1.
Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation
of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our
Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word today is taken
from Jonah 4:1-11 (READ TEXT). It’s
entitled, “Mission—with Fingers Crossed!” Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
In this series of Old Testament
sermons, we’ve devoted a lot of attention to the divided kingdom, Israel in the
north and Judah in the south. A myth persists among many readers of the Old
Testament that Israel and/or Judah were the only objects of God’s concern, that
he didn’t care about anyone else. Not so! As the Lord had made clear to his
people already back at Mount Sinai, he wanted them to be a kingdom of
priests. They were to tell the nations who God is and what he is like. In
this sermon we follow along as the Lord deliberately sends one of his prophets
to another nation, not Israel or Judah.
3.
The prophet is Jonah. He has become
famous these days for his bout with the great fish. But the thing people would
have found most remarkable about this prophet at the time wasn’t the fish
he was in, but instead the fix he was in. For the Lord sent Jonah, who
was a prophet and an advisor to the king of Israel at a time of calm and
tranquility, on a rather surprising assignment. Jonah was to go not simply to
any old foreign land, but specifically to cold and cruel Assyria.
4.
In an age when many peoples knew how
to be cruel, the Assyrians specialized in it. They became masters of horror and
terror in warfare. For example, they would pile up huge heaps of the skulls of
their victims. They wanted the very mention of their name to strike fear into
the hearts of their neighbors. The Assyrians were, if you will, the motorcycle
gang of the ancient Near East. At this time, they were weak. So, they
couldn’t launch the kind of military strikes that would eventually destroy
Israel and nearly destroy Judah. But the Lord was sending Jonah into the heart
of Assyrian power, right into the capital city of Nineveh.
5.
But, Jonah said no. He refused his
assignment from the Lord. Instead of heading east, he hopped aboard a ship sailing
west. Jonah was saying a capital NO to his prophetic calling. He was
trying to get as far away from it as he could. The Lord wouldn’t take no for an
answer, though. He sent a great storm that endangered the ship. When Jonah was
tossed overboard by the crew, the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow him
and save his life. After three days, the fish deposited Jonah on land. The Lord
again commanded the prophet to go and preach in Nineveh. This time Jonah obeyed.
He had preached there for only one day, and the people repented. Remarkably,
this cold and cruel people got into sackcloth, everyone from the king on down. It’s
been observed that this was, if anything, a greater miracle than Jonah’s rescue
at sea by the Lord through the great fish.1
AE 19:37. What a demonstration of the power
packed by God’s Word!
6.
At this point, Jonah shows what had
been bothering him all along. It turns out that he had not run away from his
calling due to fear. The reason why
Jonah abandoned his assignment and went west wasn’t that he thought God’s
message wouldn’t work. He knew it would work. This prophet went on his mission
to Assyria kicking and screaming, only after the Lord seized him with the great
fish. But, even while he was preaching to the Assyrians, he had his fingers
crossed behind his back. He wasn’t afraid that no one would listen to him. He
was really afraid they would hear and repent, as in fact they did by the power
of the Holy Spirit.
7.
Jonah seems to have thought of the
Lord and his gifts as only for the Jews, not for the Gentiles. He would have
preferred to die rather than to see these Assyrians enjoying anything good from
God. They just didn’t measure up in Jonah’s mind. He still wanted to see them
get theirs. So, Jonah settled upon an
observation post outside Nineveh, probably hoping against hope that the Lord
would unleash some sort of judgment upon the city. In attitude, he resembled
the friends of Job, who were sure that Job had sinned a great sin because they
thought he was undergoing judgment for it. Jonah knew that the Ninevites had
sinned great sins, and now he was expecting them to be judged accordingly. Jonah
was also like the elder brother in Jesus’ story of the waiting father,
resentful of his younger brother who had wasted away his inheritance but who
was shown such lavish mercy by their father. And Jonah was like the Pharisees
who had blood in their eyes when they brought to Jesus a woman caught in the
act of adultery. Jesus said to them, “Let him who is without sin be the
first to throw a stone at her.” At length he asked the woman where her
accusers had all gone, and added: “Neither do I condemn you” (John 8:7,
11).2 See Farrar, as cited in Homer
Hailey, A Commentary on the Minor Prophets (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House,
1972), 79.
8.
Are there people you and I would
like to see falling under God’s judgment? Maybe it’s someone with whom we’ve
been in conflict. Maybe it’s a person who rubs us the wrong way, or any number
of folks we find distasteful. Or maybe we should be thinking more about people
we don’t know. Maybe we have nothing in particular against them, but we don’t
find much for them either. Nothing about them commends them to us enough that
we are moved to bring them the Gospel. Jesus said that in the last days, the
love of most people will grow cold (Matthew 24:12). The Church Father John
Chrysostom observed that nothing is so cold as a Christian who doesn’t care
about the salvation of others. That was Jonah, saying he would rather die than
live and see God showing mercy to the Assyrians. To a frightening extent, isn’t
it also you and me?
9.
God taught Jonah a lesson with a
plant that grew quickly and shaded him as he watched the city. The next day,
the Lord made it wither up. Deprived of his comfortable shade, Jonah started
complaining again, wishing to die. You and I also can grow extremely concerned
over the slightest things, things of no real importance. But, we can remain
shockingly indifferent to far more important things. The Lord always maintains
the right sense of proportion and importance. The Creator of heaven and earth
made people to be of far greater value than vines, grass, or birds!
Even if Jonah had no concern about that great city of Nineveh, the Lord did.
10.
So concerned was God that he sent
his only Son into the world. When people put Jesus on the spot, demanding him
to show by a sign that he was who he said he was, he refused to perform on
demand like a trained dog. He said the sign they would get was the sign of
the prophet Jonah: as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three
days, so Christ would be in the bosom of the earth for three days before he
rose from the dead. (See Matthew 12:39–40.)
11.
Jonah’s bout with the great fish
turns out to be extremely important, after all. In the same manner, Jesus would
die, be buried, then come back alive and well, proclaiming the Lord’s Word. He
comes out of that tomb and says, “Yes, it was tough to bear all the sins of
the world. I bore the cruelty of the Assyrians and the coldness of Christians
who are not concerned about the salvation of others. But I have done it. I have
taken all your sin, and I have paid for it. It can no longer hurt you. It need
no longer bother you. It is all forgiven. Your sin—forgiven. It will not
separate you from me.”
12.
Jonah knew that. Angry as he was
with the Lord, he still spoke to God like a child addresses his father. We can
too. The Lord’s love for us and for all people is so much greater than our
selfishness in sin. It embraces us, cleanses us, and gives new life—all on
account of Christ! Therefore, we don’t
recognize any conditions by which anyone needs to qualify for God’s grace. The
Lord, “desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the
truth” (1 Timothy 2:4). Whoever we meet, Christ died for these people and
rose from the dead. God’s great Good News in Christ is for them. We need not
worry that God may not “mean” it in their case. He really does mean it
for everyone, whoever they are and whatever they have done.
13.
We proclaim the Lord’s Word, then
let him take it from there. His Word remains powerful. Notice how powerful it
was in Nineveh, even though Jonah had been preaching it with his fingers
crossed. The effectiveness of God’s Word, as shown among the Ninevites,
encourages us to keep going. We keep spreading this Word, which remains God’s
own power unto salvation.
14.
But how do we get ourselves moving?
It’s so easy to get stuck. Once there
was an artist who painted in a studio on the second floor of a downtown
building. Every day he would see a beggar on the sidewalk below. The beggar
hardly made for an appealing sight. He had dirty clothes, an unkempt beard, and
disheveled hair. One day, the artist decided to draw a sketch of the beggar. He
drew the man wearing a new suit, clean-shaven and neat. Showing this picture to
the beggar, the artist said: “This is you. This is what I see in you.”
The beggar stared at the picture for a long time. Finally, he said, “If this
is the man you see in me, this is the man I want to be.”3 Adapted from The Lutheran Hour, “God’s Power for Your
Life,” July 25, 1971.
15.
You and I resemble that beggar. Yes,
I’m talking about us, not the people we tend to look upon as unworthy and who
have nothing to commend them. In our sin we’re like the beggar, desperately in
need of new life. This is what God gives. “For as many of you as were
baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (Galatians 3:27). God sees us the
way he sees Christ: not dirty and sinful, but crisp and clean and new. This is
the new man, the new you, created by God himself in Baptism. If this is the man
God sees in me, this is the man I want to be. So, I lay aside my old clothes
of sin and apathy and unconcern, and I put on the new, that is, the new
baptized self that is really me. And I want to tell the Good News about
Jesus.
16.
The Lord was making this point with
Jonah. The Lord asked his wayward prophet, “Should I not pity Nineveh, that
great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who don’t know their
right hand from their left?” Such concern is God’s way. As someone who
belonged to the Lord, it was to be Jonah’s way too. By the power of God in our
Baptism, it will be ours as well. Receiving God’s salvation in Christ by faith,
we serve our neighbors in love with the Good News of salvation. For us, no
mission with fingers crossed! The
peace of God that passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds in
Christ Jesus until life everlasting.
Amen.
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