Homily for the Commemoration of Jonah

Delivered at Concordia Seminary. Text: Jonah 3,4.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Well, if only our pouty prophet had been a graduate of this august institution, he would have learned well before graduating and being sent out that God’s opus alienum is ever and always in the service of His opus proprium. He’d probably have had to write a paper on the fact that in wrath he remembers mercy, as Habakkuk sung (3:2). God’s heart is never in the wrath, though it is very real and terrifying. His employment of the wrath seeks, so long as the day of grace perdures, to move to penitence so that He may come to His proper work, to show mercy, kindness, steadfast love.

But before we go feeling all superior to Jonah, if we stop and consider his words that we heard this morning, we might realize with a shock that he knew perfectly well all about the opus alienum and opus proprium, even if he didn’t use those terms. Think of what he said: “I know that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and relenting from disaster.” (4:2) And THAT was the problem in Jonah’s eyes. Jonah did not want God to be gracious and merciful to those nasty Assyrians. And by the way, the Ramseys of House Bolton had nothing on the Assyrians. If your city didn’t capitulate when they came knocking at the door, they’d happily flay your leaders once they took the place and hang their skin as a trophy and warning against not opening up when they first knock. They were awful, evil, wicked people. And Jonah wanted them to get their come-uppins; he was not doubt thinking “and it’s about time!” So he didn’t want to go on the mission because he was afraid that Yahweh would fall into His old habit of threatening wrath in order to move to repentance and then show mercy; and God forbid THAT happen, Jonah thought.

But, of course, it did. The Word of God is a hammer that can break the hardest of hearts. And when the hearts of the Ninevites were broken, Jonah was so angry he could spit nails. And so God does a children’s sermon with his grumpy prophet with the gift and then demise of that gourd. God asks: “Do you do well to be angry?” Jonah is defiant: “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” And so the Lord gently takes His pouty prophet in hand: “You pity the plant, for which you didn’t labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. Now should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more the 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?”

Which is to say, God gave him something that he might have pity on (the plant), that he might learn a thing or two about the pity that goes in the heart of God for lost mankind. Pity from which Jonah actually lives, even when he forgets that he too is a poor sinner who is no better than the cruel and vicious Assyrians at heart. God’s mercy is what first sent him on his journey; God’s mercy saved him from the great fish; and all of this not just to save the Ninevites (though, that too) but most of all to save him. For salvation, my friends, is coming to know and believe and live from and share the mercy that beats in the very heart of God Himself.

Now our Jesus, famously lifts up Jonah as the great sign and type of himself. A friend of mine years ago floated to me the idea that it works all the better if Jonah actually died in that fish’s belly. For then Jonah becomes a powerful sign of the resurrection, which if you think about it, is exactly how Jesus used it. Raised from the dead and then sent out with an embassy of repentance and a gift of forgiveness even to the heathen, even to the worst of the lot of us. Glorious! But of course, because Jesus is the eternal Son of the Father, and is born of the Father’s heart “ere the worlds began to be,” He doesn’t have a “go get ‘em” God disposition, but rather the Father’s opus proprium, mercy, that’s His heart beats too. James and John, sons of thunder, were ticked at the Samaritans for not welcoming Jesus on the journey to Jerusalem and Jonah-like, they ask Jesus if He wanted them to call fire down from heaven to consume the wretches? Remember how Jesus turned and rebuked them and said: Luke 9 “You do not know what manner of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man came not to destroy people’s lives but to save them.”

Jonah’s three day stay in the great fish’s belly was like unto Jesus’ sojourn in the heart of the earth, but the heart of Jesus is not like the heart of Jonah, for Jesus shares the heart of His Father. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.” No, for His way is to cry: “Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; let him return to the Lord, that he may have compassion on him, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” (Isaiah 55)

To lavish on mankind such abundant pardon Jesus followed the path of Jonah, but He did it with the heart of God. But did I really say mankind? What does one do with the almost Hindu ending? “And also much cattle?” His mercy on mankind spills out to embrace the critters that at the beginning God put under our dominion. And so even on the fasting cows of Ninveh, mercy pours from the heart of God. As St. Paul wrote: “in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” Look, we dragged creation down in the fall; but Christ will restore all that we have ruined. “Behold, I make all things new.” For from His heart flows pure mercy, mercy also for man’s animal companions; and much more so for any sinful man who will hear the threat of wrath, turn from sin in repentance, and turn back to Him in faith.

So, as we commemorate Jonah, people loved by God, we rejoice in a God whose overflowing compassion saves the nasty Ninevites, and even His own reluctant prophet. We glory in how Jesus’ death and resurrection reveals to us the staggering extent of mercy pouring out toward the most unexpected and unlikely of objects in the whole creation. From Nineveh’s cattle even to you, Even to me. Mercy, indeed, people loved by God, is our God’s very heart beat. And for that all glory, honor and praise to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God, now and ever unto the ages of ages. Amen.