Jonah: Anger and Pity

All right, well, good morning.

So we're gonna continue our way through the book of Jonah.

We're in chapter four.

And last week we were in chapter four.

We'll be in chapter four today.

We'll be in chapter to four next week, and then we'll be done with Jonah.

So if you haven't been with us, I'll catch you up to speed as we talk this morning so you won't feel too lost.

So this morning, I I want to talk about a sad truth that we all know about.

We all know this truth to some degree on some level.

Now, some of us, our very lives are defined by this truth.

All that we are and all that we do every day can sort of be defined by this truth.

This truth, this sad truth, actually produces a lot of resentment and bitterness.

For others of us, maybe you just know somebody, somebody near you, that is incredibly defined by this truth.

And for some of us, it's just that a particular day or a week or a season can be defined by this sad truth.

And we can move through life with the hum of never being enough and always being a victim.

So here it is, the sad truth, straight from Jonah 4.

It's what's going on with Jonah.

Unprocessed anger can easily turn into self-pity.

Now that's not groundbreaking for most of us, but it is a truth and it defines a lot of us, whether it be our entire lives or a day.

Unprocessed anger can easily turn into self-pity.

So chances are you know about this in some degree because you lost a job, or you lost a romance, or you lost a child, or you lost a wife or a boyfriend or a husband, or you lost your health.

You didn't make the team.

And that thing that you needed to happen, or you thought it would happen, it didn't happen, or it hasn't happened, the thing that you never wanted to happen, that thing, that thing happened.

And you know what I'm talking about because it's that memory that you've bottled up and you've shoved it way deep down and you haven't processed it.

Unprocessed anger can easily turn into self-pity.

This is what can happen.

And either we need to process and grieve our sin, or process and grieve our loss.

Maybe both.

The first one is self-pity is a form of anger that can be created when life isn't going the way I want or expect.

Anybody familiar with that, right?

All of us, right?

This is when we have our pity party and we listen to too much inya.

We just keep listening to it and feel sorry about ourselves or too much reality television so we can feel better about ourselves, one or the other.

Here's the second sentence.

Self-pity is a reactive state fueled by anger because I lost something I thought I deserved.

So, chapter four of Jonah.

If you remember the story to catch you up to speed, if you've just shown up with us this morning, Jonah was a religious prophet, a very religious man.

And he is called to go preach to Nineveh.

Nineveh was his enemy.

Now, we say enemy, but this really was his enemy.

These were horrible people.

2 Kings tells us how horrible these people tortured other people.

This was his enemy.

So, of course, he doesn't want to go and preach to them and share God's love for them, and like, hey, you should repent of all this horrible stuff you're doing, and God will have his kindness upon you.

He doesn't want to tell them that.

He wants them to suffer for their sin.

And so he goes the other way, right?

He boards a ship, he heads to Tarshish, eventually he ends up over into the sea, under the sea, the miraculous story of him being swallowed by a fish.

He is underneath it all.

And there in that belly of the fish, he has nothing left.

And we have this incredible moment of surrender.

Out of that, he is thrown up out of the fish, he gets back on land, he heads to Nineveh.

So out of his surrender, we finally have some obedience out of Jonah.

And so he goes and he preaches to these people, these horrible people, and they all repent.

They all say, We have been horrible people, we repent of that, we're not gonna do that anymore.

We recognize God's authority, and God is kind to them.

And that's just when we think, right?

This is just at the story that in the narrative arc of everybody gets along.

This is just the point where you go, like, hey, they're all gonna go to David Buster's and have drinks and play games, they're gonna have a great time.

This is the end of the story, they're gonna live in a neighborhood together.

No, that is not what happened.

Jonah says, I don't I don't like anything that I just saw, and I'm gonna leave town and I'm gonna go up and be miserable by myself.

So he's angry and he's full of self-pity.

We hear it, we heard all of chapter four, but verse one.

But it displeased Jonah exceedingly.

So what displeased him was that God was kind to people.

And he was angry.

So Jonah basically says, I just knew it.

God, I knew it.

I knew you were gonna love like that.

And I want the love for me, and I want the love for my people and my nation, but I don't want the love for those people.

And you know who those people are, because even when I say that, those people, you can start to think through who those people are for you.

In verse 3, he says, You were loving and kind to this horrible.

I'd rather die than see that.

Verses eight and nine, you took away my comfort.

He had that plant grow up, he had shade, he has comfort, so he got to be there, you know, he got to keep his enemy, and then he was still comfortable, and then God takes away that idol of comfort and says, Oh, if I can't have that idol of comfort, I'd rather die, verses eight and nine.

Now, of course, he could always go into the city, right?

That's kind of like the things going on in territory.

At any point, he can walk back into the city.

These people have repented, they're his brothers and sisters, they would take him in.

But here's the point his anger and his self-pity would not let him do it.

He would rather choose to be miserable.

So he sat in the sun.

And God keeps coming back to him over and over and over again and asks, Do you do well to be angry?

You know, it's kind of like, is this working out for you?

This anger thing, the self-pity thing.

Is that working out?

How's that working?

Here's point number one.

Anger and self-pity arise when what we thought we need for true life is threatened or taken away.

Anger and self-pity arise when what we thought we need for true life is threatened or taken away.

So Jonah has two loves we talked about last week.

He has this racial nationalistic arrogance.

His people are better than those people.

God should love us, God should not love them.

That's taken away from them.

The other love of his life is this idol of comfort, the plant.

And God says, Oh, you pitied the plant.

You had compassion for the plant.

You love the plant, but I love those people, and the plant's taken away from them.

Now, chances are, chances are, because I have it, there's something in your life, let's just call it X.

And if you have X, everything is good.

If you have X, you are good.

If you have X, you're whole.

If you have X, you are at peace.

And if X is taken away or threatened, everything starts to fall apart.

Because you and I, we can easily think we need X to be worthy or to be righteous before God.

It's the last thing we're holding on to.

For Jonah, it was his nationalistic idea of his nation.

And then it was his comfort.

Both are taken away from him.

He has nothing.

So what does he cling to?

He clings to anger.

That's what happens to us often.

If X gets threatened or removed from our lives, and chances are you've never said it out loud because we're just too religious for that, right?

It's just, but it's there.

And then the pity says: here's what pity says.

You deserve that.

You needed that to be whole.

You needed that to be at peace.

Do you remember the animated movie Inside Out?

Do you all remember that?

Anyone?

Watch that.

I love that movie.

Now that I have children, we watch it all the time.

So just, you know what?

Spoiler or you know, maybe earmuff for the next five minutes.

That would be fine if you hadn't seen it.

You've had time to see it.

It's not new, so I don't feel too bad about anytime I do this.

And so it's about 11-year-old Riley.

And this little girl, her family lives in Minnesota.

She has a great life.

She loves her life.

It's wonderful.

She has friends.

She loves her home.

She loves everything about it.

And then she moves, her family moves from there to San Francisco.

They get to San Francisco.

She doesn't like this is not what she wanted.

Her life is disruptive.

Now part of the movie, it flip-flops back and forth between her, what her life is, and then it goes inside of her head.

You remember that?

And inside of her head, there's those five characters: there's joy, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust.

And so there's all this interplay going on as she loses control of her life.

Her parents offend her.

She's socially embarrassed.

And she loses control.

And she's sad.

Right?

You remember it?

She's sad, but she won't feel the sadness.

So she's full of self-pity, self-hatred, rebellion, bitterness, resentment, and inner rage.

And the entire movie, the entire movie is her trying to reconcile her desire for joy, but the reality of sadness.

And literally in the movie, literally, until she gives sadness a seat at the table, she's falling apart.

Brilliant movie.

Brilliant.

I ran into an article this week, What Your Anger May Be Hiding.

By a psychologist, Leon Seltzer on Psychology Today.

Here's just a little quote: Anger is almost never a primary emotion, and that even when anger seems like an instantaneous knee-jerk reaction to provocation, there's always some other feeling that gave rise to it.

And this particular feeling is precisely what the anger has contrived to camouflage or control.

So Dr.

Seltzer's saying this anger works in the moment.

It works.

It works to camouflage, it works for us to have a sense of control when we feel out of control.

But if we have anger, we have something to hold on to.

So we get angry.

The problem is inevitably it causes us to fall apart even more.

So, three good questions when you become angry.

Right?

You feel it rise up, maybe your passive anger, you hide it really well, you just feel it inside, maybe it's outburst anger, whatever.

But if when you feel that anger, come up.

What did I lose?

What did I lose?

You lost something.

That's why you're angry.

What did I lose?

What am I sad about?

You're actually sad.

What am I sad about?

And lastly, what do I need to confess?

Or grieve.

Point number two is this we need to grieve that which we lose.

Jonah sat in the belly of the fish earlier in the story.

He's lost a lot of stuff at this point in his life.

He's lost his high view of himself, that's for sure.

He was a religious prophet now.

I mean, then he became just kind of like trash on a ship that they threw overboard.

He lost the sense of capability.

He's lost his sense of power and control.

And so then that mourning leads to surrender, and that surrender leads to obedience, but then he's just like us, and we're just like him.

He's obedient in one moment.

We talked about it last week, how close together kindness and judgment can be.

That's what we talked about last week.

And yet here we have him up on a hill outside the city, and we don't see any grieving.

We just see anger and pity, inner conflict, disharmony with God.

But what if, what if, what if he had confessed his sin and grieved his loss?

In our first year as a church, I found myself, so this was six years ago, I found myself feeling incredibly inadequate.

And part of that I started to realize was this how much of my identity that I had put in the place I used to work, a big, prestigious church, and I had an office, and I mean, you know, I mean, it was incredible, and it made me feel so important.

And being a church planner, I mean, while it's incredibly rewarding, it's not glorious.

And all that sort of like stripped away.

You know, and then identity issues, security issues, certainly lack of faith issues, certainly fear and anxiety issues.

And then also, also in that first year, we lost one of our founding members to suicide.

So I'm grieving my sin of self-justification via my career.

That's going on and causing sort of an identity crisis.

And then I lose somebody that I'm caring for.

And here's what I didn't expect.

I didn't see it coming.

I would have never expected that grieving was the way out.

I just wouldn't have thought it.

That grieving my sin and grieving my loss was actually the way out.

I think this creates, Jonah creates a few more questions for us.

What is underneath your pity and anger?

What's the story under the story?

What is under your resentment or bitterness?

What did you lose and you've never grieved?

What did you love and you should have never loved?

See, Jesus breaks all of us in Matthew 5, right?

The Sermon on the Mount.

He breaks all of us.

And a whole, oh, he goes across the board on this one.

But there's this one statement, you've heard it said, do not commit murder.

You've heard that.

Doing pretty good.

Maybe most of us.

I don't know all your stories.

But I say, do not even hold anger in your heart.

And it just levels us.

And it just causes us to realize that I don't need Jesus to just be a model of character.

Man, if Jesus is just a model of character, I'm done.

I don't need that.

That's just another standard for me to live up to.

That's not gonna help me.

What's gonna help me is if he's the fulfiller of the law, that I am angry.

I get angry in my heart.

I shouldn't be.

I should live like Christ, but I don't.

And thank God and the grace of God that he fulfills the law for me.

That he's not just my model of character, but he's actually my substitute and my savior.

That's why we say every week all of our sin is put upon the cross on Christ, and Christ's righteousness is put upon us, so we are forever beloved.

Point number three is this the God of all grace and truth is always with you in all of your loss and in all of your sin.

Always with you.

It's the promise.

Jonah gives us a whole bunch to learn from, but it's a whole bunch of what not to do.

Jonah never confesses and repents of his self-righteousness and self-justification in chapter 4.

And yet in Christ, we get to joyfully confess and joyfully repent because we're already accepted, fully accepted in Christ.

Jonah never asks to see where he's wrong.

And yet in Christ, because we're already fully accepted and absolved in righteous, we can go before God and say, Hey, show me, show me where I'm at.

Nothing's at risk here.

It would be to my benefit and the benefit of everybody around me for me to see that and grow in my self-awareness.

Jonah never accepts reality as it is, but always resists it.

This makes me think about the woman at the well in John 4, one of my favorite stories of the Bible.

I think it looks like I was going back through my sermons, but every four months I mention it.

We know she's there in the heat of the day.

So she's there at the heat of the day, which means that's when other people would not be there.

So she's avoiding people, so she's probably an outcast on some level.

Not highly regarded.

Jesus shows up and he says, Hey, will you give me a drink?

She said, Why would you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan, for a drink?

Because see, a Jew wouldn't ask a Samaritan, would talk to a Samaritan.

Samaritans were lowly.

And Jesus says, If you knew the gift of God and who it is who asked you for a drink, you would have asked him, that's him, me, and he would have given you living water.

And she says, Sir, you have nothing to draw with.

How can you how can you drink?

And then here's what he says: everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.

The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

And she says, Hey sir, sir, give me give me that water.

I won't thirst, I want to come here anymore.

Give me that water.

And then Jesus says, He goes to the story under the story.

Go get your husband.

Right?

Jesus goes to the story under the story, the emotion under the emotion.

He digs down into the heart because if she will grieve sin, if she will grieve loss, we don't know her whole story.

It's probably a combination of both, just like all of us.

But if she'll grow in that self-awareness, that joyful repentance, that joyful confession, that process of grief of loss, she's gonna know a secret that the world never will never tells us.

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

She sort of avoids.

She says, I don't have a husband.

And she says, Yeah, yeah.

I know, you've had five.

You live with another guy now.

And Jesus doesn't condone her sin.

I mean, I really think the point of the story here is Jesus is definitely not scared of it.

I mean, he engages her heart.

As messy as it is, full of sin and full of loss, all of which she needs to grow in that self-awareness and that joyful confession and repentance and that grieving process.

He goes straight into it and he says, I am all the water your soul has ever thirst for.

Now that's powerful.

That's powerful because God doesn't shame you.

And in his kindness, he leads you.

He leads you to greater self-awareness, more joyful repentance, and greater courage to grieve that which you have lost.

So that we're not like Jonah up on a hill, just angry and pitiful.

My brothers and sisters, may we be delivered in the perfect love of Christ from all self-pity and all anger and all fear.

Let's pray together.

God, thank you that we see in the book of Jonah that you just never leave him alone.

You just keep asking him over and over again, do you do well to be angry?

Do you do well to be angry?

God, we confess this morning that we are full of anger and self-pity at different times in our lives.

Some of us have reservoirs of deep anger and self-pity, and others of us, we come in and out of it.

Would you give us eyes to see?

Would you give us the gift of self-awareness that we might know where to grieve our losses and where to grieve our sin?

Would you give us the faith that understands and believes and rests in the full sufficiency of Jesus as our full righteousness and absolution, so there's nothing for us to add, so that we can come before you with greater courage to grieve all of it and ask to see all of it.

And in that, would you move us from anger and pity to joy and peace?

In Jesus' name, amen.