Sermon for 3rd Sunday after Epiphany – Jonah 3:1-5,10

So today we have the story of Jonah, the reluctant prophet. God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh and cry out against its wickedness.” What does Jonah do? He runs away. He hops a ship going to Tarsish so he can hide from God. Which is odd, because he knows you can’t hide from God. The creator of the universe can’t see me if I put my hands over my eyes? But we don’t make awesome decisions when we’re scared to death, so we shouldn’t really judge Jonah. Besides, God’s calling him to prophesy to Nineveh. How intimidating is that? Nineveh is huge! Do the math. Three days to walk across (3mph * 16h * 3d = 144 miles diameter). Want to walk to Cincinnati? That’s a lot of neighborhoods and a lot of fire and brimstone sermons that no one wants to hear. No wonder Jonah runs. Who wouldn’t?

You know what comes next. Big storm. They throw him overboard. The large fish swallows him up. Three days in its belly gives Jonah a real come to Jesus moment. Now he thanks God for saving him and showing abundant mercy. So the fish spits him out on shore and he can’t wait to show his gratitude. So when God calls this second time, Jonah goes.

Now, it’s important to remember all that backstory so that we recognize how much it took to get Jonah to preach this sermon. He gets about a third of the way into Nineveh and lets it fly like any other prophet. “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” And wouldn’t you know it works! He doesn’t even have to preach it twice. Word spreads like wildfire. The whole city repents. Mission accomplished! Everyone fasts. Everyone puts on sackcloth. They even put sackcloth on the animals, and I always think of those internet videos with baby goats in pajamas, so it’s a little hard to take this seriously, but we get the point. God changes mind and lets them off the hook. So maybe I should take a preaching lesson from Jonah.

Now, this is a happy ending for Nineveh, but not for Jonah. He’s totally irate, because he thinks it’s not fair for God to just let things slide for such a wicked city as Nineveh. They’re God’s enemies. God’s supposed to destroy them. So he tells God that’s why he never wanted to preach to Nineveh in the first place. He says “I knew that you are a gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, ready to relent from punishing.” But, this isn’t Jonah praising God. This is resentment. See, Jonah was all pious when he was praising God in the belly of the fish because he didn’t drown. But it’s easy to praise God when you know you’ve been through hell. Now Jonah sees Nineveh going overboard with repentance and thinks “No, this is too easy. Fake news.” For all his piety, Jonah’s just as resentful as always. And he stays that way through the end of the book. Jonah never comes back around. Big bad Nineveh can repent, but Jonah can’t?

But you know what? Jonah was actually right about Nineveh. Because years later, Nineveh eventually becomes the capital of the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrians thirst for power. They’re going to capture the northern kingdom of Israel and take the people into captivity. Then, they’re going to wage war against Judea. So much for repentance. Nineveh may be all about sackcloth today, but after a while, they’re going to forget. Things are going to go back to normal, and the real wickedness is still to come.

So, there’s no happy ending to the story. All it tells us is that no matter how repentant we think we are today, we’re going to forget, and our true selves come right back. Our unrighteousness. Our entitlement. Our unrepentance. I think it’s a timely story for our post-inauguration days. Whether or not you’re a fan of the new administration, a lot of us are carrying this sense that we’ve turned a new leaf, that January 6th was our come to Jesus moment, and now we’re setting about the business of renewal. No one wants to think about division anymore, so we just stop bringing up anything divisive. We agree to disagree through gritted teeth. We hope to just kind of get along, and we call this unity. But that’s not repentance. We haven’t changed, and we refuse to repent for everything that brought us to this point. So what do we expect God to do? Send us another Jonah to call us to order? Or just leave us to ourselves?

Well, the good news is that God hasn’t left us to ourselves. God sent us Jesus, who’s not at all like Jonah. Jesus never hid from what his Father called him to do. He went straight to the cross for our sake, where he took all our guilt and unrepentance upon his own body and it killed him. Yet after three days, still he rises, so that none of these things would be the last word for you or me. Unlike Jonah, he doesn’t just threaten to overthrow us. He actually does it. Not with condemnation or violence, but by his word of forgiveness. And not just once, because he knows how we are. We keep falling backwards. So Jesus repeats it with each and every time he says my body and my blood, given for you.

And Jesus gives us his own Spirit to make faith in us, so that we can understand repentance in a totally new way. Now, it’s true that repentance involves sorrow. We still regret what we have or haven’t done. Jesus never said it would be easy. But, repentance is also this glorious vision that there really is a better way to live together, and we will see it with our own eyes. In other words, repentance is the only way we can see the kingdom of God, and it’s a pure gift from Jesus. That’s why today’s gospel reading shows us Jesus coming to Galilee and saying “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” But when Jesus says that, he isn’t just giving us a new commandment. He’s not saying “repent or else.” It’s better than that. When Jesus says the word, he actually does it to us. He repents us into the new creation because the time has come and the wait was killing us.

Except, our old problems linger. We’re still plagued by racism and systemic injustice, homophobia, sexism, and the list goes on. Too many folks still disagree with us, and we just can’t seem to get them to see the light. I wish I knew what the magic words were. But we can’t write off Nineveh. We need those folks because the kingdom of God takes all of us. So we keep on speaking truth because faith convinces us there will be a day when they’ll finally understand what we’re really about. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but we keep on praying “gracious God let today be the day.” That’s why Jesus promises us, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” After all, if Jesus can catch us, he surely can catch them through us. So may we all be caught by Jesus our Lord.