Spoiled Rotten? (Jonah 3:10-4:11)

A repeat of a sermon from several years ago as the same verse comes up in the lectionary and I work with the same ideas. Apparently God still has something to say to me in this passage.

The trendy word schadenfreude refers to the pleasure someone takes in someone else’s misery. It’s German. In English, we call it "epicaricacy," or one of the Real Housewives shows.

It’s also what powers Jonah’s speech here as we get to the end of his story. We know a little bit about him, but let’s recap:

Jonah the prophet hears God’s call to warn wicked Nineveh of its impending destruction. He responds by boarding a boat for Tarshish. It would be like a modern-day prophet who lived in New York City being told to warn Las Vegas and taking a boat to Australia that leaves from Miami. In other words, Jonah plans to get as much out there between him and Nineveh as he can.

During the voyage, a severe storm comes up which the ship won’t survive. Nobody seems to know what to do – well, nobody but Jonah, who might have an explanation as to the storm’s cause but doesn’t share it with anyone. The sailors cast lots to find out what the problem is and eventually the lot lands with Jonah.

“Oh, yeah, funny story!” the prophet says and explains he’s running away from God’s call. If you thought a prophet might say, “OK, God, I give,” or maybe, “Lord, if you will spare these innocent folks I will head for Nineveh the moment we reach the shore,” then you’ve never met Jonah. He lets the sailors make another try for land, but they can’t overpower this divinely-powered storm. Now Jonah does have an idea. “Toss me over,” he says. The sailors do and the sea calms.

A giant fish swallows Jonah. He sits in the fish’s stomach for three days – and if you think about it, the only kind of air anyplace inside the alimentary canal is what we take Pepto-Bismol for, which means Jonah spends three days inside a giant fish burp. After three days of this, it occurs to him to pray. Like many of us, he prays quoting some of the prayers and songs he knows. My Old Testament professor in seminary pointed out the different psalms and songs Jonah quoted, weaving them together in a lament about how bad he had it.

When Jonah finished, my professor said, the fish threw up. His sympathies were with the fish.

Jonah now finds himself near Nineveh, and when God calls again he decides he’ll answer. Nineveh the city stretches so far a person takes three days to walk across it, which makes the hotel chains like it very much. Jonah ambles in about a third of the way and says five words in Hebrew. He did raise his voice, and that may have been because nobody would get near him since, as far as the story we have says, he hasn’t taken a bath since leaving the fish.

The Ninevites speak a language close to Hebrew but not exactly, but in any event, this five-word warning – “In forty days Nineveh will be wiped out” – sparks an amazing revival among people who the day before this wouldn’t have given two figs for what the God of some no-account wide spot in the road nation down south said. Everybody repents of their sins. Everybody, from the king on down to the livestock, vows to change their ways in the hope God will not destroy them.

God decides exactly that and it ticks Jonah off mightily. Here we learn he didn’t run away because he was scared. He knew that if he warned the people and they listened God wouldn’t destroy them. Remember Ezekiel being unsure if the people would listen to his harsh message? Jonah fumes because he knew the people would listen to what God said through him and it would work.

After all of this mess, his one hope was that he would at least get to see the wicked get what’s coming to them. He could at least enjoy a good ol’ Sodom-and-Gomorrah, fire-from-the-sky style hiney-whuppin’.

But noooooo, God has to go and be all Mr. Lovingkindness Mercy Forgiveness and now Jonah can’t even enjoy that. To top it off, his shade tree got eaten by a worm.

“You’re mad?” God asks.

“You bet I am! Mad enough to die right now!” Tops the list of dumb things to say to God, I believe.

“You’re mad because this bush died, and you don’t think I should pay attention to this huge city and all its people and let them off the hook when they turn to me?” The conversation kind of grinds to a halt, which is probably good for Jonah.

Who’s Jonah today? Well, we probably all know some people in our churches who just don’t seem happy unless they or someone is talking about someone else going to hell.

Let ’em have it, Lord! Give ’em what they got comin’! Bring up the idea that God may forgive those people and be met with some shock or some dismay. I can’t say I’ve never done it; I’ve made the joke that if I get to the heavenly city and meet this or that famous criminal or ne’er-do-well of history, the first words out of my mouth will be, “Well, there goes the neighborhood.”

But what Jonah needed to understand and what we all probably need to understand is that God’s in the business of spoiling us, where “spoiling” means giving us way, way more than we ought to get. In fact, giving us the exact opposite of what we’ve earned, what we’ve all “earned,” to use the word, by our sin. We’re all separated from God, and the degree of separation is unimportant. That separation means death, but a loving God decided on life, and decided to give that to us instead.

We’re spoiled, all right. Spoiled un-rotten.

Good news.

Just One Commandment (Romans 13:8-14)

Our tendency in Christianity is to set the two parts of the Bible -- the Old and the New Testaments -- in tension if not outright pitting one against the other. Usually when we do this we cast it as something along these lines: The Old Testament is a book of law and the New Testament is a book of grace. In the OT our relationship is dominated by obedience to the law or lack thereof. In the NT we're relieved of the burden of the law through the grace of God, given in Jesus.

But when we read Romans, we find that this idea might have surprised Paul a little. We know that he wrote Romans to the Christians of that city, most of whom he had never met and who wouldn't have known a lot about him. Instead of corresponding back and forth with a church, like he did with the Corinthians, and answering their questions, Romans is Paul introducing himself and his theology to people who didn't know him. So he spends a little time on the relationship between the law and grace, and it doesn't seem to be as clear cut as the way I described it above.

For one, Paul's understanding of grace comes from Scripture, which for him would have been the Old Testament. He's writing what will become the New Testament, so it's not available to him beyond maybe some lists of things Jesus said and copies of stories he told. That means we find grace written into the OT books in addition to the law.

For another, Romans and several other of his letters stress the importance of obeying what God called us to do. Jesus himself says that following him means obeying his commandments. Mixed in with the dominant message of grace through Christ is a call for obedience that's just as serious as the other. Paul doesn't devalue obedience and in this passage ties it to a lifestyle that "puts on Jesus Christ."

He does reduce several commandments to one simple direction: Love your neighbor. Thanks to his training as a Pharisee, Paul knows the entire Torah by heart and elsewhere says he obeys all of its provisions. He knows, though, that the mostly Gentile Christians of Rome will probably know little of that law -- perhaps some of the Ten Commandments at most. He refers to a couple in describing how the law has just one or two main purposes, and he refers to one of the two great commandments Jesus explained, loving our neighbors. If we obey that commandment, Paul says, we fulfill the law.

But the only people who think that makes things easier are people who don't have neighbors. Because loving our neighbors is about as big a job as memorizing the entire Torah and, depending on the neighbor in question, might be even harder. Not to mention how hard of a job our neighbors might have in loving us sometimes.

The single commandment, in Jesus' view, has the same function as the more extensive OT law. He tells us that our loving one another lets people know we're his disciples, just as the OT law was meant to help distinguish the Israelites as God's people, distinct from those around them. And here, if Paul's right, the teaching's not just advisory but as essential to following Jesus as obedience to the OT law was to following the path God laid out for his people.

And yet we must obey this commandment in order to have any hope of fulfilling the law, something Jesus himself said he came to do. This whole idea that the NT represents some sort of easing up from the mean ol' OT falls apart once we understand that obedience is just as important as it ever was, and that it's no easier now than when there were hundreds of rules.

So how the heck can we do it? How do we "make no provision for the flesh" but instead "put on Jesus Christ?" Even if we ditch all of the obvious provisions for the flesh like gluttony or adultery we're still left with a long list of things that elevate us and what we want more than they do Christ. Things like gossiping, running people down, insisting that our mean behavior or snappy retort was justified because of what someone else has done... Well, make your own list because you know better than I do where you cross the lines.

Just when we might think we're in the same boat as we've always been in, though, as unable to meet the demands that following God places on us as the ancient Israelites were, Paul explains the role that grace plays in the situation. We're to obey the law, which even in its simplest form asks more than we're capable of -- but thanks to the grace a loving God offers us, we have the one thing we need to do what we're called to do: Help.

The key, Paul tells the Romans, is that our relationship with God is as broken as the commandments we can't keep. Jesus, through his life, death and resurrection, restores the possibility of a whole relationship, and the Holy Spirit works within us to restore the ability to make it happen. Jesus' grace restored us to God and the Holy Spirit makes that real in our lives.  We can love our neighbors as God requires of us.

Be hard to find a bigger miracle than that.