This is the time of year I am so grateful to be living in New York, and yes, I started to write this sermon during one of those perfect sunny days we had last week (not this drizzle we're having now). But I’m not just talking about the weather. I love also that we have all these scattered holidays to help ease us back into fall.
Now, I say that as a Christian, because I’m fully aware that for my Jewish friends and colleagues these aren’t relaxing days off at all. But the rest of us are grateful.
Today, just before sundown, the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur begins, the Day of Atonement and the most solemn day in the Jewish year. Their holidays, like ours, are sometimes fixed on a certain calendar day annually, and other times movable, tied (like our Easter) to the lunar calendar of a given year. So, starting at sundown tonight they’ll begin.
One of the first things they do on Yom Kippur is read the entire book of Jonah, from which we have our Old Testament reading today. I suspect some larger church committee years ago put this reading here in the fall knowing its importance to our Jewish friends, and that they read it around this time. But it’s unusual for it to fall for us on the very day they read it.
I wouldn't presume to speak to all that it means in the context of their holiday, but definitely the book of Jonah’s themes are those of Yom Kippur: seeking atonement for wrongs done, making a new start, and God’s endless capacity for forgiveness no matter who we are, how often we’ve strayed, or how badly.
And you thought it was a children’s story. It’s really not.
I was trying this week to remember what I thought this story was about as a child. One Jewish poet whose podcast I listened to this week said that he always thought of it as the (sort of) “Jewish Jaws.” But just how much Jonah is a grown-up story becomes clear as we get older and our lives begin to look a lot like his.
The name Jonah means "dove." In Christian iconography the dove is mostly a symbol of peace, or promise, or of the spirit. It’s all those things in the Jewish faith, too, but it can also refer to the bird’s zig-zaggy flight, a symbol of indecisiveness or vacillation, not unlike this Jonah.
The book itself is only 48 verses long, shorter than many chapters of the Gospel. It starts with God telling Jonah to go to Nineveh, the foreign city (not Jewish) and urge its people to repent, to turn back to God, the God of Israel. Jonah, who doesn’t seem to think the people of Nineveh are deserving of mercy like his people, promptly refuses to do what God asks and runs in the opposite direction of Nineveh until he can’t go any farther on foot, and then he boards a ship to get even farther (he thinks) from God.
This was one of the last books of the Hebrew Scriptures to have been written and it’s commonly thought it marks a shift from tribalism towards universalism. As the Jewish people’s world expanded and their awareness of all these nations around them grew, it became harder to say, well God only loves us, and not them. It’s an important theological development, and one we still, all of us, struggle to appreciate whatever our faith: the universality of God’s love. The fact that it can stretch much farther and wider than our puny imaginations allow.
We know what comes next in the Jonah story: he’s on this boat, a storm comes, the sailors learn that Jonah is running from his God and that the only way they can stop the storm is by throwing him, the source of their troubles, overboard. They don’t want to do it, but they do. And rather than drown, a big fish--probably not a whale, probably not Jaws either, and in any case, I think I can tell you all this isn’t literal--swallows him and there he sits in the fish’s belly praying to God for three days, until it spits him out onto the shore.
And then Jonah gets ... Another Chance. This time he follows God’s command and goes to Nineveh. He tells all the people there to repent of their ways and turn to God. And God--this brings us to the very start of our passage--forgives the Ninevites, just like that. He didn’t even make it difficult.
Jonah’s mission was a success, but he isn’t happy. That’s our reading for today, the very end of the story. He sulks like a petulant child because he thinks God was too easy on the people of Nineveh. In Jonah’s view, and he tried to make it happen by not going to Nineveh, God should have destroyed them.
How like our parable for today, because of course our New Testament carries over many themes from the Old. Jonah thinks he’s a first-hour worker in the vineyard and when God shows the same generosity to people he thinks aren’t deserving, he sulks. Even though, his (Jonah’s) is the very story of grace undeserved, comically so. He runs away, gets on a boat, is thrown overboard, is swallowed by a whale, is spit back on shore, is spared by God through the most reckless choices to the point of parody, only to land safe on the shore, and have God start all over again with him, as if none of that just happened.
And rather than thank God for this lavish gift of undeserved grace, he envies God’s love for the people of Nineveh. From the owner of the vineyard in today’s parable: “Are you envious, because I am generous?”
There’s enough love. Scarcity is all we can see, wherever we look. It makes us envious of people, it makes us size others up. Scarcity makes us hoard, it deprives others of things they need. It’s the root of so much evil in the world, our utter conviction that there’s not enough. And the tragedy of it is: there is enough. We just don’t act like it. And so we run the world the way we do.
God can show love for Jonah and his people, and Nineveh and its people, and nothing and no one is diminished. God can show love for the first workers, second, third and eleventh hour workers, and no one is diminished. The same holds true for God’s mercy. And so on this weekend of Yom Kippur, let’s all of us, of this heritage, we share (and beyond) trust that God’s love and mercy is endless with each of us, and for all of us. Amen.