Jonah and Holy Willie - Sermon 25th January 2009
Jonah 3:1-5,10
, Psalm 62:5-12, 1 Corinthians 7:29-31, Mark 1:14-20
The book of Jonah tells a strange, in fact downright weird, story; it’s one of those stories that, if someone asks us to have a go at retelling it in a potted version, we gabble out an outline, and then say “No – that can’t be right! Can it...?” Yet when we check, we’ve probably come pretty close. The prophet Jonah is called by God to preach doom to the people of the great city of Nineveh. This is the last thing he wants to do, because he hates the people of Nineveh, and if doom is threatening them, he doesn’t want anything to happen that might interfere with the process. What he wants to do is to relish their destruction from afar. So he flees from God’s command, in the opposite direction, taking ship for Tarshish – and that’s when things get really weird!
A huge storm brews up, Spielberg-like, and threatens to engulf the ship. A process of casting lots reveals Jonah as the cause of the storm. Jonah recognizes what’s going on, and tells the sailors they must throw him overboard. He is the one attracting the wrath of God, because of his disobedience. The sailors are horrified; they won’t contemplate such a thing. But Jonah insists. It’s the only way. And in a switch of emotion and intention worthy of a Monty Python sketch, albeit with a decent prayer not to be held accountable for his life, the sailors accede, and throw him in.
So the ship sails off, saved, its crew and passengers never knowing that Jonah has just interacted with a huge specimen of marine life so as to generate one of the great iconic images of Scripture. Not Jonah and the whale, of course – literally, it’s Jonah and the Big Fish, which, sadly, scuppers all those silly stories the like of the one about the prophet, regaining his wits in the mouth of the cetacean, hearing the sound of singing, and glimpsing through the darkness a choir of fifty Treorchy miners, who when questioned, inform him that “We always sing in whales...” I mention that not entirely spuriously. There is a bizarre quality to what is going on in chapter one of Jonah, and the text seems to be half-aware of it.
Chapter two is very different in tone to chapter one. It reads very like one of the psalms of despair. Where the first chapter tells a story which is wild, implausible and barely explored, chapter two explores an experience of alienation from God and profound anxiety and depression, an experience of three days in hell. It’s because of this incredible deepening of the ancient and bizarre story of chapter one, that Jonah’s experience is understood in the New Testament as a prefiguring of Christ’s three days in the tomb, followed by resurrection. There’s nothing here to make anyone giggle.
Until, of course, the very last verse, in the Authorized Version at least.
And the LORD spake unto the fish, and it vomited out Jonah upon the dry land.
I wonder how many generations of children got into trouble for an unstifled giggle at that point!
There’s no mention of how Jonah got home from the beach, because chapter three follows immediately. And chapter three was our reading this morning. Jonah finally goes and preaches doom on the city of Nineveh. And again, there’s a weird moment of almost pythonesque brusquneness, as the mood of the city changes before him. The way the story is told is perfunctory in the extreme; the city is vast, three days’ journey across. Jonah travelles one day’s journey into it, and announces "Yet forty days, and Nin'eveh shall be overthrown!" – and the whole city dissolves in repentance before his eyes!
Just exactly this unintentionally slightly comic tone, just exactly the bizarre mental picture of a one-sentence sermon, delivered without enthusiasm, just exactly the urge to giggle that steals upon us as we read, should alert us to something going on in the text here. All of these may be twentieth and twenty-first century responses, but they signal something that we need to pay attention to. And they underline the need to be absolutely honest when reading Scripture. Generations of preachers have wasted their time on the repentance of Nineveh, on the power of Jonah’s message, on the unexpected faith of a people who heard the word of God and believed it. Because that’s not what the Book of Jonah is about. The Book of Amos is about the preaching of Amos, his message to a disobedient Israel. The Book of Hosea seems to draw in elements of the prophet’s autobiography, especially his convoluted marriage, to underline its message to an unfaithful people.
But the Book of Jonah isn’t about the preaching of Jonah, his message, or the people to whom it is addressed. It’s about Jonah himself. There really was a Nineveh – it was for a long time the capital of the Assyrian empire. But the Nineveh of the Book of Jonah has nothing to do with that Nineveh. You could replace it with New York, if you wanted, and the book would still work. In fact, the idea of the whole of New York seizing up in a paradox of repentance, and its mayor in sackcloth and ashes, because a prophet preached an unenthusiastic one-sentence sermon in Central Park, is a very good way of grasping how the Book of Jonah works.
Because when we have stopped laughing at chapter 3, we find ourselves faced with chapter four. And we realize that the book of Jonah is about Jonah’s messed-up head.
Jonah is sulking. He didn’t want this. He didn’t want the repentance of Nineveh. He wanted it destroyed, down to the last woman and child, and animal. He wanted it wiped from the face of the earth. And it’s only if we are honest enough to admit that some parts of the Book of Jonah make us laugh, that we stand a chance of understanding those bits of the book that should make us shudder. Because Jonah really does want this.
In some ways, Jonah is the Biblical Holy Willie. And it’s no accident that I should be offering this for your consideration on the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns’ birth. Holy Willie’s Prayer is, to my mind, Burns’ psychological masterpiece, because in it he dissects a religious way of thinking about the world – indeed, very specifically, a way of thinking that purports to be Christian. And he starts from the enormity and sovereign majesty of God:
O Thou, who in the heavens does dwell,
Who, as it pleases best Thysel',
Sends ane to heaven an' ten to hell,
A' for Thy glory,
And no for ony gude or ill
They've done afore Thee!
Not only is Holy Willie’s God, like Jonah’s, sovereign and awesome, but Holy Willie, like Jonah the prophet, has a special place with his God.
I bless and praise Thy matchless might,
When thousands Thou hast left in night,
That I am here afore Thy sight,
For gifts an' grace
A burning and a shining light
To a' this place.
But – and here again, the pattern is the same as the book of Jonah – Holy Willie’s relationship with his God is thrown into crisis by his own behaviour. The two instances are very different: Jonah flees from God’s command, where Holy Willie, “fashed by fleshly lust” falls into temptation; but both have experienced being far from God. And even more importantly, if you think of the two texts, they both work on a double level. Jonah, we have seen, works on a folk-tale level that we nowadays find slightly bizarre, and, despite ourselves, somewhat funny. But the point is that Jonah, if we read it attentively, keeps us moving between that level and something far darker, something that is to do with a real human crisis of separation and alienation before God, something that really does speak to us as human beings even in the twenty-first century. Similarly, Holy Willie’s Prayer, heard in a virtuoso reading in a Burns Supper, done by a virtuoso reciter complete with nightshirt, nightcap and candleholder, makes us split our sides – but we are also aware of something much darker and deeper, the horror that must surely be experienced by someone who really believes what Holy Willie says he believes, when he glimpses what his life is really like, and how distant and alienated he is from what he conceives to be God. We feel it, even if Holy Willie apparently doesn’t.
But Holy Willie does feel it, and he directs it out of himself onto people he can identify as sinners. People not like him in his presumed righteousness. And there’s a list of them: Gavin Hamilton, with his “takin’ airts”, the Presbytery of Ayr, who refuse to make life miserable for the opponents of the Mauchline elder and his Minister, “that glib-tongu'd Aiken,” all of them liberal, open-minded and in every other way too hateful to a mind so narrow. But look at what Willie says about Aiken:
Lord, in Thy day o' vengeance try him,
Lord, visit them wha did employ him,
And pass not in Thy mercy by 'em,
Nor hear their pray'r,
But for Thy people's sake, destroy 'em,
An' dinna spare.
Does that not sound exactly like the fate Jonah wishes on Nineveh? And then he concludes – but in a way that suggests to me, anyway, that he is still terrified of being found as hateful to God as the people he condemns, and still totally insecure in himself before God:
But, Lord, remember me an' mine
Wi' mercies temp'ral an' divine,
That I for grace an' gear may shine,
Excell'd by nane,
And a' the glory shall be thine,
Amen, Amen!
And the first three chapters of the Book of Jonah take us no further than that. But Jonah has a fourth chapter. Furious that – as he warned God (!) - Nineveh has repented, and won’t be destroyed, Jonah is sulking in the heat, in a way that is positively self-destructive in the middle east. And God makes grow a gourd plant, which, Jonah suddenly realizes, coming briefly some way out of his sulk, is actually very pleasant. And just as he begins to think about something other than his anger, his wrath, a worm pricks the delicate structure of the plant, and it withers and dies. And Jonah throws a second tantrum, in very specific terms. He is so angry at the loss of the plant, he wants to die. And he casts this up in a completely childish way to God.
Did you never stamp your childish feet and say something like “If I can’t have that, I’m going to hold my breath until I’m dead!!”? And add “And it’ll be your fault!!!”
And the LORD said, "You pity the plant, for which you did not labour, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?"
Jonah’s rage is completely disproportionate. And so it is childish. But childish rage is nothing to laugh at. Childish, disproportionate rage is what leads to the eradication of cities and peoples, to murder and genocide. It isn’t funny. And the Book of Jonah finishes on an ambiguous note, with what is basically God’s challenge to Jonah. You grieved for a plant – here today, gone tomorrow. Can’t you find a spark of compassion in you for a whole city full of souls?
And that, in the end, is the tragedy of Holy Willie’s prayer. It’s the prayer of a man in whose religion, and life, there isn’t a spark of compassion. There is only anger and fear. And anger and fear are two sides of the same coin. And what, together, they generate, is hatred. And where, then , is love?
I can’t help thinking of the situation in Gaza. I can’t understand the religion of people like those militants, who fire rockets randomly into a country they hate, in the certainty of spreading fear and the hope of causing some death and destruction. But as God is my witness, I can’t understand the response, of a modern nation state undertaking the kind of incursion that is certain to kill and wound and maim thousands, and traumatize tens of thousands more. Not when its people know what it is like to have an evil power wish to wipe you from the face of the earth.
In the end, though, we can only speak for ourselves. At the heart of our religion should be a figure on a cross, taking in, absorbing, all the anger, and fear, and hatred in the universe. Taking it. And forgiving it. Because “They know not what they do...” In a way, the stories of both Holy Willie and Jonah the prophet are stories of men who “know not what they do.” We need to look at ourselves in the mirrors they provide, and ask seriously where the compassion of Christ is in our own lives.
And we can only do that if we recognize that the anger and the hatred and the fear can live in us too. And that they can take up the room in us that should be the space in which Christ lives in our lives.