ARGUING WITH GOD John M. Buchanan
Jonah 4; 1-11 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
January 24, 1982 Columbus, Ohio

Jonah is everyman/everywoman., Jonah has twe contrary impulses inside himself:
the impulse of faith, and the impulse to arrange all reality in a way which conforms
to his own personel preferences. Jonah is you and me; a believer who wants to be
faithful but who becomes a little cranky when his religion inconveniences him.

Jonah looks uncomfortably familiar, a good-hearted soul who prefers his own kind; an
average person who organizes the world out there into "us and them." Jonah believes
in God but he can't remember the clause in the contract which gave God the right to
decide who he, Jonah, had to like, let alone love, Jonah's world was and is, neatly
compartmentalized: everybody has a place, a role, a God-ordained part to play in
the scheme of things. If each would just cooperate...if God would just remember
that Assyrians are not Babylonians, and Jews aren't Egyptians, and Africans aren't
Anglo-Saxons.

It is one of the most underated short stories in the world. All most of us re-
call of it at firat blush is the business about the whale and that's too bad because
the big fish is quite incidental to the story, a literary device only.

The author is an unknown writer who seems to know a lot about the fourth century
B.C, For one reason or another he sets his story in an historical context four
hundred or so years before. All that proves is that ancient Jews, like us, prefer-
ed their prophets from a perspective of several hundred years.

The story is old, The fourth century B.C, was a most distressing time for
Israel, A succession of foreign powers had conquered and ruled the land: Persians,
Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks. Jewish patience was wearing very thin. The rabbis
taught that purity of religion and custom would strengthen the nation and please God.
And so there was a great rennaisance of ritual and piety, of religious law and cere-
mony, It was also a time of strong patriotism which always bordered on parochialism.
The better and purer they felt, the worse their neighbors looked, It is not an un-
common dynamic. A story about a prophet of Israel called by God to go to the capital
city of the worst of the Gentiles, was every bit as controversial, disturbing and
notorious as a Presbyterian preacher traveling to Tehran during the hostage crisis
last Christmas.

God told Jonah to go to Ninevah, capital of Assyria, with a big-city reputation
for vice and sin, to warn the Ninevites that unless they cleaned up their act they
were headed for a disaster. Jonah did not think much of the assignment. It's not
that he minded being a p ophet of doom, His problem was deeper. He didn't like
Assyrians. He was offended by the thought that God did,

So he boarded the next ship for Tarshish, a pert on the Southwest coast of Spain,
on the outer edge of the world, the furthest point to which he could sail.

Not long after the ship set sail, however, a violent storm descended, Jonah
acknowledged that he was probably responsible and convinced the reluctant sailors to
throw him overboard. They did, but a large fish saved Jonah from drowning by swal-
lowing him whole.

The great fish, which turns up in literature over and over again as a mystical
symbol for God's pewer and providence, cooperates by delivering Jonah to dry ground.
Now God called him again, Jonah prudently decides to obey, goes to Ninevah, warns
the people, and then sits back to enjoy the show, Finally, they are going to get
what they have coming. Ever do that? Ever say - "do that one more time and you'11

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be sorry," and then wait, with a touch of relish, of gleeful righteousness; antici-
pation, for the offense to be repeated?

The Ninevites, however, are the spoilers. They got the message. They repented,
From the king on down everyone in Nineveh put on sackcloth and ashes. Jonah had
been a smash! A howling success;

Let's listen in on the story - Jonah 3:10 - 4:11

When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way,
God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them; and he
did not do it.

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly; and he was angry, And he prayed
to the Lord and said, "I pray thee, Lord, is not this what I said when I
was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for
I knew that thou art a grdcious God and merciful;.slow to ahger, and
abounding in steadfast love, and repentest of evil. Therefore now, 0
Lord, take my life from md, I beseech thee, for it is better for me to
die than to live," And the Lord said, "Do you do well to be angry?"
Then Jonah went out of the city and sat to the east of the city, and made
a booth for himself there. He sat uhder it in the shade, till he
should nee whrt would becotte of the city:

And the Lord God appointed a plant, and made it come up over Jondh,
that it might be a shade over his head, to save him from-his discomfort,
So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the plant. But when dawn came
up the next day, God appointed a worm which attacked the plant, so that
it withered. When the sun rose, God appointed a sultry east wind,
and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah so that he was faint; and he asked
that he might die, and said, "It is better for me to die than to live,"
But God said to Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry for the plant?" And |
he said, "I do well to be angry, angty enough to die." And the Lord said,
"You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it

_ gtow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night. And

' should not I pity 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 also much cattle?"

That's a gem of a story, In fact, it is a very important story. In fact, may
IT suggest that if the human family is to make it through the first chapter of the
Nuclear Age, something like this story will have to reclaim center stage?

The story of humanity, after all, is the story of tribalism. It is one of our
deepest instincts, and certainly one of our most destructive. There seems to be
something inherently in our character which leads us to conclude, as soon as we
develop a sense of community, that people outside our community are expendable. We
may philosophize about the one family of humanity, but the fact of the matter is
that the separate branches of the family notoriously have enjoyed and exploited their
separateness, The oneness of the race has been perceived as foolishness, as a threat
and recently as a Community plot, The opposite, this primal propensity to accentu-
ate and celebrate separateness has spawned the sad story of parochialism, provinci-
alism, mindless patriotism. It has given birth to the tragedy of apartheid, the sin
of slavery; it is the cousin of racism; its end product is a creature in a white
sheet burning crosses, or the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

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Here - 400 B,C. - in the seed bed of western civilization; here in the root
system of what we call Judeo-Christian culture - is another word, however. Here is
a Jewish story with the audacity to assert that Assyrians are as important as Jews.
Here is the most radical proposal in all of History; namely that God loves all
people: he is equally interested in all nations.

The theological name for that political and sociological assertion is grace. It
means that God loves people in a way that is fundamentally different from the way we
love people. It means that God isn't keeping score by the same rules we are using.

The human tendency, as with sociological exclusiveness calling itself patriot-
ism, is to limit God's love and call it orthodoxy. Abraham Lincoln mused about it
and, in his last years, seems to have struggled with it. Both sides in the Civil
War, he observed, claimed God as an ally. Both North and South claimed God's justice
and righteousness. It is our nature apparently to make God our accomplice.

One of the most difficult assignments in the world, frankly, is to love someone
you don't like. It is neither simple, nor easy to step away from prejudice which has
been taught, nurtured across generations and instilled in young minds. The deepest
scars in Northern Ireland are in the minds of young Catholic and Protestant boys and
girls who subsist on a daily diet of sectarian hatred. And the most serious dis~
service we do to our own children is to inflict on them our own prejudices of race,
class, nation. History doesn't need any more of it. Jonah, is a reminder, that the
task of faith today, as always, is to love the world as God loves the world. [t is
a blunt rejoinder to sectarianism, It is the word of God that the process of becom-
ing a disciple of Jesus Christ is the process of opening our arms and hearts to love
other people - people we don't like, people we don't trust, people who appear to be
our enemies.

Jonah couldn't deal with the fact that God liked Assyrians, We read that mar-
velous little prayer after God changed his mind and spared Nineveh which says, in
effect: "I knew it! I knew it all along! When it came right down to it, I knew
you'd spare them!" Jonah's argument with God was about his taste in friends on the
surface, Beneath the surface, however, it is an argument about grace,

It is an argument as old as this story, and as contemporary as John Updike's
most recent novel, One modern scholar frames it this way:

"The fundamental problem humans have with God is not that he is
cruel or vengeful, but that he is gracious. It is not so much his
treatment of us that grates, but his generosity toward others....
Who among us has not been offended by a gracious God who pays full
wage to one hour workers, who sends sun and rain on the just and
unjust, and who gives parties to prodigals."

(Fred B. Craddock, Proclamation 2, Series B,p.26)

We do have a bit of trouble with it. We do wonder why God seems so oblivious
to our good work, our efforts to be good people. How can he love us all regardless
of our track record. Karl Barth put it as simply as it can be put:

"We dislike hearing that we are saved by grace...We do not appreciate
that God does not owe us anything, that we are bound to live from his
goodness alone,.,." (@eliverance to the Captives, p. 46)

Perhaps it is a final assault on our ego. Perhaps, I have concluded, the pride

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which is our sin, must finally confront the simple fact that God loves us because he
is God, I was captivated by an incident in the memoirs of William Sloane Coffin, Jr.,
"Once to Every Man," in which he discussed his intellectual and theological struggles
while a student at Yale. I recalled the passage because all of us have been in the
situation Coffin describes. A friend had been killed in an automobile accident and
Coffin was sitting in thé ¢ollege chapel at his funeral:

"Iwas filled with angry thoughts., My friend's death seemed to be
one more bit vr yom to prove the fatuousriess of believing, in
an all-powerful all«loving God when, as any sensitive person could
see, the entire sidtfdee of the eatth wat soaked with the tears und
blood of the irotent. Mdlit¢dously I fidd noted outside that tHe
priest had a typically soft face over tis hard collar. Now dé he
started down the aisle toward the altar he began to intone unctuously
Job's famous words: 'The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord.' From the aisle seat where I was
sitting I could have stuck out my foot and tripped him up, and
might easily have done so, had my attention not been arrested by

a still, small voice, as it were, asking, ‘Coffin, what part of

that sentence are you objecting to?' Naturally I thought it was

the second part, "the Lord hath taken away.' spoken all too
facilely by the priest. But suddenly I realized it was the first,
Suddenly I caught the full impact of 'The Lord gave': the world
v2..y simply is not ours, at best we're guests, I+ was not an
understanding I relished nor one, certainly, to clear up all my
objections to my friend's death, But as I sat qv’atly now at his
funeral, I realiz:d that i: was probably the understanding against
which all tne spears of ‘vaman pride had to be hurled and shattered."

Jonah argued with God. He argued because he couldn't understand how God could
c-ize about Assyrians. He argued, in fact he sulked and pouted when confronted by
this idea of God's grace, We know the script. We have played the role. We have
aske” the same questions.

The grace in the story feels better from the point of view of the Ninc-<ter.
Euch of us lives there on occasion. God's love leaps over all the barriers we build
around ourselves to reclaim us as his own, But the Gospel for me in this story is
‘“4.2t in spite of the argument, in spite of the sulking and pouting, the self-righte-
ousness ard paralyzing self-pity, Sod never gave up on Jonah,

‘us call was relentless. ‘The slow boat to Tarshish wasn't slow enough. Even
in the sea - in the fish + God's pursuing, tracking love is gaining on his child,

What do you make of it? Where is God seeking you, calling you, finding you’?
Some are Licssed with clarity, with a voice in the dark, as it were, But Go. pursues,
may I be so bold as to suggest, in the protracted pull, the pang of conscience, the
guilt sometimes, the life-long process of caring and learning to love, the feeling c*
uncomfortable responsibility at the picture of the starving child, the unaccountable
impulse to do something you ordinarily would not think of coing?

The call of God, his people have always discovered, is frequently to do some-
thing they didn't want to do. The response to God's call is, more often than not,
an argument, sulking, anger sometimes, occasicnally a Little negotiation.

The bad news is that God will not give up on us. Of course, that happens, also,
to be tl.e good news. Abad.