THE FIFTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Year A, Lectionary 25
September 21, 2014
Jonah 3:10—4:11
Matthew 20:1-16
Pastor David Tryggestad
Concordia Evangelical
Lutheran Church
Duluth, Minnesota
Nowhere in the Bible does it say that God is fair. No one
knew that better than Jonah.
“Jonah! Go to Nineveh,
that great and wicked city, and declare the Word of the Lord that I will give
you!”
Now Nineveh lay to the east,
some 560 miles from Jerusalem.
It was the largest city in the world, in present-day Iraq. Nineveh,
capital city of the hated Assyrians, had brutalized Israel, brought it to its knees,
and deported most of its citizens. The Ninevites rejected Israel’s God,
and they were notorious for their violence.
“Jonah! Go to Nineveh,
that great and wicked city, and declare the Word of the Lord that I will give
you!”
Jonah loved his God. But he hated the people of Nineveh. So, instead of
heading east, he headed west, as far west as the known-world could imagine,
towards Tarshish, on the tip of southern Spain. He booked on the first ship
that sailed, getting away as fast as he could.
But God was not easily eluded. God sent a storm on the sea.
The crew members cried out to their own gods, but nothing happened. They
appealed to Jonah, who managed to sleep through the storm—he knew it was from
God—and the sailors had figured out that Jonah was the cause of all of this.
Jonah instructed them to throw him overboard and, reluctantly, they did.
Immediately the storm ceased and the sailors began to worship the God of Israel.
God sent a great fish to swallow Jonah, to save him from the
depths of the sea. As that great fish took Jonah to the depths of the sea,
Jonah prayed to God as if from the depths of Sheol—the depths of the
underworld. Joel praised God for God’s deliverance.
After three days, as if on cue, God delivered Jonah, causing
the fish to regurgitate Jonah on dry land.
Now, if Jonah thought he was going to receive a sabbatical
to rest and recuperate from his strange and strenuous ordeal, he had another
thing coming:
“Jonah! Go to Nineveh,
that great and wicked city, and declare the Word of the Lord that I will give
you!”
Jonah had learned from personal experience that it does not
pay to try to take the call of God into his own hands, or even to ignore that call.
This time, Jonah goes to Nineveh and declares
the word of the Lord: “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” It takes Jonah
three full days to walk through the city, and by the end of the third day, his
voice is hoarse and parched.
To Jonah’s great amazement, the people of Nineveh believe in this word of the Lord.
They repent—everyone from the king on down to the animals. The king declares to
his people: “All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is
in their hands.” The people cry out to the God of Israel.
And God forgives them. In biblical language, “God changed
his mind.” God forgives Nineveh.
Jonah is furious with God. We can overhear his protests:
“What are you thinking?! You know what they did to our women and children! You
know how they slaughtered in cold blood. You know how they dragged our people
away, never again to return home.”
Jonah goes on with his real
complaint: “I ran away from you the first time because I know that you are a
gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and
ready to relent from punishing.”
“Take my life away. I’d rather die than see our enemies
forgiven!”
Jonah is pouting now, and he goes out into the hot desert,
builds for himself a shelter, and waits to see what God will do to the city.
God appoints a bush to grow over Jonah’s hut to give him
shelter and shade from the scorching heat of the day. Jonah is happy about the
bush.
As if playing with Jonah’s sensibilities, the next morning God appoints a worm to destroy Jonah’s bush, and God sends a scorching wind, and Jonah is suffering under the heat. “It is better for me to die than to live.”
God challenges Jonah: “You seem to care more about your
bush, which sprang up yesterday and is gone today, than you care about the
people of Nineveh,
a city of 120,000 people.”
Nowhere in the Bible does it say that God is fair. No one
knew that better than Jonah.
We are just as indignant about this story as Jonah: those people do not deserve to be
spared. Those people do not deserve
God’s forgiveness.
This takes us to the heart of the matter: no one, not one,
not now, not ever, deserves God forgiveness. No one deserves God’s grace.
In our Gospel for today, the parable of the workers in the
vineyard from Matthew, the workers who came at 5 in the afternoon receive the
same as those who started at 6 in the morning. It’s not fair!
Now if our parable were about economics, we might say that
God intends for some workers to earn twelve times as much as others. Indeed,
some folks might try to make the Bible endorse and even bless the incredible
gap between the rich and poor.
But our parable is not about economics. It’s about God’s
grace, about God’s mercy, about God’s forgiveness.
God wants all people to live in the joy of the kingdom,
where there is no violence, no retribution, no “getting even,” where former
enemies share God’s peace, where former killers and those they killed dwell in
the peace of God, which passes all human understanding.
Today is the International Day of Peace, established by the
United Nations in 1981. On this day, let us all turn our hearts and our minds
to peace, the peace of God that passes all understanding.
We sing:
Eye has not seen, ear has not heard
what God has ready or those who love him;
Spirit of love, come, give us the mind of Jesus,
teach us the wisdom of God.[1]
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