The Raising of Jonah

ALLELUIA Christ is Risen
The Lord is Risen Indeed ALLELUIA

I know it is the usual way, at Easter, to turn our attention to the women, rushing headlong in the darkness towards what they believe is death, lugging the burden of burial spices, of hopelessness. But let us look a little bit further back, to that notorious biblical figure wedged between the Valley of Dry Bones and the Threatening Army of the Egyptians trying to push the people of Israel into a watery grave. There we have my favorite person in the whole Scripture. I mean, besides Jesus. If you are wandering around the Bible looking for one single person to show you the depth and breadth of who you are, and in the same moment to see the depth and breadth of who God is, Jesus is that person, obviously, but also Jonah, and his little book is the whole Gospel, in a a few well chosen lines.

Just to remind you, Jonah was a prophet in Israel, the Northern Kingdom, during a time of relative prosperity. He did not draw the straw of Jeremiah or Elijah or any of the others who were promised weeping and disappointment. He is mentioned in 2 Kings 14 where he gets the happy job of telling the king of Israel that, for once, his borders are going to get fatter and not thinner. And if Jonah could have had his way, that would have been it. He would have said his piece, gotten his name in the Bible, and gone away basically unnoticed by later generations.

But Got had it in for Jonah, as he does for us, and so we have the remarkable book bearing his own name. Which, I think, we can pretty well conclude must have come from his, Jonah’s own hand. Who else was there for all these events? It’s him and God, and the Ninevites, and much cattle.

So the Word of the Lord comes to Jonah, which is an awfully nice way of putting it, isn’t it, rather like a person, when you say it like that, and says, ‘Go to Ninevah, that great city and call out the message against it that I tell you.’

Now, if you’re Jonah, you’re immediately unhappy. First of all, God is bothering you. Second of all, he’s called the capital city of your enemies Great. Which you didn’t really need to be reminded of. And which means that God, perhaps, doesn’t feel about your enemies the same way that you do. Third, he’s sending you there, which you will not enjoy. And fourth, you have to call out against it. And, because you’re Jonah, you know something about God, and that is that if he is sending someone to call out a judgment, it means that there might be some doubt about his intentions, he may be meaning to have mercy.

Consider, say, the way God handled Sodom and Gomorrah. Did he send a preacher in there, before the rain of sulfur and fire? Not that we have recorded. And what of Israel going into the promised land? Did they go in and preach first? No, they just went in with the sword and with judgement. But consider the terrible trials of Israel–the thousands of years of preaching, the many many moments of mercy. Sure, just because a preacher is sent doesn’t mean that all is lost. It Could be that God is going to get glory, say, over Pharaoh, or make Noah play the fool for 100 years of convertless preaching. But Jonah isn’t a total dunce. He knows that if God is sending a preacher, then there’s room for him to have mercy. Mercy for the Enemy. And that’s not very nice, thinks Jonah.

Mercy is a difficult experience. A lot of time when God is having mercy, it feels like maybe you are going to die, as Jonah finds out the hard way.

So Jonah gets up and goes, but, like a sensible person, he runs as far away from Nineveh as he can go, to Tarshish. Well, he doesn’t quite make it to Tarshish. He gets on a boat to go there, and because he is both doing what he wants, and knows to be the wrong thing, he runs his mouth. He tells everybody everything. Everyone knows who he is and what his problems are. And then, of course, as the boat pushes away from the safety of the land, almost immediately a great storm blows up and the only way for any of the people on the boat to be saved is for Jonah to be thrown into the water.

The fantastic thing about Jonah is that he is at Once a type of Christ, a picture of what a great mercy Jesus works in his death and in his rising, and at the same moment a picture of what a hard time we have accepting that mercy. He, you might say, holds both of them together in himself–us held together with the life of Jesus for eternity.

So Jonah is thrown into the water and is assuredly going to drown. The waters more than rise up to his neck. He is caught in the roots of the earth. There is nothing he can do. And it is only because of what he did that he is there. This would be a good time to give up. This is the time for the sage to wag their heads and say, ‘well, you made your bed, you have to lie on it’ and ‘you reap what you sow’ and ‘what goes around comes around.’ The trouble is, its not that Jonah is caught here in the water, drowning, dying, perishing. It’s us.

When the Word of the Lord comes to you and says something, anything–and so many things have been said, things like ‘love God with everything in you,’ ‘don’t steal,’ ‘don’t lie,’ ‘don’t covet,’ don’t eat that fruit,’ ‘don’t touch that ark,’ ‘don’t do that,’ ‘go to Nineveh,’ go into all the world and preach the gospel,’–and you run away and do the exact opposite of what the Word of the Lord said–you covet and lie and steal and hate and touch and grab and eat–well, then where you end up is in the pit, in the water, in the mire, perishing. It’s not that complicated. We work awfully hard to make it complicated but it isn’t. We are all right there with Jonah.

And so the solution isn’t complicated either. Let’s look at what Jonah does as he is dying. It’s basically the substance of chapter two of his book–its a prayer of course. Looks like a prayer, with all the lines neat and even on the page. But to say it another way, a more visceral way, we can see that he cries out. When he is being grasped by death, then he cries out to God to save him.
Jonah cried out, saying, “I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice. – Jonah 2:2
He cried out. He said, ‘HELP.’ But he didn’t say it to just anyone. He cried out to God. He cried out to the one who could help.

I think most of the time in life we cry out either to the internet, for a little crowd sourcing, or to our own broken selves. There we are dying and so we go look into our pasts, or to a self help book, or our phones, or to some fix that it will make it better in the short term. When really, the one who needed to be called upon was the one who could save.

And why could he save? Because he, the one for whom Jonah is a type, who went down into the depths of the water, when he cried out to the one who could save, to the Father, that one didn’t hear. And then, when the father didn’t hear the cry, having truly forsaken him, he didn’t try to fix it himself, didn’t try to save himself. Jesus went ahead to died, perished, descended into the dust to Sheol.

The only way that Jonah was vomited up on the beach, the only way that you and I can face the eventual day of our death is because Jesus did die. He lay silent in the tomb, in the dark bowels of the earth. He went where we all should have to go.

Jonah’s prayer is the prayer of the person who sees that God himself is strong enough and desirous enough to rescue the one who doesn’t want to die after all. And because of Jesus himself lying there in the tomb, in place of me and you and even Jonah, that prayer, cried out in faith, in desperation is enough. That word, called out from your gut, to the Word brings all your dead bones clattering together.

And so, consider what joy comes in the morning. Consider the relief to be spat out into life, to discover that you aren’t going to have to face the darkness, that your friend, who endured it for you, is alive.

This Holy dark night, where we have pushed back a little of the darkness with the light of candles and a little of the sorrow with music–we’re all going to go away from here, as it were, into Nineveh. And we’re going to feel too hot sometimes, and disappointed surely, and be tempted to sit down and be angry with God for not organizing the world the way we wanted him to. All the troubles that we brought with us tonight will still be here in the morning.

But, look again, the prayer of Jonah is in the middle of the book. The salvation stands at the center point of time, of your own self. Look what Jonah says, ‘Salvation belongs To The Lord.’ It can’t be broken and spoilt or ruined. This seismic cosmic incontrovertible action to save You stretches into the past and into the future. However you feel about this great salvation–wandering around the hated streets of Nineveh, sitting under your wilting Vine, walking in all the works that God has prepared for you to walk in day by day, service by service, trouble by trouble–your feelings might change, indeed, joy will hopefully grow to replace anger and disappointment, but this great work cannot be spoilt or undone on God’s own side because God has done it.

And that is because He Is Risen. He is Risen and in his rising he has destroyed, has subjugated, has ruined death. He has gotten glory over it. It is not strong enough any more to hold you, to keep you, to destroy you. He is risen, therefore, when you cry out to him, you will rise. You will.

Therefore rejoice.
Alleluia He is Risen!