How Many People Can God Love?
The Rev. Dr. Stephen R. Montgomery
Senior Pastor, Idlewild Presbyterian Church
Memphis, TN

(This sermon is also available in audio.)
Jonah 3:1-5,10

Now buddy, get up and come here to your pap
I’ll tell you a story, climb up in my lap.
It’s better than the story of Daniel or Ruth
Although it is fishy, it’s every bit truth. 1

Yep. This is the story of Jonah, that indigestible burp in the belly of a whale. I’m sure we’ve all heard the story before, whether we were climbing up on our grandpappy’s lap or dozing off in Sunday School years ago. But you know, there’s a funny thing about this story, because each time its told, it has a different meaning

Now listen right good while I tell you this tale.
How Jonah the prophet got caught by a whale.
The whale caught poor Jonah, and bless your dear soul.
It not only caught him, it swallowed him whole.

There’s another funny thing about this story. Its….funny! It’s hard to read this and not laugh. Except we find it hard to laugh. We take our religious faith so seriously. We take the Bible so seriously. And because of that some people read Jonah as if it were solemn, straight-laced history. But it’s more than a history book. It’s a parable. Jesus told parables, and that didn’t make him a liar, you know. It’s a parable about the nation of Israel, which like Jonah had become narrow and exclusive. And maybe, just maybe, it is about us as well. So if we want to take the book of Jonah seriously, then we can’t be too serious!

Now part of this story is awfully sad,
It’s about a great city that went to the bad
The Lord saw them people with such wicked ways
He says “I can’t stand them but forty more days.”

Take Nineveh. (Please!) Nineveh, the city to which Jonah was sent with his message of doom, was not just any city. It was the capital of the Assyrian empire, which is now Iraq. Nineveh was just down the road from what is now Baghdad. For the Israelites, Nineveh was the axis of evil, the focus of terror in the 8th century BC. Nineveh stood for everything that was bad and foreign. Assyria had shamed and conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel, so Nineveh was a code word for “enemy,” for everything that stood against the Israelites and kept them down and prevented them from becoming a great and prosperous and peaceful nation.

And the Israelites took it one step further: If Nineveh was everything that stood over against the Jews, what stood with the Jews and for them was God. It all made perfect sense: our enemies are God’s enemies. And how we enjoy hating God’s enemies---people over there in Bag…er, Nineveh, those people who don’t live like us, who don’t worship like us.

So he spoke to old Jonah, then said “Go and try
To the wicked old city, and tell them that I
Give them forty more days to get humbled down
And if they don’t do it, I’ll tear up the town.

You’d think that would be pretty good news for Jonah and the Israelites. But there’s that number forty. That number forty is in the Bible a lot. Noah was on the boat for forty days and forty nights. Moses had to wait forty years before he could take up his path again at the burning bush. The whole nation of Israel had to wait forty years before they could enter the promised land. And later on Jesus was in the wilderness forty days.

But there’s a funny thing about that number forty. Whenever it appears, there is a time of testing. God suspends wrath and gives humans a chance to show who they are. And the amazing thing about all of these texts is that the delay always has a favorable outcome. Noah is saved. Moses becomes the leader of God’s people. Israel enters the Promised Land, and Jesus overcomes temptation. Apparently God is slow to anger, and Jonah had an inkling of that, because

When he heard the Lord speaking, Old Jonah said “No!
I’m a true hardshell Baptist, and so I won’t go
The Nineveh people are nothing to me
Don’t save them, destroy them, and then we’ll agree.”

“Tell them to repent? Jonah said. “Don’t you remember that those folks wiped out ten tribes of your people?”

“I’ve got an idea, Lord. Why don’t we just can this idea of saving them and just zap them with a little fire and brimstone. Surprise them! That’ll give them something to remember! Better yet, blast them back to smitherin’s. Uh, you say that’s not what you had in mind? Still want to give them a chance? Well, let my people get back to your people.” But Jonah took off in the other direction.

So he went down to Joppa, twas there in great haste
That he boarded a ship to a different place
The Lord looked down at him, and then said he
“ Old Jonah’s a fixin’ to run off on me.”

I have to admit sometimes I think we’re a little hard on old Jonah. I mean, who can blame him? He wasn’t particularly qualified for the job, and there wasn’t a great deal of prestige being a prophet of doom. Worse yet, if Nineveh were saved, what would that do to his standing back in Israel? Not to mention the personal dimension. Can you imagine trying to explain to a wife and family just why you have to travel 750 miles on foot to a big city, an evil one at that? “All right, Jonah, who is she?”

The task was too much, and Jonah doesn’t obey. But the wind and the fish do.

So He set the wind a blowing with its squeaks and its squeals
The sea then got rowdy and kicked up its heels;
Poor Jonah confessed it was caused by his sins
So the crew threw him out and the whale took him in.

That scene on the ship is really one of the more remarkable scenes in all of scripture. He’s in the midst of a violent storm, the boat is tossing to and fro, sailors are yelling and praying to their gods, and where is Jonah? Sleeping. I think if Jonah were alive today he would be able to pick up endorsements from everything from Beautyrest mattresses to Excedrin P.M. “Do you have problems sleeping during the midst of storms?” I did, until I took Seratan and slept peacefully.”

Of course, it’s really not all that unusual. We sleep through storms all the time. There is something about our desire to ignore hard truths, something about the vested interests that we all have, that keeps us sheltered from dealing with the storms around us. There are any number of examples. Global warming is a scientific fact; there have been three recent studies (including one from the Pentagon, not exactly a hotbed of environmental radicalism!) that have demonstrated that our polar ice caps are melting, yet let’s study it a bit more, wait a little longer and our filters (economic and others) prohibit us from seeing that our environment is crumbling. But let’s study. Sleeping through storms. We do it all the time.

Well, enough preaching. I’m getting too serious. Back to our story. The plot thickens.

Well, the whale said to Jonah, old feller, don’t fret.
I’m sent here to take you in out of the wet
So he opened his mouth and poor Jonah got in
Oh how he did wish that he never did sin.

What a funny sight, Buddy, that ever was seen
When Jonah rode off in his new submarine
The Nineveh people, they did not repent
For the message of warning to them was mis-sent.

Some see the fish as God’s way of punishing Jonah. Yet Jonah is certainly not worse off in the fish than he was in the ocean where he definitely would have drowned.

Let’s think about this now. I said this was a parable. He had just been thrown out into the sea, where he previously thought God was not present. Israel had been ravaged by the Assyrians and sent into Babylon where they thought God was not present. Jonah, like the Israelites, found God to be very present. Maybe God isn’t confined to the places we think God is!

On a bed of green seaweed that whale tired to rest
He said, “Now I’ll sleep while my food will digest.
But he grew mighty restless and sore afraid
For he rumbled inside as the old prophet prayed.

Now you see how God’s letter to Nineveh lay
In a dead letter office, for three nights and days.
The old prophet shut in as tight as a lock
But all things will be opened as sure as you knock.

The third day the old fish arose from his bed
With his stomach tore up and a pain in his head
He said I must get to the air mighty quick
This filthy old sinner’s a making me sick.

So he winked his big eyes and wiggled his tail
Set out for the shore to deliver his mail.
He came near the shore and he looked all around
And vomited Jonah clear out on the ground.

“Jonah?”

“That you Lord?”

“Jonah, remember that little chat we had about a week ago? About giving people second chances?

“Right, Lord, and I guess I’ve had mine.”

“Yes, Jonah, and there are about 120,000 people waiting for theirs.”

Old Jonah thanked God for his mercy and grace
Then turning to the fish, he then made a face
He said “After three days and nights you have found
A good man, you old fool, you just can’t keep down.”

The old prophet stretched up with a yawn and a sigh.
Set down in the sun for his clothing to dry
He thought how much better his preaching would be
Since from a whale of a seminary, he’d had a degree.

Having rested him self and dried in the sun
Set out for Nineveh, almost in a run.
He said “I must hurry and try not to sin
I’m sure I don’t want to be swallowed again.”

Now, as a preacher, Jonah wasn’t exactly Billy Graham. Eight words he grudgingly shouted: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” No conditions. No “if’s”, “ands” and “buts”. No word of hope or redemption. “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.”

He arrived in the city, about a week late
And he preached from the time that he entered the gate
And the whole population repented and prayed
And the great hand of justice at length it was stayed.

The people listen. And they believe. They dress for repentance in sackcloth and ashes. The king issues a royal proclamation for a national repentance. Even the animals repent! Now, if this isn’t funny, I don’t know what is! Picture this: cattle lowing through the streets with ashes on their foreheads; little puppy dogs dressed in sackcloth chasing little kitty cats in sackcloth. Nineveh changes. God changes.

But Jonah doesn’t change. He sulks. “I knew this would happen. I knew it when it all began. It’s just like it says in the Bible: ‘Thou art a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.’ I just knew it!”

God tries to tickle Jonah into a chuckle. Jonah goes up on a hill and sits under a bush to watch Nineveh and see what will happen. God “appoints a worm to attack the plant and cause it to wither away.”

“Come on, Jonah. Lighten up.” “If you can feel sorry for the plant, surely I can feel sorry for all those Ninevites who don’t even know their right hand from their left. And how about the cattle, Jonah? Did you see the cattle dressed up in sackcloth? Have you ever seen anything so funny?”

The story ends there and Jonah does not laugh. What’s at stake here in this very funny story is just that: Jonah’s laughter. What’s at stake in Jonah’s soul. And ours. It’s a funny story, all right, and the joke is on Jonah. And the joke is on us. For only destruction can follow if we do not learn to laugh at our prejudices, our hates, and the smallness of our vision of God’s purposes.

It’s always “those people.” Why can’t “those people” live together in peace? Why can’t “those people” do what we’d like for them to do? Those people. Those “other” people. But there is always something to prevent us from giving up our enemies.

Mark Twain had some difficulty understanding the enmity among all of God’s creatures and decided to try an experiment:

So I built a cage and in it put a dog and a cat. And after a little training I
got the dog and the cat to the point where they lived together peaceably. Then I introduced a pig, a goat, a kangaroo, some birds and a monkey. And after a few adjustments, they learned to live in harmony. So encouraged was I by such successes that I added a Catholic, a Presbyterian, and a Jew, along with a Baptist missionary that I captured on the same trip. And in a very short while there wasn’t a single living thing left in the cage.

Not a single living thing. That’s the price of our solemnity and seriousness. Jonah just couldn’t get it. Why was he so angry? Because God loves too many people. As God sees it, there is only one kind of people on earth: God’s people. All the rest is happenstance, for the most part accidents of our birth: our race, our nationality, our class, our gender, our sexual orientation, our wealth, our religion. We let them separate us into us and them.

Maybe we should just learn to laugh at it all, laugh at all that separates us. Jonah couldn’t. Jonah is still waiting for God to come around to his way of thinking. And God is still waiting for us to come around to God’s way of loving.

And years later God looked out on all of creation whom God so loved that God sent…well, that’s another story.

Now buddy get up and come here to your pap.
I’ll tell you a story, climb up in my lap.
It’s better than the story of Daniel or Ruth
It’s about the Lord Jesus, and its every bit truth.

Copyright 2004 The Rev. Dr. Stephen Montgomery

1) Lyrics based on "The Old Fish Song." Author unknown, Earliest Recording Date: 1933 (field recording, Blind James Howard).

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