God's Coup-de-Grace--September 17, 2020

 God's Coup-De-Grace--September 17, 2020

"When God saw what [the people of Nineveh] did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.  But this was displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the LORD, and said, 'O LORD, Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I led 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. And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.' And the LORD said, 'Is it right for you to be angry?' Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city." [Jonah 3:10-4:5]

The painful realization for us Respectable Religious folks is that we want God's goodness to be smaller than it is... and the second blow comes when we realize God is not going to stop being good to people beyond our made-up boundary lines, just because we are uncomfortable with it.  Our stinginess and short-sightedness cannot hold back God's grace.  And then the coup-de-grace is having to see the ways we have been so far off course from the mercy of God... in the hopes that by seeing it, we can be brought back into the wideness of God's life-giving goodness.

One of the haunting things about the story of Jonah is realizing that it's not just the ones who are "new" to the faith who have this struggle.  It's sometimes the very messengers God has sent, the prophets and leaders and teachers who are supposed to know the most about God and God's ways, who are most in need of having their vision stretched.  You expect the prophet... or the preacher... or the Bible study leader... to have the best understanding of what God is like, and to discover that they're the ones who need the wake-up call, well, that means all of us may need one as well.

Chances are, if you know the Jonah story, you learned it as "the story of the guy who gets swallowed by a big fish."  That's true, but it kind of misses the point of the whole story.  God sends Jonah to bring a message to the people of Nineveh--this is the capital city of the wicked enemy Assyrian empire, a people who were notorious for their violence and cruelty to those they captured or attacked.  Jonah doesn't want to go and speak God's disapproval to them--but not because he's afraid they'll laugh at him or persecute him or refuse to believe him.  As he says here, he's afraid that that God will turn out to be merciful to them, and Jonah doesn't want that possibility to happen.  He's decided that all the Ninevites (and with them, all the Assyrians) are bad, and that they do not deserve access to God's goodness--even though Jonah himself loves and cherishes his access to the goodness of God.  

Jonah doesn't want to let "those people" have what he thinks should only be for him and his group, so he runs in the opposite direction and gets on a boat headed as far away from Nineveh as he can get (hence the big fish's arrival later on). And so even though Jonah never throws a punch or makes a threat of physical violence to any of the Ninevites himself, he chooses to prevent the possibility that this whole group of people will have access to the good thing that he has freely received himself--he wants to keep the goodness of God back from all the Ninevites, just because he is convinced that all Ninevites are undeserving... are unworthy... are less-than.  Does Jonah ever directly harm the Ninevites--does he ever burn their houses down, kick the fenders on their chariots, kill any Ninevites, or even directly say, "I hate your kind?" No. Not even any name-calling, like referring to them as "a bunch of Ninnies." The problem in Jonah's heart is more pernicious, more insidious than that.  

Did it start with Jonah--did he invent the idea of hating Ninevites out of whole cloth?  No--surely it was something he grew up with, knowing that there had been generations of hostility between his people and theirs for a long time.  Probably nobody ever sat Jonah down and said, "You're supposed to actively harm and impede anything good from happening to Ninevites, and you are supposed to feel hatred for them in your heart."  But surely he grew up with the implicit teaching all around him that "THEY" were the enemy... that "THEY" were not eligible for God's goodness... and that "THEY" were not to be given access to the same good things that he, as an Israelite, took for granted. "THEY" were "OTHER"... and because of that, they were all to be treated as "enemy," every last one. Jonah didn't invent that system, but he was raised in it, and when the time came that God sent him to go to the Ninevites he had been ingrained to see himself as superior to, Jonah did exactly what he had been trained to do by every gesture, every implicit cue, and every cultural script that had been in front of his eyes from childhood:  he repeated the superiority he had been taught and refused to share the good things he had with those deemed as "other."

There is a word for that kind of complex system of indoctrination, the kind that becomes so subtle and insidious that you can almost forget it is there all the time, happening without anyone realizing it.  It is racism.  Among other things, it is systemic; it is ingrained; and most tragically of all, it is backed by Respectable Religious to make it seem like it is God's will and therefore OK.  There are all sorts of other things we could call Jonah's attitude--it is xenophobic, it is prejudiced, it is bigoted, it is merciless, and it is absolutely hypocritical.  But maybe it is worth letting ourselves be made a little more uncomfortable today by considering that at least part of what is going for Jonah is what we might call today "systemic racism."  And if Jonah is infected with it, then we are going to have to take an honest look at ourselves, too, for the same sickness--because Jonah was a Respectable Religious person who only saw goodness and righteousness in himself.

Hopefully the idea that there is racism going on for Jonah is obvious--he has a built-in prejudice against all Ninevites, and he assumes that all of them are just as unworthy, unrighteous, and undeserving of grace as the worst of the worst rumors and stories about the Assyrians that he has heard.  And treating a whole group of people negatively because they share a common ethnicity, culture, or language is exactly what racism is all about.  

The systemic part is what's harder sometimes for us to process.  See, Jonah doesn't burn any crosses on the lawns of the Ninevites, or blow up any Ninevite churches like the perpetrators of the firebombing of the 16th Street Baptism Church did in Birmingham 57 years ago this week (September 15, 1963).  Jonah didn't throw a punch or call a name.  But he was absolutely a part of a whole attitude, a whole set of practices and policies--in other words, a system--that assumed good things did not belong to the Ninevites and could not be shared with them, even if God said they were supposed to be.  Jonah had been raised in it, and then in adulthood, the same system came to fruition in him.  It wasn't even about his emotions or how he "felt" about the people of Nineveh--maybe Jonah would have even insisted, "But I have a Ninevite friend!"  But he had accepted and perpetuated the whole way of life that said, "All of these people are not worthy of the good things God has given me," and so even when God said explicitly, "Go to them and share with them what I have told you," he wouldn't.   

Poor Jonah--his whole view of the world is getting broken apart as he comes face to face with the realization that God's goodness is bigger than he wants to let it be, and that he is powerless to stop God's determination to bring life and grace to the ones he has been taught are unworthy.

Now, like I say, there's more to this scene than only what we would call racism today.  It's true that Nineveh is the capital of an empire that was notorious for its cruelty and wickedness, and there was certainly a lot that these particular folks had to repent of.  But what God wanted Jonah to bring was exactly the opportunity to repent, to turn, and to find mercy--and that's exactly what Jonah didn't want to let them have.

And that's in the end what we all need to wrestle with: here we are, Respectable Religious folks who like to think we know how God works and who "matters" in God's scheme of things.  And a lot of the time, those assumptions have been ingrained in us from childhood--nobody has to lecture us or brainwash us, but we just pick it up in a thousand different subtle ways.  And because we see it reinforced in our church life so often, we often just assume that God backs our prejudices, our assumptions, and our systems of "the way things are."  The whole arc of Jonah's story reminds us that God does not... and that God is not bound to live inside the boxes we have constructed to try and cage the Almighty.  God does not stay inside the boundary lines of our quietly-ingrained racism, our pet hatreds, and our unspoken patterns of prejudice that become the systems we build our lives on. The only question is what we will do when we realize that God has escaped the pen we built.

That's Jonah's question, too, and that's maybe where we need to leave our conversation for now, too.  The book of Jonah ends with the open question of how he will respond to a grace that is wider than he wanted to allow.  His story also calls into question the whole set of assumptions Jonah had surely grown up with--about who was eligible for mercy, who should have access to God's goodness, and whom the Respectable Religious Crowd are allowed to exclude.  Maybe we will need to take a closer look, too, at ourselves, and what ways we have been quietly ingrained with the belief that "we" are better than some people, and that "they" do not deserve the good things (or even the God things) we have freely.

What will we do when we have that honest conversation with ourselves?  How will we respond when we discover that God's goodness is wider and wilder than we dared imagine?  How will we react when we discover the father is welcoming home prodigals with lavish parties while we sulk outside, grouching about their unworthiness?

Maybe we will work up the courage to come into a party that has a lot more variety in its guest list than we could have dreamed.  Maybe we will even smile a little to see the celebration.

Lord God, open up these hearts and eyes of ours to the wideness of your vision, and help us to see ourselves honestly, including the ways we have learned to exclude others that you are still including.