Jonah 3:10-4:11
When God saw what the people of Nineveh
did, how they turned from their evil ways, God had a change of heart about the
calamity that God had said God would bring upon them; and did not do it.
But this was very displeasing to Jonah,
and he became angry. He prayed to God and said, “O God! Is not this what I said
while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the
beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger,
and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O
God, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
And God said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
Then Jonah went out of the city and sat
down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in
the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city. The Holy One, our God,
appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head,
to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But
when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so
that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the
sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might
die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah,
“Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And Jonah said, “Yes, angry
enough to die.” Then God said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you
did not labour and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and
perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about 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 many animals?”
Matthew 20:1-16
Jesus said, “For the realm of heaven is
like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire labourers for his
vineyard. After agreeing with the labourers for the usual daily wage, he sent
them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others
standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the
vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out
again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five
o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why
are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has
hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came,
the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the labourers and give
them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When
those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily
wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each
of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they
grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and
you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the
scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no
wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? Take what belongs to
you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not
allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because
I am generous?’ So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
Sermon “Want Some Cheese With That Whine?”
Will you pray with me? God of justice
and love, open our hearts to all your people. Give us grace to see others as
you do, worthy of your blessing and healing; equally your children with us. May
we see with your eyes, the eyes of love and comfort and caring. In the name of
your child Jesus the Christ, amen.
As many of you know, I grew up with four
sisters, and we usually got along pretty well—still do. But there were sometimes
difficulties, of course—with five siblings, it would have been a miracle
otherwise! One issue, hard as it may be to believe for those of you who grew up
in the 80s and 90s, was ear piercing. In the late 60s and early 70s, “nice
girls” didn’t often get their ears pierced. So I remember that my older sisters
had to wait until they were in university to get their ears pierced. By the
time my sister and I were asking to have our ears pierced (and this was before
any other kind of piercing was mainstream!), it was considered OK, if a bit
wild, for teenage girls to have their ears pierced, So I had mine pierced when
I was 14. My mom, who believed that the doctor should do such things, figured
she might as well take my younger sister in at the same time to get hers done--she
was 11. Well, there was a bit of family ruckus, as you can imagine. My older sisters
thought it unfair that we younger ones got to have our ears pierced earlier than
they had; on the other hand, I thought it was unfair that my younger sister got to have
them done at the same time I did.
It’s one of the most common whines of
childhood, isn’t it? “That’s not fair!” And I don’t know about you, but my
mother’s response often was, “Life is not fair.”
But life is about more than
fairness—it’s also about justice. And there’s a difference between what is fair
and what is just. It might make sense to think the two belong together but they
simply don’t. Sometimes there is fairness in justice and sometimes there is
not. There’s a saying the Canadian Mental Health Association uses that I like:
“To treat every one the same you must treat some people differently.” In order
for everyone to get the level of care they need, some people get more
attention—because they need it—than others. In the end, everyone has been given
the care they most need—which is justice—even though some have gotten more care
than others—which is not “fair.”
It’s somehow a human trait, though, to
see only what we have received—or not—and make that the measure of fairness. We
feel we deserve whatever grace has been given us but we are often—if not
usually—unhappy to see it given to others. As a scholar put it, "It is
simply a fact that people regularly understand and appreciate God's strange
calculus of grace as applied to themselves but fear and resent seeing it
applied to others." Those workers in the vineyard resented the latecomers
earning as much as they did and Jonah resented the Ninevites their repentance.
Jonah was, in fact, that whining kid we
all carry in some part of ourselves, tucked back in some corner of our minds or
hearts. Now, this section of the book of Jonah may be surprising to you—it’s
not what we think of when we think of Jonah. We’re coming in at the end of
Jonah’s story in this reading. We have all heard the fist part of the story, I
think—God calls Jonah to go to Nineveh to preach repentance to them, and he
refuses. Jonah goes in the exact opposite direction, in fact, heading to
Tarshish, and God sends a storm, which threatens to sink the boat, so the
sailors, at Jonah’s suggestion, throw him overboard. He’s swallowed by a
“leviathan,” generally understood to be a whale, which dumps him, after three days,
on the shore near Nineveh. So Jonah gives in and goes to Nineveh, preaching
repentance. And, as he had predicted, the Ninevites listen and repent.
This annoys—angers, actually—Jonah. And
this is where the part of the story we read today comes in. He’s angry
because—get this—the people listened to him and repented, and so they will not
be destroyed.
Does this make any sense to you? Why in
the world would it make Jonah angry to know some people repented, especially
since he was the one telling them to do so?
Well, here’s a bit more information.
Nineveh was understood to be a cesspool of evil, the worst possible place to
be—wicked and dastardly, everything awful you can think of. Jonah is disgusted
by the people of Nineveh, and feels they are too evil to ever repent and be
saved from destruction. He doesn’t want to go there—we are not told why. Maybe
he felt they were too corrupt, too set in the ways of wickedness, that they
would never repent, that he would be wasting his time going there. Or maybe he
had more faith—he knew that they would repent and change their ways—and then he
would be responsible for them, he would have to accept them. He would have to
overlook, or accept, their past, and be cordial to them and share fellowship
with them---he would have to see them as equals. And he did not want to do
that. And so Jonah loved the plant that God sent more than he loved the
Ninevites; and he was angry unto death that they had actually repented, were
wearing sackcloth and ashes, and were mourning their sins. Jonah had been
successful and yet he regretted it. He did not want them to repent and be
saved—did not want them to have the same reward that he had. Jonah resented the
grace they were given.
Sounds like those workers in the
vineyard that Jesus tells us about in the reading from Matthew, doesn’t it? The
ones who had worked all day got the same pay as the ones who only worked an
hour or two. The Ninevites, who had just repented, got the same reward as
Jonah, who had been faithful to God all his life. And so Jonah was stamping his foot, crying,
“That’s not fair!”
But God is not about what is fair. God
is about justice. God’s justice gives grace to all, to everyone, whether we
humans think the recipients deserve it or not.
And my friends, this should be
reassuring to us, not a source of frustration or resentment. Because if God
gives grace to others—whose faults we can clearly see, even if we think God
can’t see those faults, or chooses to ignore them—then surely God will give
grace to us. We know our own faults, even if we don’t like to admit them. If
God gives grace to all people, then we are included in that all.
It’s tough to realise people who have
hurt us or others, people we think of as irredeemable, being loved by God just
as much as God loves us. People who tell us we are less than, people who reject
us, people who hurt the ones we love—and yet, God loves them, gives them grace
as much as God gives us grace.
If we can learn to see this, too, as a
gift, then we will be much closer to God’s realm, to what should be. Every one
of God’s children gets what she or he needs—not what she or he deserves—including
us. That, my friends, is grace. That is God’s gracious love for each of us.
In all God’s many names, amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment