JONAH
WHEN GOD CHANGES
Topical Line Drives
Volume 24
BRUCE G. EPPERLY
Energion Publications
Gonzalez, FL
2016
Copyright © Bruce Epperly 2016
Unless otherwise annotated, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (NRSV), copyright © 1989 by the Division of the Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA.
Electronic Edition:
ISBN13: 978-1-63199-301-5
Print Edition:
ISBN10: 1-63199-293-7
ISBN13: 978-1-63199-293-3
Energion Publications
P. O. Box 841
Gonzalez, FL 32560
energion.com
Chapter One: When God Changes the Rules
What would you do if God asked you to challenge everything you thought was true? What if God told you to turn your back on the religious values you learned in church and in the Bible? What if God also urged you to go into the heart of darkness, the enemy camp, preaching a word of condemnation that might just lead to salvation for the oppressor? Worse yet, what if God changed God’s mind to expand the circle of grace to include our nation’s worst enemies, let’s say, al Qaeda, ISIS, and the Taliban? What would you do? Would you go willingly on a mission trip to Nineveh or occupied Iraq or Syria?
Moreover, what if the God you believed in, the God whose biblical message was clear and authoritative, changed the rules of the faith, threw out the spiritual guidebook that shaped your life, and commanded you to adopt a different, and unprecedented, approach to life? Would you follow God’s new directions, stay put, or run away from this rule-changing God? In the pages ahead, you will discover that this is the heart of Jonah’s message.
In the past few decades, committed Christians have struggled with theologically radical ways of reconceiving marriage and divorce, equal rights, war and peace, the insights of other religions, homosexuality and marriage equality, and the nature of mission in light of changing understandings of God’s vision for our world. If God is still speaking, then God can surprise us with new insights for changing times. Like Jonah, we must decide how we will respond to a god whose ways are different than we imagined.
The Book of Jonah is a radical story, inviting us to consider how we would respond if God asked us to disobey what we’ve always known to be true, and disregard what we previously believed were God’s own words. The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead describes the worship of God as an adventure of the spirit and Jonah is thrust, against his will, into a profound spiritual adventure. This utterly confused prophet doesn’t know where God is leading him or what God wants from him. So enamored of orthodox understandings of God’s ways, he cannot imagine that his Creator is the God of novelty as well as tradition.
In a world in which politicians fan the flames of fear and anger, Jonah presents a provocative possibility: What if God loves our enemies as much as God loves our friends? What if God’s revelation comes to outsiders as well as persons from our own faith tradition? Such inclusive thinking got Jesus in trouble following his first sermon and it caused Jonah to flee from the presence of God. Following Jesus’ first sermon in his hometown Nazareth, the crowd is amazed at Jesus’ reading from the prophet Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18-19)
In the blink of an eye, the hometown crowd turns on Jesus, when he has the audacity, and dare we say chutzpah, to claim that divine providence embraces friend and foe, and neighbor and stranger alike:
But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian. (Luke 4:25-27)
When God changes the rules which undergird our way of life and then welcomes outsiders into God’s inner circle, all hell breaks loose. Jesus’ listeners want to throw him off a cliff and Jonah wants to flee to the outermost territories of the earth.
We are all tempted to create a God of our own making, who will uphold the status quo and baptize our values as God’s definitive word. When God challenges our way of life and the religious and cultural values we hold dear, we are tempted to run away in search a new god — a god of our own making — who will support our privileges and prejudices and lead us into battle against our foes. In contrast to nationalist and parochial images of God, the Book of Jonah portrays a different vision of God: God, the iconoclast; God, the lover of our enemies; and God, who cares for non-humans with the same devotion as God cares for humankind. Constantly doing a new thing, God calls us to be innovative and iconoclastic as we embrace new understandings of God’s vision for humankind and the world.
Jonah is a radical text and my interpretation is equally radical. I believe that Jonah’s flight results from his experience of theological cognitive dissonance, the tension he experiences when God appears to overturn God’s previous mandates and expand the scope of Jonah’s prophetic vocation to include enemies of his nation. Jonah doesn’t believe he is disobedient. In fact, his disobedience results from what Terence Fretheim describes as a “certain belief that he has.”1 He believes that God changed God’s mind, and he doesn’t know which way to go. His running away is a running from a new, more universal and loving, vision of God. Fretheim continues: “The issue in the book then is the issue between a man of faith and his God. It is an issue that involves an interpretation of an aspect of the meaning of that relationship. It is a theological conflict.”2
Today, we hear the chorus, “Black lives matter!” in light of the USA’s institutionalized racism, infecting even our law enforcement agencies. Many white Christians can’t imagine that they are part of a racist system that requires radical economic and judicial transformation. Jonah hears an equally radical word, “Ninevite lives matter!” despite the enmity of Israel and Assyria and Nineveh’s role in destroying the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
Jonah is a mysterious text that poses equally difficult ethical and theological questions that no politician wants to face and few religious leaders want to address. But, address them we must! Fidelity to God, human survival, and the soul of our nation demands it. Does God love the non-human world with the same ardor as God loves us? Does God call us to love the ISIS terrorists and welcome Syrian immigrants as well as to care for the world around us, both its living creatures and its natural resources? These questions may not dictate domestic or foreign policy but they serve as a lens through which persons of faith must view the messy political and social issues of our time.
Perhaps, in the Book of Jonah, we see the prefiguring of Jesus’ challenge to love our neighbor as ourselves, his embrace of his nation’s enemies, his invitation to radical inclusion in the Sermon on the Mount, and his open table to sinners and outsiders. The Book of Jonah invites us to take a spiritual journey, whether or not we leave our own hometown. Jonah asks us what it means to follow God’s way in a world of terrorism, xenophobia (fear of strangers), and fear-based politics. God calls us toward world-changing discipleship in our time. Will we run away from God’s vision or follow God’s call to embrace otherness, with all our ambivalence and anxiety, or will we baptize our prejudice and hatred in the waters of religious faith?
A Word of Thanks. I want to give thanks