Readings:
Jonah 1-4
John 11:1-16

Jonah

This will be the first time we read an entire book in a single sitting, but Jonah has a pretty straightforward message and is only four chapters long so I think we can do it. Jonah lived in the northern kingdom of Israel towards the end of that kingdom’s lifespan. Living in Israel he knows only wicked kings and his country is constantly being harassed and harried by the Syrians and then the Assyrians. He was also apparently a well known prophet being mentioned in 2 Kings 14, but his deeds in Israel are unrecorded, the only thing we have written about him apart from that reference is this book.

The very first line in the book is God commanding Jonah to go and preach a message of repentance to Nineveh. There was a common belief among the Israelites that God was their God, and nobody else’s. That God is calling Nineveh to repentance or else they’ll be destroyed shows both his power and his mercy. Most gods of the Middle East were thought to be geographically limited, so by showing he’s both concerned with the actions of a foreign land, and that he’s both willing and able to punish them if they don’t repent, shows he is not limited at all. It also shows that God is concerned with a foreign people, which will be expanded even further in the new covenant to explicitly include all the nations of the world.

And finally, Nineveh was the capital of Israel’s most powerful and ruthless enemy to date. So an Israelite is supposed to waltz into the capital of his enemy and tell them “repent or else”? Possibly Jonah didn’t want to go because it would be like sending a Frenchman into Berlin in 1945 to tell mustache man that he needs to repent. It’s both something he wouldn’t want to do because of bad blood, and also because it’s probably a suicide mission.

So Jonah runs away. But he didn’t take into account that God can see everywhere and everything, there’s no running and hiding from him. And we all know what happens next, there’s a great storm and the ship is in danger of sinking so Jonah is thrown overboard and a great fish swallows him. In a foreshadowing of Jesus, he spends “three days and three nights” in what was essentially his grave.

Another thing that often goes unnoticed is that Jonah sleeps through a storm that his fellow shipmates think is going to sink their boat, and when he awakes he says he’s a Hebrew that worships the Lord who made the seas. When Jesus does the same thing, he wakes up and he is that God that Jonah was talking about, and he commands the sea to the astonishment of his apostles.

Jonah prays and repents inside the belly of the fish, and God has him spat out on the land. Now he has to carry out the mission he was sent on.

At first Jonah may have resisted because he thought the idea of Nineveh repenting was unbelievable. They were the wicked capital of the wicked nation of the Assyrians. They worshiped cruel gods and practiced barbaric practices on the peoples they conquered. But yet they repented, and this is noted by Jesus in the gospels when he says that a pagan gentile city repented at the preaching of a human prophet, but now a greater prophet is preaching to a people who should be predisposed to listen and they refuse.

The men of Nin’eveh will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.

Matthew 12:41

Jonah and God have an argument where Jonah is upset that the city isn’t a flaming ruin. His job wasn’t to sit and watch the city burn, it was to call them to repent so that they wouldn’t burn, but now the unbelievable has become reality and the city has repented, so he doesn’t get to see its destruction.

God makes a vine to give him shade while he sits on a hill and mopes, but then a worm eats it and it dies, this doesn’t help Jonah’s mood. But God uses it all to teach him a lesson, and is too. We can’t root for the demise of others, even if they “deserve it” because they’re also creations of the Creator. They have as much right to exist as we do, so we need to remember that we all come from the same creator and if he chooses to show mercy to those who don’t deserve it we should rejoice in his mercy, rather than lament the fact that the wicked weren’t destroyed. Maybe one day we will be the wicked one that needs ,recycle and repentance much more than death and destruction.

Read this article I wrote for more on Jonah Jonah; The Unloving Evangelist

John 11:1-16

They received word that Lazarus is ill, and his sisters are probably expecting Jesus to show up like the cavalry and save the day, but he doesn’t go anywhere for two more days. In that waiting period Lazarus dies, and then Jesus gets up with his followers and says they must go to Bethany. A common belief in that day was that the soul stayed with the body for two days and then departed for Sheol, so by waiting till he’d been in the tomb for over 3 days and was most certainly dead to everyone around.

Raising a corpse, and one that wasn’t even particularly fresh, but had begun to smell, would be a much more impressive sign than healing whatever it was that killed him, and this is why Jesus waited around and he tells the apostles so.

This sets up his most impressive miracle of his ministry (besides his own resurrection of course).

Tomorrow’s Readings:
Joel 1-3
John 11:17-57