2023.11.12 | When God Sends a Worm
When God Sends a Worm
Jonah 3:1–4:11
Preached by
Rev. Dr. Marvin Lance Wiser
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, CA
12 November 2023
Have y’all heard the story about the lobster diver, Michael Packard, in Massachusetts? Well, it’s a whale of a tale! Michael Packard, a commercial lobster diver from Cape Cod was out in the Atlantic in 2021 and suddenly found himself enclosed within the mouth of none other than a humpback whale. The story was so riveting that filmmakers have turned it into a feature-length documentary, which was presented at the Cape Ann Film Festival this year. Now, after about 30 seconds of struggle and panic the whale did spew Michael out, but with a dislocated knee. In thirty seconds his life changed. He made it back to Provincetown though. Go to inthewhale.com to see more.
While the film’s tagline is “the greatest fish story ever told,” today, we heard one even greater. And yes, I think as of 2021, we can safely state that yes this could have actually happened–at least for 30 seconds– perhaps not for three days.
Jonah in English, Yonah in Hebrew, Yunus in Arabic, and Jonás in Spanish, is one of my favorite books of the Bible. Jonah is a decentering text, a narrative challenging of worldview. Jonah is the only prophet tasked with the heavy burden of not just prophesying to his own people, but also to non-Israelites and non-Judahites. God asks him to say a word directly to empire. What would you say given such an opportunity?
Jonah is the only one of Judaism’s prophets from the Book of the Twelve, or of the Minor Prophets as known in Christian tradition, to be named in the Qur’an. As such, the prophet enjoys a place of importance among the three faith traditions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
The Mosque of Yunus, a former church located in modern-day Mosul, Iraq, which used to be Nineveh, was where the tomb of the prophet is located according to tradition. It was a popular pilgrimage site and a symbol of unity to Jews, Christians, and Muslims across the Middle East. In 2014, however, it was destroyed by ISIS. So unfortunately, it can no longer be visited as it has been for centuries. However, what was not destroyed was the message of Yonah. Let’s get to the heart of that message together this morning.
First, a little context. In our Texts and Contexts Bible Study last month in examining migration and the Bible, we explored the first ancient Near Eastern empire, the Neo-Assyrians and their activities throughout the Levant, turning kingdoms and city-states into vassals, puppet states, and provinces, and the carnage that was left in empire’s wake. We saw the Judean Lachish reliefs, and archaeological excavations of horrific proportions during Sargon II’s reign and the ultimate fall of Israel and its capital Samaria during the late 8th century B.C.E. I’ll spare you the visuals, but I think we have enough mental imagery of the pillaging of empire to imagine it.
It was of the downfall of this great empire that the prophet Nahum, also part of the Book of the Twelve, or the Minor Prophets, celebrates. Nahum emphasizes “a jealous and avenging God; the Lord is avenging and wrathful; the Lord takes vengeance on his adversaries and prolongs it against his enemies. The Lord is slow to anger but great in power, and the Lord will by no means clear the guilty” (Nah 1:2-3). This is the aspect of the LORD God that Jonah very much wishes to see. But to his great displeasure he is met with a god embodying the other side of the ancient divine attribute credo from Exodus, “a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment” (Jn 4:2).
We are left with the question: Is the LORD God a god of hostility or hospitality? What say we?
There are as many interpretations of Jonah as there are fish in the sea. First of all, in the Hebrew the “fish” that swallowed Jonah vacillates between male and female in the text. Jewish Midrash of Jonah accounts for this by explaining that the first fish was male, in whose belly there was too much room to turn a stubborn Jonah contrite. The second fish that came along to take Jonah was a pregnant female, with a much less spacious interior in order to coerce a turning of the heart of the prophet. Along these lines, many interpret his prayer in the belly of the whale in the chapter that preceded our reading this morning as a prayer of ultimate repentance, displaying a contrite heart, that invites God to open up the mouth of the whale for safe passage for him. Others, as with myself, read it as an overly pious rant that in true Jonah fashion is all about me, me, me: “I’m not like those idol worshiping sailors,” which actually makes the fish vomit him up out of disgust. Another animal that makes less of a splash will have to try to change Jonah.
Medieval rabbi Rashi’s interpretation of the prophet is that he protests and flees God in order to avoid saving Nineveh as Assyria will inevitably become the rod that will discipline his people within the incomprehensible divine plan. Hospitality is perceived as unattainable. The self-jeopardizing consequences of loving the stranger are too great.
Modern historical linguistics suggests that the book of Jonah was probably written much after Nahum and the fall of Assyria, and so I think then that this text is an imaginative exercise in the what if. The intended audience of the book already knew what the rod that was Assyria had done to the Israelites. The fall of Nineveh, occurring more than a century after the fall of Israel in 612 BCE, too was already a cultural memory. Assyria was the razor that shaved them of dignity and autonomy. Sargon II forcibly deported more than 27,000 people from the area and Assyrian armies killed many more. This is what the readers would have also remembered from stories of their grandparents. No wonder Jonah hopped in a boat and paid its entire passage to hightail in the opposite direction. God, have you lost your mind? Asking me to go to Nineveh? Do you remember what they did to my people, your people?
Well, as it did with Michael Packard, the whale got his attention–at least for a little while. And so after the intermission our play picks back up with another word of the LORD coming to Jonah. “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” What this message was, we are not told. What happens though as the story is written is that Jonah goes into the city center and exclaims, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” The word in Hebrew for “overthrown” here is hāpak. And while its semantic domain is wide enough for overthrown, it can also simply mean to be changed. From the text it is evident that Jonah wanted God to overthrow the city, but God, God wanted to change it.
Here’s the catch: news of Jonah’s proclamation of doom reaches the king of Nineveh and he issues an edict that no person nor animal should eat anything for forty days, for who knows, “maybe God will relent and change God’s mind?” Well, God did see how the city of Nineveh changed and so God changed too. Jonah’s begrudging prophecy seems to have actually worked.
But Jonah is greatly displeased with this, for deep down he knew that God was ultimately a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment, despite the picture that his predecessor Nahum painted of God. Jonah is peeved. So indignant, Jonah does not proclaim mercy from the city square, rather he exits the city, not disclosing to its inhabitants God’s relenting. And so we are to deduce that the Ninevites continue their fast uninterrupted. They are without food, repentant, sitting in ashes. Waiting, however undeservingly so, for either wrath or deliverance.
Though Jonah doesn’t return the direction that he entered the city, west, the text tells us that he went east, so he continued through the city, with no intention of returning just yet. It seems he’s going to be there for some time, he even constructs a booth from himself. It would appear that Jonah’s intention here is dead set on witnessing the destruction of this people. “If God isn’t going to bring a calamity, then I’ll sit down here in my booth and watch them starve.” Recall the king’s edict?
Righteous anger. Politicized pain. Weaponized grief. Generational trauma.
In Jewish praxis, the booth or sukkah came to be a symbol of not keeping strangers out, but of welcoming strangers in and becoming a host during Sukkot or the Festival of Booths, emulating the hospitality of Abraham and Sarah. The sukkah is constructed in such a way as to allow the light of the sun and stars in, to be in harmony with nature and others. I have sweet memories of being hosted in sukkahs in Boston. Jonah in his indignation and isolation inverts this.
Five weeks ago on October 7th, Israeli’s endured the greatest attack in half a century. 1,400 persons were killed, thousands more injured, and more than 200 taken as hostages by Hamas. On the 50th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, no less. Our hearts still writhe in pain with the victims. In Jewish tradition, the book of Jonah is read on the evening of Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement, one of the high holy days, the culmination of the Ten Days of Teshuvah, return or repentance, mercy and forgiveness.
Since October 7th, the military retaliation known as Operation Iron Swords has claimed more than 11,000 lives in the ghetto of Gaza and wounded tens of thousands, nearly half children. The U.N. Secretary General states that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” And without adequate food, water, and fuel an entire displaced population group of more than 2 million finds itself forced to the verge of catastrophe.
The newly inaugurated Arab Orthodox Cultural and Social Center in Gaza, which houses most of the Christian activities in Gaza was also bombed this past week, as was the Greek Orthodox church, killing many. Jonah reminds us that God is in the rubble, no matter the side.
Jonah. Jonah. Jonah. Jonah constructed a booth to shield himself from outside forces of nature and to have a comfortable vantage point to witness the vanquishment of his enemies. Yet, the sun shone strongly and its infrared radiation gave him discomfort. The water molecules of his body vibrated with intensity. God took pity upon him and caused to grow a qiqayon plant to give him more shade. I imagine Jonah under the tree in the photo I took in Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah last week; the hoodoos representing peoples as they do in Navajo lore. It’s on the cover of your bulletin this morning. Then along came a worm, the other often overlooked animal in this play. I mean come on, how could a worm not be overshadowed by a whale, right? The worm though, plays just as important a role as the whale in this story, if not more. Biblical authors sometimes use animals to show just how near-sighted seers or prophets can be. You might remember Balaam and his smart ass? This little worm proves to be Jonah’s foil. It does what the whale could not.
“It is better for me to die than to live!” Righteous anger. Politicized pain. Weaponized grief. Generational trauma. Jonah would have preferred to have riffed off of Nahum’s monologue: “Woe to the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder (Nah 3:1)” But God demands dialogue.
And you know, that’s not what we find here. What is lacking in Jonah is dialogue with others. From the time he is in Nineveh there are no authentic exchanges, just shouting out doom and destruction–and then turning inward. Dialogue, not destruction, is what pushes the dial toward restorative justice, which is a prerequisite for peace.
Shortly after the attacks, my former neighbor in Boston, a rabbi, reached out to me and we have been conversing weekly. He has been sharing with me his arduous work as a peacemaker and lifting up Jewish-Muslim and Arab-Israeli cooperation. Now is the time for solidarity in action, not solitary festering of righteous anger, but a transformational change toward compassionate presence, like that of my friend Palestinian Aziz Abu Sarah whose brother was murdered by Israeli soldiers, and who once sought vengeance, but now works tirelessly for peace.
I can’t imagine what it must have been like for Jonah to have been called to deliver a word from God to the nations, to his enemies. Only those like Aziz and those who make up the Parents Circle-Families Forum, a grassroots organization of Palestinian and Israeli families who have lost immediate family members due to the Israel-Palestine conflict, can truly relate. The first meeting of the The Parents Circle-Families Forum between bereaved Palestinians from Gaza and Israeli families took place 25 years ago in 1998. Numbering over 600 families, they operate under the principle that a process of reconciliation is a prerequisite for achieving a sustained peace. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God” (Mt:5:9).
There are only two books of the Bible that end in a question:
Nahum 3:19 - Nothing can heal you; your wound is fatal. All who hear the news about you clap their hands at your fall, for who has not felt your endless cruelty? And Jonah 4:11 - “And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand innocent people—and also many animals?”
In the question that ends Nahum, the innocence of the victims is in view. Perhaps this is the comfort that Nahum seeks to bestow upon its readers, that justice is best served cold. The question that ends Jonah however, is Nahum overturned; it has in view also the innocence of victims, though it is not the innocence of the author’s ethnic group, but the innocence of others, the inhabitants of Nineveh, that great city that had once inflicted so much pain. Jonah urges us to extend compassion from the familiar to the foreign.
God in the last line refers to the Ninevites as ʼadam or humans, as from ʼadamah or humus, earth. Another word for people could have been easily used here, however, the author of Jonah is intentionally trying to establish a common humanity for both the Israelites and the Ninevites, rooted in God’s good creation.
And so the book of Jonah ends with a question. A question that moves the story beyond the confines of itself. With all great circular books of history, continuous spines assure readers that the work is never finished. We must answer the question in the here and now. The author of this literary masterpiece urges us to move from clan to cosmos, but we have to act. We, like God, must choose between hostility and hospitality, between retributive justice and restorative justice. Destroying a people is never a solution, rather dialogue and changing hearts and minds–our own included is our calling. And remember the last line, God’s concern extends well beyond humans solely. So, pay attention when God sends a worm. Amen.