People ask Jesus for a sign, so they can know it’s all true, all real, so they can know Jesus truly is reliable and is who they think he may be.  Trust, but verify.  Won’t get fooled again.  After all, God provided Moses with three signs he could perform so people would be convinced—though Pharaoh wasn’t convinced.  Jesus says the only sign will be that “of the prophet Jonah” (Mt 12:39).  What did he mean?  Jonah and the whale—one of the nursery Bible stories.  As a young child, I had a pop-up book of Jonah and the whale.  That might be all we remember about Jonah.  On our journey to Easter, we’re going to go through Jonah’s story.

What happens to Jonah begins this way: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah” (1:1)—almost like a visitor or guest.  Someone who comes from somewhere: God.  The Word of the Lord does not come from us, from history, culture, myth, or psychological need—made up stories to comfort us in our infantile ignorance and fear.  There are those who read the Bible primarily as a reflection of the times and societies in which the events recorded there take place.  Since those times and societies are long gone, they say, this book doesn’t really have much to say to us.  That’s one way to respond to the Word of the Lord.  Not very hospitable.  A visitor is glad for welcome; a guest is glad for hospitality.

The Word came to Jonah.  Poets and writers can wonder where the words come from.  Those who make words their special study speak of inspiration—that’s not just an idea out of nowhere.  Inspiration is to breathe in.  In the word itself, we hear that stem spir-.  Spirit is another word for breath.  The Spirit of the Lord is like the breath of the Lord, one might even say the life of the Lord, making alive, giving life.  The words come from the Spirit.  The Word comes by way of the Spirit, the life-making power of God.  While written down by many over many centuries, God’s Word as recorded in this book, comes from God, as Peter reminded us last week.

God’s Word provides great comfort, peace, and hope.  God’s Word assures us of God’s love for us, His good plans for us.  God’s Word tells us of the way to live and the way not to live.  In the same way that the Word came to Jonah, God’s Word visits us with a mission.  That sounds like work, effort, risk, maybe even inconvenience.  The wonderful thing about our god, you know, is that he’s never inconvenient.  He speaks no inconvenient truth, asks no inconvenient service from us.  So, you can understand Jonah’s feelings when the Word comes to him, telling him, “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me” (1:2).

“Preach against it.”  You just know you’re going to encounter resistance whenever you go against anything, or anyone.  It’s not about what we’re against: it’s about what we’re for!  No one likes a Negative Ned, a No-no! Nelly.  The NLT makes God’s . . . request? No, command!—even more inconvenient: “preach against” becomes “announce my judgment against it.”  No wonder we’re not very enthusiastic about the Old Testament: there’s so much of it, and so much of it sounds just like this, right?  Judgment against it.  Jesus never talks that way!  What was that about catching more flies with honey than vinegar?  But why do we catch flies?  And we have fly swatters and Raid for that, anyway.

Nineveh—Jonah is told to go to Nineveh.  What’s the wickedest place you can think of?  Amsterdam?  New Orleans?  Washington, DC?  Austin?  Nineveh was the capital of the pagan power: the worst possible place, and the worst possible place for a man of faith to go.  Nineveh was the sort of place to which no self-respecting man of faith would ever go.  Jonah is told to go to that latter-day Sodom and “preach against it.”  Now, does that mean like fire and brimstone?  Nothing like telling people they’re all horrible and all going to hell.  What’s the alternative: tell them they’re all wonderful and all going to heaven?

What could it mean to preach against Nineveh?  It could be as basic as speaking up for God, there.  It might be as basic as bringing the Bible into Nineveh, talking with people about the Bible, there in Nineveh.  Nineveh was where there was no room for God’s Word.  Maybe to preach against something is to put God’s Word alongside it, for measurement, comparison.  God’s Word was against Nineveh because Nineveh was against God’s Word.  The wickedness of that society, its unbridled indulgence of every appetite of the flesh, had become so notorious that its notoriety had gone all the way up to God (1:2).  The people who lived in Nineveh had front-row seats all the time.  No, I don’t believe all of them approved of all they saw, but they didn’t condemn it, either.  They just accepted it, made their adjustments to it—there was no pushing back, you know, no resisting such things, after all: the way of the world.  And who was there to help them?  I’m sure some there knew they needed help.  They knew they didn’t know where to look for that help.  When Nineveh is all there is and all around you, help can be hard to see.

               Is God sending Jonah to condemn or to save?  Doesn’t matter to Jonah: he wants no part of it, whatever way.  Was Jonah afraid?  I think, maybe more, he was disgusted.  I’ve cleaned up all manner of nasty filth in my time, beloved, and so have you.  I’ve never been afraid to do it; I’ve always been disgusted to one degree or another.  Uncleanness—the Old Testament speaks about uncleanness.  Those parts really bore us because it all seems so remote, nonsensical, and pointless.  What’s any of that got to do with faith?  But when you actually encounter uncleanness, and have to do something to clean it up, the subject is no longer quite so remote, nonsensical, or pointless.  Dealing with uncleanness becomes quite relevant, and goopy, smelly, foul, and likely to get on you, and stain.

So, “Jonah ran away from the Lord [. . . .] He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship [. . . .] After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord” (1:3).  Tarshish—the ends of the earth: any length to get away, flee the uncleanness, flee having to say or do anything about it.  Why would God do that to poor Jonah?  How could God tell Jonah to go throw himself into such a reeking mess?  Doomed to failure!  Go and speak God’s Word in Nineveh?  A fool’s errand.  The word of the Lord came to Jonah, and Jonah slips out the back door, scrambling for the bushes.  Whether from fear, disgust, incomprehension, the conviction of certain failure, the futility of it all—from whatever reason or jumbled mixture of reasons, Jonah does not do what God asked—told him to do.  Not obedience.  Not faith.

What is faith without obedience?  I can stand up here and talk about my love for Jesus, wear a big shiny cross around my neck up here, but if I never show that love on God’s terms, or put that love into action on God’s terms, what does all the talk of love amount to?  Jonah wants to sail away; he pays his fare.  He pays the price for running from the Word that came to him.  If I leave God alone, He’ll leave me alone.  Then, I can go back to my convenient faith in my convenient god.  Jonah probably didn’t put his thoughts and feelings quite that way, but I’m afraid that’s what they amount to.  Sometimes, we love God best when He doesn’t bother us.

No one can escape the Lord.  They can listen or not listen.  They can struggle and wrestle or act like He’s not there.  They can fall to their knees before Him or strike Him and spit in His face.  None can escape Him, though.  None can get away from God’s Word: the measuring line set alongside—against—every heart.

Poets, writers, and prophets, who live by words, rely upon inspiration—oh, there’s plenty of perspiration, but without the inspiration it’s all futile.  The inspiration is the divine breath, the breath of God, who creates and makes alive.  God sends His breath over the sea upon which Jonah had hoped, prayed, that he might escape the will of God, the Word of the Lord that came to him and would not leave him because God has a purpose for Jonah.

“[T]he Lord sent a great wind on the sea” (1:4).  A wind over the waters—that’s creation talk.  God is doing something big, new.  It looks terrible.  It looks like a disaster.  It certainly feels that way, aboard that little ship out on that big sea.  That should be no surprise.  The beginning of Genesis tells us of the vast, deep, formless void: the old chaos.  If it’s left alone, maybe it won’t hurt us, but God’s breath moves over the waters, and the waters start moving, start responding to that breath: the churning and heaving can be hard to stomach.  The old chaos does not like the Word of God, does not want the Word of God, gets quite agitated upon hearing—feeling—the Word of God.  So inconvenient!  Beloved, in this life, it’s either God’s word or the old chaos, and we know what the old chaos does to all that we try to build in this world, what the old chaos does to our hopes in this life.

We’re told that, out in that storm, totally exposed in that creating, shaping, overcoming wind over the old, dark, deep, chaotic waters, “the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god” (1:5).  That sounds right; that rings true.  People have different gods, even those with no religious identity or affiliation.  I mean that everybody is dedicating his or her living to something: success, happiness, fun, popularity, health, wealth, family, career, education, entertainment, stimulation, More.

Those sailors are calling out to their gods to save them: all the deaf idols to which they had been devoting their lives.  At the same time, the sailors are lightening their load: “they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship” (1:5).  No one gets through the storm weighed down with stuff.  The stuff sinks them, snaps the lashings and crushes them.  Jesus told the rich young man to go and sell his possessions if he wanted to be perfect.  Don’t get your heart all tangled in things.  Well, perfection as we surely know, is unattainable, but stuff can be very obtainable, and we’re always being encouraged to acquire more.  We come home with it so excited.  Then we have garage sales.  If we’re going to get our lives straight with God, it seems we’re going to have to start jettisoning some of our stuff.  Simplicity, moderation—is this purchase really necessary?  Some people, because of circumstances, must live that austere way, but who wants to?

In the midst of the terrible storm caused by God’s moving, creating breath over the deep waters, Jonah—astoundingly, or not so astoundingly—has been unconscious to all the tumult: he’s belowdecks, asleep.  We’re told that he “fell into a deep sleep” (1:5).  In Scripture, God is the one who causes a deep sleep to come upon people.  It’s the deep sleep out of which God brings forth help and hope.  Seeing there was no one on earth just right to help Adam, God caused a deep sleep to come over the man, and brought Eve from Adam’s very substance: Eve, the help that was just right for Adam.  God sends the help that is just right.

Jonah was oblivious to the danger, all along: oblivious to the danger of the ship out in the storm on the old dark waters, angry under God’s breath; oblivious to the danger of fleeing the word of the Lord that had come to him; oblivious to the danger of the thousands in Nineveh.  “The captain went to him and said, ‘How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god!  Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish’” (1:6).  Do your part, too, the captain is saying.  God had been saying that to Jonah from the start.  Jonah just can’t escape that message, that Word: do your part, too.  Which god will save?  What is it best to live for?  What sort of life is most rewarding?  God’s Word, the Word that came to Jonah, like a visitor or a guest, tells us.  Jonah doesn’t want to listen.  He just knows all those doomed people in Nineveh won’t listen, either, and won’t want to.

The captain urges Jonah to call upon his God for salvation, saying, “Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish.”  Maybe your god will.  Sounds like that captain is pretty sure his won’t; salvation isn’t really what the captain’s god is for, or into.  Some gods take notice.  Not all do; maybe most don’t.  In a ‘round about way, the captain is asking Jonah what kind of God Jonah knows; he’s asking about the God of Jonah’s life, what that God is like.  That’s the Spirit, sisters and brothers—that same breath of God who stirs things up, who comes as visitor and guest, who creates and makes alive, who gives those listening a mission.

Now, Jonah is aware of the danger: it’s in his face, all around him.  He’s awake, now.  Who is your God, Jonah?  It’s time to remember.