Think Nineveh is the Bad Guy? God's Trying To Convert Jonah.

The people who know this story of Jonah understand that Jonah is called to Nineveh, that “great city”. Jonah does not want to go to that city and he runs only to end up being spit up on the shores of Nineveh. However, I think this is a misreading the story.

God is not trying to convert Nineveh.

God is trying to convert Jonah. And for us reading the story, God is trying to convert the reader.

When Jonah arrives to the city, he walks one day into it and tells the people God is going to destroy the city. Upon hearing this message the people repent. The king hears about the people repenting then the king repents and makes a city wide declaration. It is as thought the people of Nineveh had already heard about this God Jonah is talking about and the people in the city repent right away. Jonah does not have to convince people about this God at all, just one day’s worth of work and the people get the message.

The people of God in the Hebrew bible and the followers of Jesus did not even get this message that quickly.

Then after the city repents, Jonah could have gone back home as the greatest evangelist of all time. This could have been the most effective and remarkable sermon of all time by getting the entire city of Nineveh - including the King - to repent. Instead of celebrating that all of these people repent and turn toward the very God Jonah says he follows, Jonah gets mad.

The name Jonah means ‘dove’. Among the many different thoughts on what this means, one of the thoughts is that Jonah knew the Bible so well that when he prayed he “cooed” like a dove.

He knew the Bible but he did not know God. Perhaps Jonah was never really following God to begin with.

Today, many of us know the Bible. We are convinced that we know what is a sin and who the bad guys are. We are confident that we are already converted to God. We are convinced that our sin is not as bad as the other person’s sin and that our repenting is somehow more complete than the one we think is not repenting. We are convinced that we have a pure soul.

So did Jonah.

And yet, the book of Jonah ends with a question - is it right for Jonah to be angry that destruction did not come upon the very people who repented and turned their heart? It has been said that if you look up on the hill you can still see Jonah sitting there. Sulking in his distain of the other. Convinced that he knows the Bible and he knows that he is right.

So many of us in the Christian tradition are like Jonah. We think that God is using us to convert others, when in fact God is using the other (the evil and insincere sinner) to convert us. If I leave the church because there is a sinner in the church and that I only will attend the church if all the sinners repent and have as pure of a soul as me, then I might as well join Jonah on that hill.

In his Church of one pure, angry and bitter soul.

What is the training of a Christian?

When I was younger I played soccer. I was above average, but no Messi. Becoming a soccer player required training: first I had to learn to dribble, then pass, then trap the ball, then pass with accuracy, then shoot, then learn to play with others, read the field, see the space, formations, timing, etc. This training took years to get decent at. Countless hours a week with coaches and others in practice and games.

And that was just something as simple as soccer.

Becoming a Christian requires more training than we are want to believe. (We forget that the disciple were with Jesus all the time for three years and they still did not get it.)

What is the training of a Christian?

John Cassian suggests that there is a training process that one engages to develop into a Christian. In the the fourth book of The Institutes he describes this process:

First it begins with the fear of the Lord that is the beginning of wisdom (Proverbs 9:10).  What this means is that one must come first to see they are in need. To put it another way, the fear of the Lord means that we admit that the current models of our lives are leading us poorly and we need a new model to guide our lives.

We cannot adopt a new model while holding onto our original model. We cannot worship two gods (Matthew 6:24). This is why we must renounce our first models/gods. We must repent. This repentance is total. It is a repentance of all the objects, values, teachings and ways of the original model. It is impossible to learn a new life while holding onto the “way we used to do it”. It would be like learning to play basketball while still using a soccer players mindset, skills, tools and techniques. It does not work that way.

When we renounce our previous ways/models we are like a beginner. And there is nothing more humbling than being a beginner at anything. Which may be why we do not repent or renounce totally. We hold on to some things so we are not tossed into beginner status. However, when we are able to renounce/repent our previous life, dreams and desires fall away and die.

As Jesus said that a seed must fall to the ground and die in order to grow (John 12:24). When our old ways and models have died, then we are able to receive what the new model has for us. This new model, Christ, trains us in virtues that produce the fruits of the spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

The person who produces such fruits of the spirit has an altogether new heart, what we might call the purity of heart. It is, as Jesus says, the pure in heart that see God (Matthew 5:8).

This training takes a lifetime and it is not easy. It breaks us down into being a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). In this training, you may see that this does not begin by training people to just be better humans. It does not start with behavior modification to be more loving or kind or forgiving. It understands that we are unable to be loving, kind and forgiving as long as we living out of a sense of self and without seeing that we are in need. Without seeing that we are in fact in need we will reserve our love, mercy and forgiveness for only those who “deserve” or “earn” or who are “worthy”. Until we repent and renounce this way of living, we will not see God.

We will just see ourselves as god.

Repent By Hugging a Tree

Every preacher I know has a sermon on repentance. The difference is in degrees. There are those with an intense repent message and those with a mild one. The intense message are those messages you and I see in popular culture. It is the guy on the street corner. It is the preacher in Footloose. It is the message that says you need to give up some action. The ol’ “We don’t smoke or chew or hang with those that do.” Stereotypically this is found in conservative circles, but it is not limited to it. There are liberal circles that have their own version of an intense repentance, but the knock on liberal circles is that the call to repent is more mild. So mild in fact that some might not even say that liberals call for repentance. This mild message often comes as a reaction to the more intense repentance message and sometimes is a message that is not preached often in liberal circles.

Of course these are broad stereotypes and there is much more nuance in the messages of repentance. However, if the call to repent is intense or mild, one thing seems to hold true across conservative and liberal circles. The call to repent focuses on substance, and less on form.

When repentance is focused on the substance of our lives, then we begin to think that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is, as Dallas Willard says, a gospel of sin management. When we think that repenting means that we need to turn away from one set of actions that lead us to hell or unhealth, and take on a new set of actions that we think will lead us to salvation or health, then we are in the realm of sin management. We can get a life coach or a trainer to help us change the substance of our lives. We don’t need any divine help to change the substance of our lives, individuals and human communities can do that. The Christian call to repent is not focused on the substance but on the form of our lives. For this we need divine help and cannot do this on our own. Of course, the paradox is that if we repent in form, the substance of our lives will change.

Psychologist at St. Mary's University in Halifax, Canada Dr. Kenneth Hill looked at 800+ people who were lost in Nova Scotia and found that most of them repented of their substance. What I mean is when a person was lost, they stopped walking in one direction, turned and walked in a different direction. This is often how repentance is thought of. We are going one way and we need to stop and then start going a different direction. But this way of repentance is just in substance, not in form.

https://nasar.org/education/hug-a-tree/

Dr. Hill found there were two people who were lost who repented not in substance, but in form. One of these "repenting-in-form” people was a 11 year old child. When this child was lost in the woods, they did not stop walking in one direction and begin walking in another direction. This child just stopped walking. This child repented from the act of walking altogether. This child repented in form.

This 11 year old was taught in school that if he was ever lost that he should “hug a tree and survive”. 

Of course, this runs counter to what we would think is the “correct” thing to do. You may think that to hug a tree is to be passive and that we really need to work to be found. We think that if we are not working for our salvation then we will not be saved, if we are not working to be found then we will not be found. We are not confident that anyone is coming to save us or even that we are lost to begin with, and so in our efforts to “save ourselves” we get more lost, walking in circles. 

Christianity says that we are to repent of our form. Specifically we are to hug the tree of the cross and in doing so we will be saved. This is the Good News of Jesus Christ! We are to repent (turn) from trying to save ourselves, we are to turn from our refusal to admit we are lost, we are to turn from the very form of our lives and hug the tree of the Cross.

We are to trust that there is One who is coming to find us, save us and bring us into salvation.

The Danger of Patriotism

Years ago in my undergraduate studies at St. Mary's University, one of my political science professors taught a year-long class that called for the class to set up a fictional land's government. We had elections for different offices and each class period we were given situations that this fictional nation faced. As a class we had to follow the laws we set up and come to some sort of way forward.

It was my favorite class. 

It was in this class that I was voted as the leader of the opposition party and the debates were often intense. As the opposition leader, I constantly feuded with the the majority ruling party's president. At the end of one intense discussion, our professor pulled the class together for a review of the "legislative activity" and set us up for the next day's events. It was in this review that our professor stated something that has stuck with me to this day. 

Photo by Jared Sluyter on Unsplash

The danger of patriotism is that it does not allow repentance of the sin of the nation it celebrates. 

My professor said this idea was from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and a simple Google search has pointed to Bonhoeffer's Ethics book as the source for this thought.

The greatness of a nation is in its ability to admit where it has gone wrong, how it is perpetuating sin, atoning for acts of injustice and reconciling with its failures. 

When we are unable to admit that our nation has and is participating in sin, then we have fallen prey to the danger of patriotism.