The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
August 11, 2002

Deliverance Belongs to the Lord
Jonah 2:1-9 

Deliverance belongs to the Lord. These are the last five words of our Old Testament reading for today. Deliverance belongs to the Lord. These five words end Jonah’s prayer from the belly of a great fish. Jonah cries out to God in these five words and in doing so he sums up the meaning of the entire 48 verses of the book of Jonah. But these words—Deliverance belongs to the Lord—are words that Jonah himself does not yet believe.  

If we look back at what has happened to Jonah up to now, we can better understand his prayer. In the verse of the book of Jonah, Jonah hears the word of the Lord. Jonah was told to go to Nineveh to cry out against it. Jonah immediately responded by getting on a boat heading away from Nineveh. He wanted to run away from God. Now if you find that a funny reaction for a prophet, that’s just fine. You see Jonah is a very funny book. At every twist and turn this unusual tale goes the opposite direction from what the Bible has taught us to expect. This is why a professor of mine refers to Jonah as the Unprophet.[i] He is everything you expect in a prophet and less.  

But we shouldn’t be too hard on Jonah. God called Jonah to a task he didn’t want. In fact, God called Jonah to a task that Jonah hoped no one would follow through on. He was called to prophesy against Nineveh in hopes that the town would repent. This was inconceivable for Jonah. Why would God want to reach out to Nineveh? They were the last people on whom God should be wasting divine attention. 

Nineveh was no garden variety bad town, and Jonah wasn’t the only one in Israel who thought so. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire and the Assyrians were Israel’s worst enemy. Assyria was a ravening lion that rampaged through the Ancient Near East and Nineveh was the lion’s den—a den filled with torn flesh from its victims. This isn’t my description. These are images from the book of Nahum just two books after Jonah in the Old Testament.  

The Assyrians were an empire particularly adept at conquest. They moved into a territory, laying waste to the towns and then carting off the survivors while settling new peoples into the conquered land. This is what happened to the Northern Kingdom of Israel. After all the 10 lost tribes of Israel were not carelessly misplaced, they were obliterated by the Assyrians. It was the Assyrians who wiped 10 out of 12 of the tribes of Israel off the face of the earth. And it was to the capital of Assyria that Jonah was called to bring the message of repentance.  

I don’t want to loose the shock the book of Jonah demands in a reader by discussing ancient kingdoms. Imagine with me a modern equivalent. What if God called a rabbi in the early 1940s to go to Berlin to warn the Nazi regime to repent or face God’s wrath? The prophet would not be afraid of failure. A Jewish prophet called to preach repentance in Berlin might fear that the Nazis would repent and escape God’s vengeance. In this scenario, a Jewish prophet might not want God to forgive all the atrocities of the Nazi death camps. This is how Jonah felt. He ran to Tarshish to avoid reaching out to Nineveh. Nineveh was a city Jonah did not want to be saved. If anywhere on earth deserved God’s vengeance, Jonah believed in his heart it was Nineveh and he did not intend to preach there. 

Jonah runs away from God’s call for a reason. While he is on the boat headed for Tarshish, God hurls a great storm against the boat. The sailors cried out to their gods for mercy, but the storm did not relent. The captain of the ship then sought out Jonah, who was asleep in the hold of the ship. They cast lots to see which one of the people on the boat was the cause of the storm and the lot fell on Jonah. He confessed that he was on their ship in order to run away from the Lord and told them to throw him into the sea to calm the storm. Fearing God, the sailors tried all the harder to row toward shore, but the sea grew stormier. Finally the sailors lifted Jonah and threw him down into the sea. At once, the sea stood still. God appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah and he was in the belly of the great fish for three days and nights.  

It is at that point, right in the center of the book that we find this morning’s Old Testament reading. It is Jonah’s prayer to God from the belly of the great fish. It is a smooth prayer, quite flawless really, ending with the fateful line: Deliverance belongs to the Lord. Jonah is, of course, quite correct. Deliverance does belong to the Lord. But whose deliverance does Jonah have in mind? At this point the deliverance he is praying for is his own. Jonah can say that deliverance belongs to the Lord, but he is too blinded with rage against the Ninevites to see that God’s deliverance is not for him alone. God’s deliverance is not for Israel alone. God’s deliverance is for all of creation. Jonah doesn’t yet understand this.  

Nevertheless, even in his incomprehension, Jonah is faithful. When God calls to Jonah a second time, he beats a path straight to Nineveh. His message is simple. No fancy orator, Jonah cuts to the chase: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” That’s it. Forty days more and Nineveh shall be overthrown. This short sentence does the trick. All of Nineveh believes God and repents. By sundown, every creature in town from the livestock in the stalls to the king of Assyria in the palace, is covered in sackcloth and fasting from food and water. The people of Nineveh cry out to God to relent from the punishment and God does. The Ninevites are happy. God is happy. It sounds like another happy ending. Cue up the closing music. Roll the credits. The story should be over. But this ironic book takes yet another strange turn.  

Sure the Ninevites are happy, they were saved from destruction. God is happy, the Ninevites repented and turned to the Lord. How does Israel’s most wildly successful prophet feel? Jonah is burning mad. Jonah stomps out of town in a huff. He yells at God, “I told you it would turn out like this. I know you. You are a gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to repent from punishing.” Jonah doesn’t say this to butter God up. Jonah says this as an indictment. Jonah is burning up. How dare God be gracious? How dare God be slow to anger? How dare God abound in love? How dare God be ready to repent? These are the Ninevites! Isn’t that just like the Lord?  

Jonah plops down on the edge of town and waits. He watches Nineveh while still clinging to hope that the city would be destroyed. But his wait is in vain. As much as Jonah wishes that it weren’t so, God’s steadfast love is reaching out to Nineveh. Even that ravening lion of an empire can know God’s grace if it will but accept it.  

This is a point that we can find ourselves in the story. I’m not sure about each of you, but I know where I find myself at times. I’m the one sitting with Jonah on the outside of Nineveh praying for destruction. I suspect you may find yourself there sometimes too. Every time we decide that someone is beyond God’s grace, God’s steadfast love, we find ourselves alongside Jonah. Every time we feel that we don’t want God’s love to reach someone, we are there with Jonah. 

Nineveh is the place where people live who we think are beyond God’s grace. Nineveh is the place where the other people live. My work a few summers ago gave me experience at finding Nineveh in the modern world. While in seminary, I worked a ten-week internship at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, DC. St. Elizabeths is a large public mental hospital. Patients who come to St. Elizabeths are severely mentally disturbed. They are also poor. Many are homeless. 

When people find out I was working at St. Elizabeths, they would often ask, “Can you do any real ministry there?” The question was not unfair. People really wanted to understand just what I can do in working with people suffering from severe mental illness. Could the patients even understand me? How could a chaplain begin to reach them, much less help them? It helps to understand that the patients are sick. The illness does affect thought processes. However, the patients are not unreachable. Far from it.  

So why do we think of people with mental illness as “them” or “other?” We are tempted to say, “Surely God’s love doesn’t extend to the mentally ill. Surely God’s love doesn’t extend to the mentally retarded or people with severe physical handicaps. Surely God’s love doesn’t extend to those parts of creation where the potter’s hands seemed to have slipped in the act of creation. These imperfect vessels might just be beyond God’s redemption.” To all of that, the book of Jonah offers a resounding No!  

Before we start to label the mental health patients, we had better look again. Is it really a matter of “them” with mental illness and “us” free from mental illness? I think if we look at it more honestly, we can admit that we all have mental health troubles from time to time. We can all have bouts of depression or anxiety that we keep under control well enough that others don’t notice too much. It never reaches the point that we need hospitalization, but nonetheless we don’t escape the brush with mental illness. So the people at St. Elizabeths are not so different from us after all. They suffer from the same types of problems we do, but at an amplified level. So when someone would ask, “Can you really work with patients at St. Elizabeths?” The answer was “I hope so, for all our sakes.” If they are beyond God’s grace, then we all are. But is it that we think the severely mentally disturbed are beyond God’s grace, or is it that we want them to be? For if God can reach out to them the way God reaches out to us, then they aren’t “they” any more, they aren’t “other,” the mentally ill are one with us.  

Having looked at one group of the many “other” in our own society, we return to Jonah. We rejoin Jonah sitting east of the city hoping for the destruction of Nineveh, God appoints a bush to grow up and shade him. Jonah is quite pleased with this turn of events. This is how a prophet of the Lord should be treated. But the next morning, God appoints a worm to destroy the bush and a hot east wind to blow on Jonah as the sun beats down. Now Jonah is so burning mad that he wants to die. Right at that point of rage, God brings home the lesson. Jonah is angry over the loss of a bush that he did not labor over in any way. God asks the question that closes the book of Jonah: If you are so mad about the bush that you didn’t labor over, then what about my creation? “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than one hundred thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”  

That’s it. The book ends right there. Jonah himself never answers the question. It is then that the reader realizes that the book of Jonah is not about Jonah. Not really. The book of Jonah is about God. It is about our gracious God who is merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. God reminds Jonah that all that is was lovingly created by God and deserves God’s concern. None of creation is beyond God’s love. That love of God extended to the herd animals of Nineveh. That steadfast love of God extended to the people of Nineveh who didn’t know their right hands from their left. That abounding, steadfast love of God extends still to all creation, particularly those we feel are beyond the deliverance of God. Because deliverance doesn’t belong to us any more than it belonged to Jonah. Deliverance belongs to the Lord. 

Amen.