Jonah, Our Inner Villain, And The Hard Work Of Forgiveness

As we begin today, I have an assignment for you.

I need for you to be thinking of the most frequent villain in your life.

That villain in your life and in your head and in your heart.

It may be someone that is actually in your life.

It might be someone that is someone from your past.

It may be someone with power.

Maybe power over you.

It may be someone in power, in control of things that include you, but are much more broad than that.

But I want you to grab that person in your brain right now and be thinking about it.

You know, hold on to that person.

For me, it's Ryan Seacrest.

Rockin' New Year's Eve.

Indeed.

Just kidding.

I don't know him.

We've reached the end of Jonah.

All right.

Has it been a decent journey?

Have you enjoyed it?

I hopefully it flushed the book out to a certain extent for you.

You know things about that story that you didn't know before.

We're grateful to Mark last week.

You know, he really laid out chapter four really well for us, and now I'm responding.

Now we're going to break that down a little bit.

And so it starts with the story we all know, right?

Jonah gets asked to do some godly work and decides to do the opposite.

Not only not do the work, but run away, the complete opposite direction in which he was called.

And uh you will remember the lesson we learned about Jonah when we were in Sunday school, right?

Oh, how foolish we are.

God is everywhere.

You can't run from God.

You better do what God wants you to do.

Did anybody get that lesson in Sunday school?

I got that lesson in Sunday school.

All right, I see some nodding.

Yeah, that's that's the story of Jonah.

We tend to remember when we think about Jonah, right?

And uh we just got to be mindful that God controls everything, including the seas and the fish.

So trying, you can't just run, is what we're learning, right?

Then chapter two, we actually move into a whole new uh feeling, a whole new vibe, right?

There's this really sincere and some fairly moving poem or prayer about the nature of regret, the nature of God's forgiveness and and how that feels.

Uh, and so there's some some real uh nourishing that can come from that.

Then in chapter three, we go back to the kind of original story, right?

We were reintroduced or brought back to that Jonah we learned about in chapter one, this rascal, and now he is, I assume, grudgingly delivering his message to the Ninevehites.

It is a message that is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight words.

Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.

There's the message.

That's all we get from Scripture.

I don't see, I don't hear Jonah really laying it thick.

I don't see him really worried about all of these people.

But here's the big surprise that community, the Ninevites, well, they repent.

I don't know if anybody would have anticipated that.

If we were to run to a place called Nineveh and let them know that they ought to repent and that God was going to come for them in 40 days, I don't know that they would listen to us.

Would you do you think uh, you know, even if I wore a nice shirt like this, I think they would go, yeah, it's a nice shirt, but I don't believe you.

Right?

A weird kind of circumstance.

Uh and so for them to repent, it's a little bit surprising.

They do exactly what God wants without pause.

News reaches the king, and even he repents.

He takes on sackcloth, he sits in ashes, he is in grief, also that God may relent and turn from his fierce anger.

They fully repent.

At this point, hopefully, we're realizing the story isn't really about Nineveh.

It's not about Nineveh or the Ninevehes any more than it was about those sailors in chapter one who ends up throwing Jonah in the water.

They exist in this story, in this tale, to show us who Jonah the prophet is.

So who is he?

Well, he's a guy who is not down with this redemption thing at all.

Jonah is not into God's uh forgiving grace.

Not only does he not want to be the guy who delivers the message of redemption, he doesn't even want the people redeemed at all.

He is not a fan of forgiveness or grace for the Ninevehites.

We don't 100% know why he's not a fan, but maybe that's the point.

It doesn't matter why.

Only that Jonah does just not want it offered.

God wanted to inform these people about the possibility for redemption, and Jonah wanted no part of it.

Just look how it rolls out.

First, he says, you were going to forgive them, and this is why I didn't want to do this in the first place.

I'm not about forgiveness.

Did you hear it rattled off?

All the things we hope to understand about God and to learn when we finally get that experience, that full experience.

Everything we want to know about God is what's laid out here.

Jonah hears it and says, Ah, none of that.

You're a forgiving God, I am out.

He even goes to the next step and asks to be put out of his misery of knowing that these people were forgiven.

Are you hearing some of the satire in this thing?

He responds, or God responds to him in the midst of this fit, this tantrum that Jonah is having, he responds, Is it right for you to be angry?

Although I don't know how you think God sounds.

Sometimes I think God sounds like a really wise Jewish man.

Right?

Is it right for you to be angry?

Right?

You know that.

So that question first goes unanswered.

Jonah finds his way out of the city, he finds a place to sit, he goes and he starts to wait to see what happens with the city.

Safe to say he's not really hoping for good things.

Then the story takes kind of a supernatural turn for a bit here.

God creates a bush to shade Jonah, which makes him happy.

Then God sends a worm to eat that bush.

And now Jose Jonah, he's just withering now in the sun.

He's wishing he had this bush.

And again, God asks, Is it right for you to be angry?

And Jonah, he's going down with the ship.

Yes, I am angry enough to die.

Story ends with God pointing out to Jonah that he would mourn this bush that's offering him shielding from the sun, but not Nineveh.

This town with thousands of souls and many animals.

Don't forget the animals.

It all comes down to a lesson about God and God's heart for forgiveness.

You could argue this is the most Christian story in the whole Old Testament.

This emphasis on grace and forgiveness, to me, it's worthy of New Testament writing.

That was, in some ways, the transition from Judaism to uh Christianity, that was one of the transitions.

The more emphasis on grace and forgiveness, this is all about grace and forgiveness, God's grace and forgiveness.

And we learned that Jonah, the prophet, is not about forgiveness at all.

So, on one hand, we probably ought to hear the sack uh the satire of this.

He is not your typical prophet by any means.

Have you heard of Schadenfreude?

If Schadenfreude was a virus, Jonah's got it.

He is sick with this.

Schadenfreude is this German word.

Uh it is the word that they use to describe people's happiness with others' misfortune.

Of course, the Germans have a word for that.

I got a lot of German.

I'm allowed.

That's Schadenfreude, and that's Jonah, is it not?

Almost joy that he thought, oh, the Nineveh might receive their uh uh uh their justice and then to find out there's gonna be forgiveness.

He's lost it.

His Schadenfreude doesn't get to get answered.

So we can sit in that that satire, but on the other hand, we want to be careful to remember that this story is still speaking to us.

We really shouldn't be saying to ourselves, silly Jonah, he doesn't get it.

He doesn't understand God in the way that we do, right?

We know Christianity better.

I'm gonna invite you to remember your villain now.

Oh that person.

That person that is in your life or over you in some way has power in this world that you resent, or maybe it's smaller, somebody who said something uh that really damaged your life.

Think about that villain and remind yourself of why you think so poorly of them.

What is it that happened that created that image of them in your mind?

And with that, now I will invite you to imagine yourself being asked by God to go and offer up a message of God's redemption to that person.

You'd probably feel happy early on, right?

Oh, thanks, God.

I've been dying to tell that guy God's going after him.

You you I I you don't even have to give me the words.

I got 'em.

They're right here.

I'll be right there.

I will tell them that they are in big trouble.

Then what do you do when that person re repents?

Says sorry.

Presumably forgiven in divine ways for all that they did to you, around you, to your heart, to your spirit, to your well-being.

Forgiven.

All that they've done kind of wiped off the slate.

Are we telling ourselves there's no part of us that feels like Jonah?

Part of us want to be part of the redemption of somebody else that has hurt us, that has harmed us.

We like to see ourselves as people of grace, but it it's not without its stipulations.

Am I right?

There's a part of us that's that really likes the idea that God is up there keeping score.

Right?

Marking down the things that have been done wrong, making sure that justice is served out.

We're also a little bit happy that, hmm, you know, maybe I can get my blessings as well.

If that's what's gonna be fair and everybody gets theirs, well, surely I'm gonna get the blessings that I should get for being the one who made sure I didn't hurt other people.

Are you hearing maybe a little bit of why this is problematic thinking?

I'm convinced that Jonah would fit very well in our polarized society of today.

Aren't we pretty firmly entrenched that the idea of forgiveness for everyone is a bit of a stretch?

We've been walking a journey with Richard Rohr this year.

Uh, we've got the weekly devotional, daily devotional, but we're also reading the book, The Tears of Things.

This emphasis, and this has been a lot my choice, it's because I I feel him working on a softening understanding, a way to soften our understanding about living in that space like Jonah, of wanting there to be some sort of justice accounting, much more than this realm of forgiveness and grace.

Richard Rory talks about our problem stemming from a reliance on dualistic thinking.

Our brains want to simplify the world around us by creating really just two categories for ourselves and for the world around us.

What are the two categories?

Well, it's either good or it's bad.

It's dark or it's light.

It's right or it's wrong.

Our minds, we as a species, we tend towards that space of wanting to just get everything sort of solved like that.

It's a little bit of the same thinking that uh we use when we're inviting a world of God's judgment over forgiveness.

The driver is that the same part of us that wants to know that God is keeping score, that judgment is real, that that's in the midst of all that.

That's the part of us that wants that.

But it's interesting too, it's the same part of us that also wants to know that we're going to get the blessings that we deserve.

Hopefully you're hearing it again.

The problems with this way of thinking, the slippery slope towards God is surely thinking the same way I am, because it's the way that makes sense.

A faith grounded in our own idea of what God wants as opposed to the one God is calling us to.

To a certain extent, we need to soften this tendency in order to find the centeredness, in order to find the light of wisdom that God is trying to offer us.

And this is where Richard Rohr speaks into that importance.

Uh, this is actually uh um, it'll be in your email today, uh, but it was part of, I believe, Sunday's devotion this last week.

Uh, and I do we have it on the thing?

The contemplative, non-dual mind is not saying everything is beautiful even when it's not.

However, we may come to everything is still beautiful by contemplatively facing the conflict between how reality is and how we wish it could be.

We must face dualistic problems, name good and evil, differentiate between right and wrong.

We can't be naive about evil.

And here's the key phrase But if we stay focused on this duality, we'll become unlovable, judgmental, dismissive people.

I've witnessed this pattern in myself, is what Richard Rohr says.

We must eventually find a bigger field, a wider frame, which is non-dual thinking.

In other words, we get locked into these dualisms, right?

We become Jonah.

And our lack of appreciation for God's grace becomes a problem.

Not just for those who might have come to know a better way through our ability to offer that loving grace, to be a representative of that loving grace in this world, so we lose ground there, but we also have a problem for ourselves.

This thing does not end well for Jonah.

He ends up on that hill, lost in his own disappointments, unable to see what God has done right in front of him, even using him to do it.

This is the concern that we carry.

Will we be stuck on that same hillside, lost in our frustrations as we deal with the dangerous polarities of our current culture?

I know many of us carry the burden of that polarization pretty heavily.

We're concerned for a society that has chosen to work against itself rather than to work together in some common sense solutions and compromise.

We grieve for a time when we would look for the good in each other even when we disagreed.

In our quote, Rohr called it being able to say everything is still beautiful, even when it's not shining God's light.

To me, the invitation of the story of Jonah is clear as we navigate these polarized times in our day-to-day life, in our places of engagement with the community, even when we're sitting in a voting booth, we need to ask ourselves can we trust in God's loving grace?

Or will we land on that hill paralyzed with our anger?

Will we find our way back to that hard work of redemption?

That is our question for today.

Amen.