OPENING PRAYER
Blessed
are you, sovereign God of all,
to
you be glory and praise for ever.
You
are our light and our salvation.
From
the deep waters of death
you
have raised your Son to life in triumph.
Grant
that all who have been born anew by water and the Spirit,
may
daily be renewed in your image,
walk
by the light of faith,
and
serve you in newness of life;
through
your anointed Son, Jesus Christ,
to
whom with you and the Holy Spirit
we
lift our voices of praise.
Blessed
be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
All Blessed be God for ever.
Almighty and everlasting God,
you hate nothing that you have
made
and forgive the sins of all
those who are penitent:
create and make in us new and
contrite hearts
that we, worthily lamenting
our sins
and acknowledging our
wretchedness,
may receive from you, the God
of all mercy,
perfect remission and
forgiveness;
through Jesus Christ your Son
our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with
you,
in the unity of the Holy
Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
All Amen.
THE ADDRESS BEFORE
COMPLINE
Week Two: Jonah 1.4-17 ‘Caught up in the storms’
4 But the
Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the
sea that the ship threatened to break up. 5Then the mariners were afraid, and
each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea,
to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the
ship and had lain down, and was fast asleep. 6The captain came and said to him,
‘What are you doing sound asleep? Get up, call on your god! Perhaps the god
will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.’
7 The
sailors said to one another, ‘Come, let us cast lots, so that we may know on
whose account this calamity has come upon us.’ So they cast lots, and the lot
fell on Jonah. 8Then they said to him, ‘Tell us why this calamity has come upon
us. What is your occupation? Where do you come from? What is your country? And
of what people are you?’ 9‘I am a Hebrew,’ he replied. ‘I worship the Lord, the
God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.’ 10Then the men were even
more afraid, and said to him, ‘What is this that you have done!’ For the men
knew that he was fleeing from the presence of the Lord, because he had told
them so.
11 Then
they said to him, ‘What shall we do to you, that the sea may quieten down for
us?’ For the sea was growing more and more tempestuous. 12He said to them,
‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea; then the sea will quieten down for you;
for I know it is because of me that this great storm has come upon you.’
13Nevertheless, the men rowed hard to bring the ship back to land, but they
could not, for the sea grew more and more stormy against them. 14Then they
cried out to the Lord, ‘Please, O Lord, we pray, do not let us perish on account
of this man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O Lord,
have done as it pleased you.’ 15So they picked Jonah up and threw him into the
sea; and the sea ceased from its raging. 16Then the men feared the Lord even
more, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.
17 But the
Lord provided a large fish to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of
the fish for three days and three nights.
In the story of Jonah, attention, almost inevitably, turns
to the eye catching character of the ‘large fish’ often thought of as a whale.
In some ways the great fish becomes a bit of a distraction. It sounds so
unlikely (although recent press reports tell of Rainer Schimpf, a diver
observing whales off the coast of South Africa, who was caught in the jaws of a
blue whale, and thankfully spent less than three minutes in its jaws and not
three days in its belly). I don’t want
in any way to dismiss the significance of the great fish, for it is the at the
heart of Jonah’s story for Christ and for Christians, but I will hold him over
to next Thursday.
The stormy sea is representative in Hebrew thought, and
indeed our own too, of unleashed forces of chaos, turbulence and despair. The
creation itself is inaugurated over, in and through the primeval waters and (Genesis 1.1-3). In our mother’s womb
each of us was carried in the waters of amniotic fluid, and it was when the
‘waters broke’ that the moment for our birth came.
This storm is the birth pangs, as it were, of Jonah’s adult
life. Just as Nicodemus points out to Jesus one cannot enter a second time into
the mother’s and be born (John 3.4),
this is not a literal thing, except in the sense that Jesus describes of the
need to be born from above (John 3.3). The dominant question for
Jonah and for us, through the book of Jonah, is, ‘what will life look life for
those born again in Christ’? But for now let us stay in the stormy waters.
This is where the story of Jonah has a clear narrative, but
is figurative too. It was, we might say, that the storm, whilst unleashed by
the Lord (v1), is of Jonah’s making. But this is not a personal experience.
When we are in a storm in life others are drawn into it too. And those mariners
sailing from Joppa to Tarshish became implicated in his flight from the call
and commission of God, which we explored last week in Jonah 1.1-3.
The mariners could not understand this storm. They sensed
there was a divine drive to it, and in some ways they were right, but they
defaulted to an instinct in humanity to create the scapegoat to placate and
ease their own turmoil.
The mariners hit the nail on the head about how each of us
feels in a storm: we fear that we will perish, be blotted out (v6). It is out
of that fear that they act, and cast Jonah overboard, dressing up their
desperation as a religious act, attributing all this to God. Jonah colludes
with that and invites the act of throwing him overboard.
The search for the scapegoat does not achieve a resolution
but only a temporary truce. Scapegoats can be guilty of course: Jonah was.
Likewise, the death of toppling, arrest and execution Saddam Hussein did not
bring a peaceful Iraq; the assassination of Osama bin Laden has not resolved
Islamist terror; deposing Theresa May as Prime Minster will not lead to a
smooth, uncontroversial Brexit.
But creating a scapegoat makes us feel better. That’s why
we do it. And we can justify it. As the mariners reckoned this was the only way
to calm the storm, and they even ask in advance to be excused for their
murderous act, ‘Please, O Lord we pray, do not let us perish on account of this
man’s life. Do not make us guilty of innocent blood; for you, O Lord, have done
as it pleased you’ (v14).
The great mystery of redemption is that the Innocent Victim
is turned scapegoat, and the guilt he bears is not his own, but is ours. And
whatever the justice we feel better for it: as Caiaphas said in the trial of
Jesus, ‘it is better for one man to die for the people than to have the whole
nation destroyed’ (John 11.50).
One lesson then from the book of Jonah is that scripture
exposes our innate desire to blame and point the finger, whether at God or
other people. Like Jonah we are to take responsibility for our own decisions
and their consequences. Jonah’s rejection of his call and commission and his
flight away from God have thrown him into turmoil and a storm of his own
making.
This is not to point the finger further at Jonah to absolve
myself, or any of us. Indeed part of the move to confession and repentance is
to acknowledge precisely our disposition to flee from the mercies of God. The
irony, or beauty of this passage of Jonah is that it is the Lord who provides
the great fish to swallow up Jonah (v17) which itself is a mercy.
So Jonah is a person caught up in storms. He has been
fighting against himself and against his God: it is that sort of fracture in a
life that leads to depression, turmoil and withdrawal. Jonah is in denial and
that denial leads to self-blame.
Before his ejection Jonah famously sleeps on the boat, down
in the hold. Jonah’s first strategy is to withdraw: Jonah’s sleep is Jonah shut
down, closed in on himself. This is where the parallels with Jesus, the
Innocent Victim, continue. Jesus sleeps on a boat in the midst of a storm and
his disciples call out to him that they are on the brink of perishing. The
disciples, experienced mariners themselves, inadvertently, perhaps, call upon
their God: ‘Master, save us for we are perishing’ (Matthew 8.25; Mark 4.38; Luke 8.24). But Jesus is asleep.
But is this the sleep of withdrawal in the storms? I want
to suggest that is the reverse of Jonah’s hibernation in the face of the world
and life. Jesus’ sleep embodies peace in the midst of the storm. This peace is
the space into which we are invited as the storms swirl around us: this is the
peace of Jesus Christ, the Innocent Victim, to whom we cry when we are
perishing in the storms that buffet and assail us in our lives. As the antiphon
to the Nunc Dimittis at Compline puts
it: ‘Preserve us, O Lord while waking, and guard us while sleeping, that awake
we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace’.
So two points to ponder as we approach Compline:
1.
What are the storms in
my life at the moment?
2.
Where do I seek solace
in times of depression, turmoil or withdrawal?
I
weave a silence onto my lips:
Calm
me, O Lord, as You stilled the storm.
Still
me, O Lord, keep me from harm.
Let
all the tumult within me cease.
Enfold
me, Lord, in Your peace.
Amen. A Celtic Prayer
Recommended further reading:
Paul Murray, A
Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment. Dublin: Columba
Press, 2002.
(A limited number of copies are available to borrow, or buy
second hand, from the Minster.)
©
Andrew Bishop, 2019
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