Jonah's Image of the God of All

JONAH’S IMAGE OF THE GOD OF ALL

If I asked you to describe God, I would finish up with as many descriptions of God as there are members of this congregation.

The reason for this is that each of us have our own description of God. Yet all these pictures of God can never do justice to Him because at the heart of God there is a deep unfathomable mystery. All we can hope to do upon this earth is to catch a glimpse of Him.

This we have been trying to do, by looking at some of the Old Testament prophets and their individual glimpses of Him. These in turn have been influenced by their own personal experience of Him as revealed through the history of the Jewish race.

I want now to look at the image of God which the prophet Jonah gives us.

The story of Jonah is probably very familiar to all of us. Nevertheless, it is probably worth repeating it if we are to catch something of his particular understanding of God.

We are told that Jonah was told by God to go to the people of the city of Nineveh and tell the people that God was aware of their wickedness and that he would destroy their city.

In order to appreciate the significance of this, it is important to recall that the Jews hated the Assyrians. It was a hatred which had developed over many centuries. The Assyrians had conquered the Jewish nation many years earlier and for years they had been exiled in Babylon.

In recent years they had returned to their homeland and were beginning to re-establish their nation. They were beginning to gain self-confidence and respect as they once again sought to develop their own national identity, with its own language, culture and religious life.

The last thing any devout Jew wanted to do was to have contact with the Assyrians, let alone to tell them that God was aware of their wickedness.

It is therefore hardly surprising that Jonah should choose to run away from the challenge and go off in the opposite direction. In fact he went to the sea port of Joppa. There he found a ship bound for Tarshish upon which he hid as a stowaway.

We are told that God caused a great storm to develop which began to threaten the safety of the ship. Meanwhile, Jonah was below deck, fast asleep from the exhaustion of his journey.

The sailors attributed the storm to God being angry with one of the members of the ship's crew. So they decided to cast lots in order to determine who was responsible. Unfortunately, the lot fell upon Jonah. So in order to pacify God, and thereby put a stop to the storm, they threw Jonah overboard. There a big fish found him and swallowed him up. For the next three days he remained in the belly of the fish before being vomited up upon dry land.

So God gave Jonah a second chance to go to the citizens of Nineveh and warn them that God was aware of their wickedness and would destroy them.

This time Jonah went. Unfortunately he was not prepared for the results of his preaching. We are told that all the people repented, and as a consequence, God decided to spare the city and not destroy it.

Naturally, Jonah was very upset and went off in the sulks. He considered that God had let him down.

"O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing" (Jonah 4.2,3). So Jonah asked that he might be allowed to die.

To this end, he went out of the city and made a booth. There he sat under its shade. God assisted by causing a bush - possibly a castor oil tree - to grow so that it would provide shade to protect him from the fierce midday sun.

However, the next day, God appointed a worm to attack the bush and to destroy its life saving shade.

Needless to say, Jonah was furious with God.

Now we come to the punch line of the whole story. God replies to Jonah's complaint by saying, "Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?... You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and so many animals" (Micah 4.9-11).

In other words, the concern which Jonah showed towards the tree he should have shown towards the citizens of Nineveh. Instead of sulking and being full of self-pity, he should be rejoicing that the people of Nineveh have been saved from destruction.

What a beautiful story! And that is what it is. A story.

It is therefore a waste of time to try to discover who Jonah was, although he has been identified as the son of Amattia who lived four hundred years earlier during the reign of King Jereboam 11.

It is a waste of time trying to find a fish which would have been big enough to accommodate a man within its belly.

It is a waste of time trying to prove that Nineveh could not have been as big as the story suggests whereby it took Jonah three and a half days to cross it.

It is a waste of time because it is only a story - an earthly story with a heavenly meaning, just like the parables which Jesus used to describe God in the New Testament.

It is a story about the Jews and their relationship with God.

They knew that they were the chosen people of God. Hence he had rescued them out of slavery from the Egyptians and, more recently rescued them again from the grip of the Babylonian exile in which the nation had been swallowed up

True they were the chosen people. But they had been chosen for a purpose and not for a privilege. They were intended to be the means whereby God would make himself known outside the confines of the Jewish nation.

Unfortunately, they had chosen to ignore this responsibility. Instead of showing concern for those outside the confines of their society, they had chosen to retreat behind the walls of an exclusive community. Like Jonah, they had run away from their responsibilities, being concerned only about their own well-being

The one word which sums up the picture of God which we have in the book of Jonah is that God is the God of all people. He is the God of both Jews and non-Jews alike. His concern is for all men and women, irrespective of their race, colour or creed.

This is a picture of God which we can glimpse in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Here was a person who was born of a Hebrew mother and yet rejoiced in the faith of a Syrian woman and a Roman soldier. He was welcomed by the Greeks who sought him and allowed an African to carry his cross.

The God which Jesus reveals is the God of all nations and that includes those whom we do not necessarily like and may even be at war with. God is not a national God. His arms outstretched upon the cross embrace the whole of humankind whom he seeks to draw closer to himself out of love.

This is a God whom we are in great danger of forgetting. As financial pressures and shortages of manpower begin to impinge upon the church, there is an awful danger that we shall retreat behind the walls of an exclusive society and turn our back upon those who are not members of the church.

But as Bishop Michael Ramsay once said. "A church which lives to itself will die to itself."

Or as the opening words of Edward Burns hymn put it.

"We have a gospel to proclaim.

Good news for men in all the world"

Not just good news for ourselves, but for all men and women.

The Christian church is by its nature a missionary church. Like the Jews in the Old Testament, we have been chosen for a particular purpose. And that purpose is to continue the ministry of Jesus in the world of today. A ministry which is directed towards all because God is the God of all.

And if we do not? Well we know what happened to Jonah. Suddenly, he found that the comfort and security afforded by the bush was taken away from him and found himself exposed to the heat.

Hence, we see much of the security of the past being removed to make us aware of our primary purpose of being the people of God.

So let us try to recapture something of Jonah's picture of God. A God of all. And let us stop retreating behind the walls of an exclusive church community, but rather seek to embrace all humankind as we seek to proclaim the good news.