation!  God hadn’t followed through.  Jonah had put his life in mortal danger for what?  He wondered what God needed him for.  If God all along was going to save them all—just save them, then, Lord, and leave me out of it!

“Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city.  There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen” (4:5).  He’s still sort of hoping God will rain down fire and brimstone after all.  Jonah needs to know that his works and sacrifice weren’t useless, pointless.  It’s as if he were saying, “I was faithful, and now You, God, follow through and wipe them out.  I’m here, all set and ready for the show.”

He made himself a shelter.  I don’t know that it was an especially good shelter, but I suppose it worked well enough for Jonah.  Sometimes we have to throw up a shelter, too: the shelter of whatever wisdom we’ve been able to forage, whatever looked like it might be wisdom, whatever was sold to us as wisdom: go along to get along; God is love without judgment; everyone will be saved; Jesus never said that; my God would never.  Sometimes, we end up sheltering ourselves from God’s Word, but we can’t block out all the light.

Jonah needs a shelter there outside Nineveh because it’s hot, like high summer around here.  No fun getting beaten down under the sun.  So Jonah made himself a shelter, but he was no builder: it wasn’t level, it wasn’t square, it was all propped together, a rickety lean-to—the breezes shook it; the sun burned through the cracks.  If Jonah shifted this way or that to try to get more comfortable, the whole shelter was likely to collapse.  Flimsy.  The notions under which we shelter ourselves can sometimes also turn out to be flimsy.  So we don’t look, we don’t think, we don’t test our notions against reality and don’t want them tested.  We don’t test our notions against the light and wind of God’s Word; we don’t want them tested.

“Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant” (4:6).  This was much better than Jonah’s fabricated shelter.  All he needed from God, now, thank you, was the Big Show . . . and a cool drink, maybe, with lots of ice.  And God is still guiding Jonah, pointing, calling his attention God’s way.  Why cause the leafy plant to grow for Jonah?  Not only because God saw how flimsy Jonah’s shelter was, not only because God knew Jonah suspected how flimsy his shelter was, but because God has compassion and wants His own to know Him better.

God provides.  He caused a plant to grow, giving Jonah shade “to ease his discomfort.”  Grace.  A teaching.  Jonah had tried his hand at cobbling together his own comfort—what a shabby shack!  God was providing Jonah with God’s comfort . . . another word for that is faith, also love.  Jonah was happy, we’re told.  About what?  About the love, the faith, the God who provides?  Jonah, we’re told, was “happy about the plant”: the thing rather than the one who gives.  Plenty of people enjoy life, live with gusto and seek adventures and excitements, throwing themselves into this world, yet have no thought for the One who provides all, who provides life.  No room for God; no time for God; too busy for God.

Jonah couldn’t see the forest for the trees, the Giver for the gift.  The main serious alternative, so far as I have gathered, to belief in a Creator and Creation is belief in randomness, purposelessness: molecules in the infinite, empty expanses of space that happen to collide and stick to one another.  But why is it in the nature of molecules to stick?  How did they come by that nature?  And why is anything inherent—natural that is—to anything?  And from where did these molecules come?  One of the basic questions of philosophy, that ancient pursuit of wisdom, is why is there something rather than nothing.  If the ground, the source, of everything is nothing, how can anything be?  There must be a First Cause, an Uncaused Cause.

Well, let’s come back down to earth, to Jonah under the shade of that most agreeable plant.  “At dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered.  When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint.  He wanted to die, and said, ‘It would be better for me to die than to live’” (4:7-8).  If this is how the world is, then let me off.  But Jonah isn’t at the end of his journey.  He was still in the wilderness, under the sun in the heat, his useless shelter long forgotten and the strictly temporary, temporal shelter God provided gone.  Why did God take it away?  Is that love?  Is that grace?

Where is relief?  Where is hope?  Where is possibility?  If this misery is all there is, all there could possibly be, what’s the use?  Vanity of vanities!  So much wasted breath.  All this faith talk: a bunch of hot air.  Jonah might well have thought to himself, “If this is what it comes to, if God doesn’t destroy the wicked and I’m left exposed to all this suffering, then count me out!”  A plaything of the elements!  Without God, isn’t that all that we are?  Playthings of the unknowing, uncaring elements, forces randomly doing their blind, deaf thing to we poor, pitiful mortals, stuck on the roller coaster, the Titan of terror?  Jonah might agree that life, whatever it was, was a joke, and a bad one.  The question, though, beloved, is not what is life, but what is life for?  May I just say that, at the very least, life is for knowing God.

But Jonah doesn’t want to know God, not as God would be known by His people, by those whom He is calling.  Jonah likes Jonah’s god: the god Jonah had assembled, just like that ramshackle shelter under which he thought to hide and wait it out.  And God, who wants Jonah—and all of us and everyone—to know Him rightly, asks, “‘Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?  ‘It is,” [Jonah] said. ‘And I’m so angry I wish I were dead’” (4:9).  Angry.  Hasn’t that been it all along?  How often our anger leads to sin!  It did, there in Jerusalem, all those centuries ago.  Jesus came to give; he also came to remove: he came to remove the shelters people construct for themselves, the happy fictions people fashion from this and that, the security they want to have in the things of the world, where justice is so rarely done and God doesn’t do what He says.  So far as Jonah was concerned, that shade plant was better than God.

Jesus came to remove our anger, take it upon himself, so that we could receive God’s grace, and live.  He rode into Jerusalem that warm, bright day, to make the perfection of God’s justice visible, to show to the world that God indeed does what He says.  Jonah, and a few too many besides him, have convinced themselves that God’s justice is on clearest display in wrath.  Oooh, that wrath!  Jesus shows that Jonah was partly right and mostly wrong.  Jonah ought to have remembered it, too, because Jonah—when he wasn’t angry, hurt, and resentful—understood, vividly, vitally, that God’s justice was on clearest display in salvation: salvation of the pentitent, salvation for those who turn to God, who beg Him to help them to have life and live life on God’s terms.  Jonah had lived it!

God chooses to stay in relation with angry, hurt Jonah, because God wants to bless Jonah and make him a blessing to many (all those Ninevites—and their animals!).  God also wants to teach Jonah something, see and understand something about God, to know God better.  That’s just what God wants for us, too.  Jesus is our constant reminder.

God gently chides Jonah for feeling more upset about the plant than about the people: where has your heart been, Jonah?  Where has it gone?  God in Christ reminds us that God’s heart is for all the misguided, living no better than their work animals—eat, drink, sleep, work, play, get, copulate, repeat.  Jonah, even if you have no concern for all those lost souls (shame on you), God has concern for them!  The sign is God acting to save them from themselves, their ignorance, their false gods and fallen ways.  God makes visible, audible, available for everyone the justice that is love and the love that is justice, including right here, right now.

Worthy is the Lamb who was slain, to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing!