Jonah And The Need To Be Right

"Jonah & The Need To Be Right"

Jonah 3:11-4:11
September 21, 2008

When God saw what they 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 very 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 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. 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. The LORD God
appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to
save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn
came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it
withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down
on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is
better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry
about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the LORD said, “You
are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow;
it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not 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 also many
animals?”

If you look on the top of computer desk in my office, you’ll find a bevy of pictures of
family and friends, and amidst that mess of pictures you’ll find one with a snapshot of
much thinner me with my arm around a small woman—yes, even shorter than me—she
is perhaps in her mid-to-late fifties at that point. In fact, you can find the picture on
page 8 of your bulletin. That is my aunt Linda with me on the day of my graduation
from Emory University—she had come up from Silas, Alabama to see me graduate with
my Masters, and that meant a lot to me. Her health had been bad, and so it was kind of
amazing that she was there, though it ended up that she couldn’t actually be at the
graduation ceremony because of some breathing issues she had on that day. It was
difficult to see her so hobbled, so delicate, compared to how I had come to experience
her—you see, Linda was the backbone of my larger, extended family. She and her
husband had taken in so many of her nieces and nephews over the years during their
particular times of youthful turmoil that many of us considered her house to be a
second home for us, including me, who spent my senior year in high school right there
with her and Jim. She was an amazing woman, and well missed by our larger
family…she passed away some years ago, and I miss her tremendously.

But aside from her remarkable personality and the solid home away from home she
gave to many in my family, she was also a woman of extraordinary faith, and through
her and others in that family, I got first taste of the Christian faith, since my own family
was fairly secular, non-religious. But Aunt Linda was not your typical Southern Baptist,
in many ways—she really was very different from most of the Baptists I have known and
worshipped with, at least the ones from the South. She was the closest thing I’ve ever
met to a Southern Baptist liberal, at least when it came to the great social issues of our
day, and one of the things she was most clear about was the right of women to choose
whether or not to continue their pregnancy to term—she was a pro-choice Christian,
something you don’t see a lot of amongst Southern Baptist women, though it’s a lot
more familiar to us in UCC circles. When I became religious myself, around 13 or so, I
took on the standard position of my fellow Southern Baptists, and so I was vehemently
ant-choice, in contrast to Aunt Linda. One night when I was around 14 or 15, we got
into a blistering fight about this issue, with me arguing my points with the passion of a
true believer and my aunt responding in a slightly more calm way, but with just the
same amount passion. It was quite the fireworks, and at some point, I became so
distraught that I burst into tears and stormed out of the room, slamming the door in my
wake! Folks, I can be quite the drama queen when I want to be!

Eventually, my aunt came back to the room where I had sequestered myself away, and
we talked it through, but I have never forgotten that moment, and it has continually
reminded me of my own personal sin of always wanting to be right, about everything. It
wasn’t enough that we argued through our positions, that we had stated clearly why we
believed what we believed, but I had this clear need for her to agree with me—you must
believe this, believe me, take my position, or, or, you’re not as faithful as me, or you
don’t have the right beliefs, or you won’t be right with God, or whatever. When I read
today’s text from Jonah, that moment in my room long ago at my aunt’s home, after that
terrible fight, my arms crossed, my face blistered and red with tears, comes to mind. I
know Jonah, because he’s a lot like me in my worse moments, when my drive to be right
about something overcomes my better self, and I cannot let go of the need to be right.
In this case, I came to understand why aunt was pro-choice, and I think it was because
she had probably had known friends or had heard of others who had experienced back
alley abortions and she knew how unsafe they were, and though I can’t imagine her
ever telling or even suggesting to someone that they ought to have an abortion, I now
understand why she cared about this issue. Still, at 15, I couldn’t understand, I couldn’t
understand what her experience had taught her—all I knew was that I needed to be
right, and that I was embarrassed because I couldn’t convince someone of the obvious
rightness of my point of view.

Jonah is right where I was, or I should say, I was right where Jonah was—resentful and
embarrassed, though he felt those things because the prophecies he had uttered
towards Nineveh hadn’t come true—God had chosen compassion rather than judgment
because the people had repented and cleaned up their act. You remember the story
of Jonah, right? Of how he was called by God to warn the people of the pagan city of
Nineveh that their wicked ways were getting them into trouble with the God of Israel,
and how he resisted the call, ran away from the God who told him to go on this
mission? And do you remember the whale—we all remember the whale, the big fish, in
the story, don’t we, and how Jonah finds himself in that whale because of the storm that
God brings about to get him off that getaway boat? We know that part of the story, for
the most part, but we often forget the more interesting part of the story, I think, the part
we read today, where Jonah finds out that he has been incredibly effective as a
prophet—he had actually gotten people to change their ways, something you don’t find
all that often in the Hebrew Scriptures, an actual effective prophet.

But he doesn’t want to be effective here—he actually wants to be right. Jonah had
resented being called by God to be a prophet in the first place, and in this passage he
even explains why he had run away from that call to prophesy to Nineveh—he didn’t
believe that God would go through with the divine threat of punishment, because he
knew that God was generous and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast
love. But this didn’t interest Jonah, he was displeased with God’s mercy, God’s
compassion—in fact, Jonah “condemns compassion, subverts divine love into an
accusation, and demands vindication from the merciful God who coerced him into
obedience” as one commentary puts it. (NIB) Verse 1 of chapter 4 doesn’t quite
capture Jonah’s outrage at God’s behavior—“displeasure” is really watering down the
text here, because the Hebrew actually says something to the effect that it burned him,
it burned him up inside. He’s so embarrassed by not having his prophecies come true
that he actually asks God to do him in, to let him die—he doesn’t quite want to kill
himself, just like he didn’t throw himself overboard earlier on that stormy sea—he had
other people do it—and so he does want God to end his life, instead of himself.

And I love what comes next—God answers this request with a question—“is it right for
you to be angry?” Where did this anger comes from? Why isn’t he happy that he’s
one of the few prophets who actually gets the job done, and gets people to change
their ways, which is the actual job of prophet—prophets tell the people their future IF
they decide not to heed God’s call to take care of the poor, and do justice to the
widows and orphans in their midst. There is a story about a Sunday school teacher who
had been telling her class the story of Jonah and the whale. Finally, she asked them
what lesson they thought the story taught. One little boy put up his hand. “I know,
Miss!” he said. “It teaches that you can’t keep a good man down!” Well, it must be
asked: is Jonah really all that good of a man? Even after this conversation with God,
when God questioned the meaning of his anger, Jonah still sits outside the city, waiting
to see what is going to happen to Nineveh. He’s not a nice guy, which I guess just
shows you that God uses all kinds of people to do the work of God’s realm in this world,
I suppose, but still…he’s not someone you would really want to hang out with, right?

And maybe one of the reasons Jonah’s not a nice guy is because he has invested so
much of his identity, so much of who he is, in the idea of him being right about this or
that thing, this or that matter. He’s the guy at the table who has to argue with you
about politics until he convinces you that you’re supporting the wrong candidate—he’s
the guy that storms off the field in a game of touch football because his teammate
dropped the ball in the endzone, right as the game was ending, thus losing the match.
He’s the kind of guy that has to convince you that he’s right about his understanding of
Christianity, or the Bible, or the church—whatever—he’s the dogmatic guy amongst
your friends, the one whom everybody dreads when he gets onto a volatile topic that
everyone knows is going to send him off the deep end…and so everyone starts to
saying their goodbyes before the room erupts with his anger. We know these kinds of
people, and they may even be us, actually, storming out of some room because a
beloved aunt doesn’t agree with him on the issue of abortion rights. We know these
kinds of people—people who must be right, and who must show you how you are,
indeed, wrong, about your beliefs or values.

But in our story, we are reminded that God doesn’t even give up on these kinds of
folks, thank goodness, at least in my case. Even as poor, bitter, Jonah sits outside of
Nineveh, the God of Israel doesn’t let him alone, and so God appointed a shade tree to
grow up overnight in order to give him shade for his head. Of course, the tree dies the
next day, with the help of divinely appointed worm, that kills it off, and Jonah is now
back to square one, with the sun and wind beating down on his fainting and fading
body. And, again, God questions him about his right to such anger and bitterness—
“do you have the right to be angry about this shade tree, the one that came up one day
and dies the next. You did nothing for it—I created it and I destroyed it—so how dare
you be angry about something you had no investment in? I actually have an
investment in Nineveh—I care about these people, Jonah, even down to the helpless
animals that would have been destroyed if I chosen to make your wishes come true.” It’
s an amazing display of compassion, something Jonah ironically enough, condemns,
and something we’re never quite sure Jonah ever acquires himself, this compassion,
because the story ends with God’s question to Jonah, God’s rhetorical barb right back
at that self-involved prophet, sitting there on the outskirts of a city he would have
burned to the ground himself if he could have.

We don’t know how poor Jonah turned out, but we do have a say in how we will turn
out, under similar kinds of situations. Maybe the fate of a city is not in the balance
when we argue our points passionately, but our relationships with others may be, and
thus we may need to ask ourselves the same question that God asks Jonah: what right
do you have to be angry? What God is asking us in those moments, is whether we are
more interested in being right about this or that opinion, this or that belief, than we are
about being good to each other, merciful to each other, graceful with each other. So
many people think of God as being a judgmental brute, but, you know, in reality, over
and over again, it is we humans that seem so often without mercy. We judge each
other, as we heard last week, we put each other out of the circle, because we think that
will make us right with God. But not so, not so, says our text today: what God wants of
us, I think, is to be as compassionate and merciful to each other in our disagreements
with each other as God is with us and with the people of Nineveh. True, God threatens
a city in order to get them to do the right thing, to do justice, but the whole point of the
last part of the text is to remind us that God is God and Jonah is not and we are not,
and that God is more interested in mercy and compassion than even justice, as
evidenced in God’s mercy in regards to all those in Nineveh that had committed sins
against the poor before their repentance upon Jonah’s arrival in the city—God chooses
mercy for them, instead of settling up the score, nice and neat. You know, Jonah is
right about God, ironically enough—God was too merciful to wipe out the residents of
Nineveh just in order to be right about justice.

And if God can let go of being right, maybe we can too, with a lot of grace from the One
who gives us all more grace than we often deserve. I know how often I’ve left an
argument angry and bitter because I couldn’t get them to see the rightness of my point,
the clear truth of my position. But God is not as interested in being right as we often
are—right about our politics, right about our doctrines, right about those other people—
thank goodness God is not as interested in being right as Jonah was, or we sometimes
are—no, God is interested in being love, in being grace, in being merciful. I just think
we need to let go of the need to be right, and remember that God is right about us,
which in the end, is the only opinion that matters—that we are worth forgiving, worth
giving much for, worth loving even in those moments when we are less than graceful,
less than kind. You know, sometimes I think God is a little like my aunt Linda, when she
opened the door of my room after that blistering fight, and she just came over and sat
with me on my bed, me heaving with sobs, my embarrassed red eyes turned downward,
just letting me cry it out, letting the shame go. She showed me a lot about who God
was and is, because she accepted me as I was, even as she disagreed with me. I
wonder if Jonah ever learned that lesson about letting go of needing to be right, and I
sometimes wonder if have yet to learn it as well, but, nonetheless, I am so grateful that
it was never a lesson God had to learn—God has chosen to love us as we are, with our
right or wrong opinions, our right or wrong beliefs, and if God can do that, then maybe
we can do the same with each other. Amen.