Lent 2019
THE ADDRESS BEFORE
COMPLINE
Week
Five: Jonah 4.6-end ‘The Lord gives and the Lord takes away: Easter
Living’
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 BOOK OF JONAH
6 The Lord
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.
7But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the
bush, so that it withered. 8When 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.’
9 But God
said to Jonah, ‘Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?’ And he said,
‘Yes, angry enough to die.’ 10Then the Lord 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. 11And should I not be concerned about
Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty
thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many
animals?’
We have been on quite a journey with Jonah these last weeks
of Lent: from his initial call and flight; his being caught up in the storms of
life and his distance from God; his call to God from the depths as he
remembered God’s presence in the Temple which prompted the redemptive scooping
up by the great fish which then spewed him onto the beach; his total resentment
at God’s merciful dealings with the city of Nineveh; and now we come to the end
of his story.
I have entitled this address, ‘The Lord gives and the Lord
takes away: Easter Living’ because it takes on the question that we raised last
week about what it means to live the new life of one born into something new.
In Jonah’s case that was being spat out onto the beach where he had another
chance and, for us, baptism where we appear to be given another chance.
However, what we learn from Jonah is that what God offers
us is not just another chance, as if life was all about a slightly harder try,
one last push and, with our moral force of character or mental resilience,
we’ll make it; with the implication that if we don’t we weren’t actually up to
it in the first place.
This plays to the contemporary fallacy that if you want something enough you’ll get it.
It takes life at the very highest level of elite sport or the creative arts and
applies it to everyone’s life. If what you want doesn’t happen is it your
fault? Didn’t you want it enough? This, spiritually, is a version of Pelagianism;
the notion that if you want salvation enough, and work hard enough for it, you
will be saved. Like Jonah and his booth. It strips the possibility of grace out
of our lives.
Jonah is trying to use his human effort to sort things out.
He builds himself a shelter, a booth, such as the Israelites would make, and
Jews today still do, for the feast of Succoth one of the great pilgrimage
festivals of Israel. And indeed Jonah – not the conventional pilgrim - is on
the move again. He is not someone who can count blessings, because he doesn’t
appear to know what a blessing, and from where that gift comes.
As the funeral sentence that joins St Paul’s first letter
to Timothy and the Book of Job puts it ‘We brought nothing into the world, and
we take nothing out. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the
name of the Lord’ (1 Timothy 6.7; Job 1.21b).
Jonah doesn’t buy that: he wants to be in control of a life that cannot be
controlled.
Last week’s passage concluded with Jonah leaving the city
of Nineveh. The same word used for his departure from Nineveh is the Hebrew
verb used for the Exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt. But, as Philip
Cary notes,
as
in the book of Exodus, getting out from the place of exile does not solve all
the problems, and indeed raises some questions of faith and unbelief more
sharply than before. Israel in exodus is not yet Israel in the promised land,
and that gives them much reason for complaint, fear, and distrust.[1]
We have seen this before in Jonah. He left the great fish
but even once he was out and free he was still living a resentment fuelled
life. And so it is here. Jonah is grousing about his shelter or lack of, still
self-justifying, still resenting God’s mercy.
Jonah helps us learn that the new life, the new promise,
the new hope of God isn’t a rehash of our old lives where we’re given a second
crack at the whip, but rather something entirely new. As St Paul says ‘so if
anyone is in Christ there is a new creation: everything old has passed away;
see everything has become new’ (2
Corinthians 5.17).
The genius of the book of Jonah is the ending, which is
really no ending at all. The book ends with a question, a rhetorical question
perhaps, but it is a question which is telling us that we have to go on and
seek the answer. We have to move beyond Jonah’s life –which is ours in so many
ways –beyond resentment and grumbling.
Before we return to that point, let’s just consider what is
in the question.
And
should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are
more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand
from their left, and also many animals?’ (Jonah
4.11)
The Lord is asking why he should not show mercy on the city
of Nineveh: a city of more 120,000 people, human beings, sons and daughters of
Adam, and save them not because of their membership of the people of Israel,
but of their membership of the human race. And we see even more, that God’s
mercy is for the whole of creation, because all creatures are part of that
mercy he gives to Nineveh. Cary points out that Nineveh abounds in livestock, just
as the Lord abounds in mercy.[2]
Human beings and livestock – dressed in sackcloth -
together await the judgement on the city. Livestock is subject to plague and
pestilence, as are human beings, but they are also beneficiaries of the
blessing of the Sabbath established in the Law of Israel, where he gives rest
to sons, daughters, maidservants and menservants, as well as ox and ass and all
the livestock belonging to the house (Deuteronomy
5.14; cf Exodus 20.10). Cary suggests that:
The
last words of the book of Jonah point toward this Sabbath rest for all, a time
set apart and holy when human beings may look upon the livestock and every
other creature that God has made and Adam named (Genesis 2.20) and laugh on behalf of the whole creation, which is
finally freed from vanity (Romans 8.20)
delivered from evil and rejoicing in the praise of the LORD.
Jesus’ three days in the tomb, the Sign of Jonah, break a
Sabbath rest. Indeed Holy Saturday, that apparently empty day between Good
Friday and Easter Day, is a Sabbath through which the whole of creation is made
new, renewed in Christ.
The Church Fathers speak of the Day of Resurrection as the
Eighth Day of creation: the ‘rest’ that God had on the seventh day, the first
Sabbath, was in order that the ongoing work of creation and recreation might be
resumed. The ‘light there be light’ of the first day is echoed with ‘the light
of Christ’ of the eighth day, the Day of Resurrection and the inauguration of
the New Creation.
Compline – completorium
– is an act of completion so that we lie ourselves down to the ‘little death’
of sleep, when the day the Lord gave is taken away through the night. In our
nightly sleep we die to the past ready to wake to the new, and declare with the
psalmist, ‘This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it’.
The ‘ending’ of Jonah is a beginning. Christ’s own death
was both an ending and a beginning. The ‘ending’ of Jonah is, for us, a pointer
to a grace-filled life in Christ.
This is the pattern of dying to self, that we might live to
God: Easter living. Life is never resolved, but is a constant negotiation of every
life, uncontrollably throws at us. We have journeyed this lent with Jonah in
growing in that understanding: thank you Jonah!
The call to an Easter life, a baptised life, life as a
Christian is an invitation to enter the unresolved-ness of the world with the
conviction that God’s grace, mercy, compassion and love sustains and holds that
world in being because ultimately as St Paul puts it, ‘it is no longer I who
live but Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians
2.7,8).
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.)
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