I.Anyone who thinks God calls only good
people knows nothing about Jonah!
A.
Jonah is a story about an angry prophet,
about a God who uses Jonah’s anger to bring salvation
to a whole city.
1.
God allows Jonah to make his own choices, to
be what he wants to be.
2.
You will discover that Jonah is a man much
like Job,
a.
The people around Jonah are constantly
calling out to God, and Jonah like Job only does so at the
end.
b.
Jonah and Job are surrounded by disaster, and
the reader has to wrestle with the question about suffering
and why God allows it.
c.
God continually confronts Jonah with
questions, and Jonah must answer and make decisions about
the direction his life will take.
d.
The one thing that separate these two men is
that Job, though he curses the day he was born,
never gives in to anger.
B.
This short story is a fascinating
psychological study of anger.
1.
God never tells Jonah he should not get
angry.
a.
God does not say, “When you calm down, Jonah,
then I will be glad to listen to you.”
2.
Both God and Jonah get angry in this story,
a.
We are told, “their nostrils burned like
fire,” yet each uses anger in a very different way.
b.
Jonah remains angry to the end, his situation
is left open-ended.
c.
But God’s anger is short-lived; we are told
he
“repents of his fierce anger”
in order to do good.
3.
Job claims that God “does great things beyond
understanding” but “will not turn back from his anger (ch.
9).
a.
That is not the case here.
C.
Are you surprised to learn that our Bible
actually says it is OK to be angry?
1.
Maybe you have heard of Jonathan Edwards’
fire and brimstone sermon of 1741, “Sinners in the Hand of
an Angry God,” (Enfield, Connecticut).
a.
Edwards believed, "There is nothing that
keeps wicked men, at any moment, out of hell, but the mere
pleasure of God."
2.
Paul talks to the Christians of Ephesus about
the controlled use of anger, quoting from the Psalms:
a.
“Be
angry, but do not sin” ( 5.26)
b.“Do not let
the sun go down on your anger”
(4.26).
3.
James 1.19 cautions us to be careful with our
intense emotions:
a.
to be “quick
to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger,”
b.
because
“it does not contribute to
righteousness.”
4.
Thursday morning, while I was trying to
write this sermon, the large master copier in the
secretary’s office was being uncooperative, our internet
server had suddenly changed, and there were all the people
coming in to the quilter’s meeting–with the front door
banging every 2 minutes, were driving me nuts! But I said
to myself, first off: I am not getting upset. then: I am not
getting mad, then: I am not getting angry! I have a hard
time getting started on sermon-writing on Thursdays, but
once I get to it, I like to focus intensely and do
not like to be interrupted.
D.ANGER is “an
emotion common to all people and (it is)very much a part of
our lives,” says Dr. Theodore Isaac Rubin in his
publication, “The Angry Book,” written 40 years ago.
1.
Dr. Rubin is a former president of the
American Institute of Psychoanalysis
2.
Anger is descriptive of both God and Jesus,
and many of the prophets.
3.
It is a compound emotion, which as we
see in the story of Jonah can lead to either creativity or
to destruction.
4.
When someone gets angry and allows it to
control her, it is an indication of some far-deeper emotions
and issues.
5.
This can then lead to more serious
expressions:
a.
violence, outbursts of power, suicide.
b.
If repressed, it will suddenly show up much
later more explosive.
6.
Some questions
which the author of Jonah poses, and with which God
confronts the prophet are,
a.
how will you handle it?
b.
how will you release it so it brings about
good?
c.
how will you talk it over?
d.
how will you move ahead?
e.
how will you pray about it?
7.
Jonah, then, becomes a textbook for how NOT
to deal with anger.
II.
In this story, ask yourself: How does Jonah
use his anger? Then, ask yourself, How does God want Jonah
to use his temper–his violent emotion–in a different way?
A.
First, look at what happens when he finds
himself swallowed up by a fish.
1.
While sitting in the belly of the fish, he
has time to think over the events of the past week: running
away from God, the storm, getting thrown overboard. This guy
has plenty of ammunition to make him mad.
a.
How then does he express that in his prayer
to God:
2.
What he sees all around him is evil, but God
has instead chosen to punish him!
3.
He rebukes God,
a.
self-righteously he justifies his own
actions;
b.
he wants God to give him revenge.
B.
Jonah prays in the same way after he is spit
up on the beach.
1.
This is the same pattern of prayer we see in
some of the psalms.
a.
except you and I often disguise our demand
for retribution in pious words, so that we cannot see
our hostility, our aggression in it:
b.
God, do this for your sake, your own honor.
c.
Lord, I know deliverance belongs to you
alone; you delivered me,
d.
now let evil reap its just reward among those
“who
pay regard to vain idols (and) forsake their true loyalty”
(1)
[words from Jonah’s own mouth].
2.
At whom should my prayer in times of anger be
directed?
a.
Only at myself and my own actions, no one
else.
b.
“Lord, forgive me; help me to look at what I
have become. Lord, deliver me from
myself.”
c.
But that is so hard to do all by myself.
Remember, Jonah was on his own. That is the only way he
operated.
d.
I guess no one wanted to be around him.
not even the plant!
C.
In the third incident, Jonah repented–or he
went through the pretense of repenting. He preached to the
Ninevites, covering the whole city.
1.
Then he sat down and got disgusted once
again. Why?
“‘Because I knew that you are a gracious God
and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast
love.’”
2.
This man of God was outraged because God
repented of anger and chose to be forgiving instead.
a.
“Steadfast love”– Yahweh’s KHESED,
God’s unique all-encompassing love that has no room for the
kind of anger that wants to get even
(1)
just wants to punish,
(2)
wants to exclude at all costs!
III.
Here now is the turning point of the story:God uses anger for a
creative, loving purpose.
A.
God uses anger to save lives; on the other
side, Jonah wants to die.
1.
God “turns
back from the evil God had planned,”
while Jonah cannot.
a.
The Hebrew word for “repent,” NAKAM, means “
compassion.”
2.
What does it mean to say, God repents?
a.
God is in control of his emotions. God is
able to turn back.
b.
Jonah is out of control.
3.
So God for a third time confronts Jonah: “‘Do
you well to be angry?’”
a.
Are you so angry that you let it take over
your whole life?
4.
Do you know Christians or church members who
have suffered an injustice or misfortune, maybe beyond their
control, and they have allowed it literally consume them.
They might as well be dead, just like Jonah.
a.
Several people have asked us to remove their
names from the church’s roll because the church will not
take a strong stand on certain issues.
b.
They are angry Christians!
5.
There are abusive husbands who are ordered by
the court to take anger management classes.
a.
Statistics say, the majority of these will
fail,
b.
Why? In Biblical terms, they have fallen too
far from grace.
6.
Many young people who have fallen into the
cracks by our educational system, who are lost by the time
they reach high school or college...I saw them in court when
I went to pay my ticket in November: drug addicts, repeat
offenders, outstanding warrants, failures in providing
family support
a.
They are each from Ninevah, just like Jonah.
b.
“Do you do well to be angry?” God asks each
one of them.
(1)
Maybe Jonah was one of those, not even 30
years old yet.
7.
There is in this book an “inevitable
connection between suffering and egotism,” says one
commentator.
a.
How you handle your suffering affects whether
you will get upset or unnerved. How you handle your
emotions affects how soon you will move beyond your
suffering, turn your suffering into a blessing.
B.
Throughout this book, the protagonists
repeatedly call on God: the sailors, the king and people of
Ninevah.
1.
Everyone, except Jonah, calls upon God, for
salvation, to be saved from themselves and their evil, maybe
to bring joy back into their lives.
2.
They call out of the “fear” of God
–the Bible calls this “wisdom.”
a.
Jonah calls to God out of a different kind
of “fear.”
3.
Dr. Rubin says: one of the first lines of
defense or repentance in handling our own anger is prayer,
honest prayer.
a.
But I doubt that you or I can do it on our
own.
b.
If you have an issue with emotions getting
out of control, come to our healing service at 9:00 a.m.,
the first Sunday of the month.
Come and pray to be touched, pray for
wholeness, pray for forgiveness. You will not be alone,
others will lift you up and pray for you. We will anoint you
with the healing mercy of Christ himself.
C.
A fourth episode of anger takes place under
this plant that God caused to grow and gives Jonah shade for
only a day.
1.
The plant’s demise is possibly a commenary
about the arbitariness of human life, as the 90th Psalm
declares,
2.”the
grass is renewed in the morning;
in the morning it
flourishes;
in the evening it fades and
withers...
So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of
wisdom.”
3.
The sun attacks the plant and burns it, the
same effect Jonah’s fiery temper has on him.
a.
The worm here represents a weak and
despicable person.
b.
His bad attitude is like a worm deep within
which eats at him.
4.
Jonah is the son of Amittai. That is
a pun, “Amittai” means Truth or Belief.
a.
The calling of the son of Truth causes a
whole city to believe, but he cannot see the truth.
IV.
And so the story ends with a question. Jonah
must write the final chapter. How will he choose? How would
you end this story? from your own experience of how God
healed your anger with his compassion and mercy...
A.
You have the power over your own life.
1.
Power is a gift from God, to be used for good
or bad, to serve others or to control them, to be assertive
or to cave in.
2.
It is no different from anger.
a.
A parable declares, “Live
to love and you love to live. Live to hate and you hate
living.”
3.
Why was Jonah unable to be joyful for the
Ninevites?
4.
Bill Hybels, in his book “Descending Into
Greatness,” writes that joy in the Bible is not defensive;
Christian joy goes on the offensive. It gets involved
in the lives of others, it breaks down barriers. Instead of
hiding in safe corners (like on a ship or under a plant),
Hybels says “we run toward life at full speed, embracing
whatever it offers”
B.
This is much more than a short story about an
angry prophet, or a primer of how not to use anger.
1.
More than a stereotype of disobedience and
self-righteousness,
a)
More than a story filled with humor and wit,
b)
More than a satire on phony, empty religion.
2.
Much deeper than all that, it is a story of God’s
infinite pity, of divine “eyes overflowing (with) tears,”
a)
a story of God’s unbelievable love which is so
far beyond us,
b)
and how wide that gap is between God and where we
are.
c)
A timeless story like the story of Ruth.
3.
When Jesus said that “‘no
sign will be given to this generation except the sign of Jonah,’”
what do you think he meant?
a)
It is not just the sign of preaching a
resurrection from the dead, rising from the belly of the fish
after 3 days, which brings the gift of deliverance for the
wretched of the earth;
but a warning to you and me, a warning we
may condemn our generation for our lack of compassion, our
refusal to repent!