Pursued by God: Jonah 1:1-17; 3:1-10 - 25th Sunday after Pentecost

After college, I waited nearly a year to receive my first offer for a full-time job. It was 2003, and the job market was not good. Many of my classmates had job offers waiting for them right after graduation, only for the companies to rescind them due to mergers, acquisitions, or downsizing.

I had been on 38 job interviews, and if I received a response from those companies at all, the letters read something like this: “We regret to inform you that we have narrowed our search to candidates who are more qualified to meet our needs. We wish you good luck on all your future endeavors.”

I immediately vented my anger and frustration by tearing those letters to shreds or hurling them into the trash as hard as my arm could throw them. 

I’m sure you know how discouraging it is to work hard and invest your life intro something, only to be told that you’re not good enough. But that’s life. 

God, on the other hand, is nothing like your typical HR department.

God constantly calls the most unqualified people to do his work. Those people realize how unqualified they are, which is why so many of them hesitate, question, and even resist. Moses, for example, flat-out refuses God’s call and begs God to choose someone else. 

But no one rejects God’s call like Jonah.

Blue Whale by Christopher Michel on flickr. CC BY 2.0

Jonah’s refusal had nothing to do with doubts about his abilities. Jonah rejected to the call itself, which was to travel to the city of Nineveh and call the people to repent of their wickedness. Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian Empire, which had just conquered Northern Kingdom of Israel and taken its citizens into exile. 

For a Jew like Jonah, there was no one earth he hated more than the people of Nineveh.

Keep in mind that there was no such thing as freedom of speech back then. To speak anything against the empire, the emperor, or its gods was a capital offense. 

So, Jonah immediately boards a merchant vessel bound for Tarshish, which was a 2,500-mile journey across the Mediterranean Sea to the southern tip of present-day Spain. 

Soon, they sail into a storm which began breaking the boat apart. Jonah confessed to the crew that he was running from God and begged them to throw him overboard. He is then swallowed by a large fish and he spends three days and three nights in its belly. 

Clearly, Jonah did not want to go to Nineveh. So, why was God so adamant about sending him on this mission? Wouldn’t it have been easier to send someone else? And why did God care so much about the Ninevites? Weren’t they violent, idolatrous scoundrels?

It turns out that Jonah is going to learn, together with all the people of Nineveh, who God truly is.
When Jonah finally arrives at Nineveh, he does the absolute minimum of what God required of him. He says, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” Astoundingly, the people believed God and repented of their wickedness. God relented from destroying the city, and Jonah is furious. After all he’d been through, he wanted to see the Ninevites getting what he felt they had coming to them. The fact that Jonah succeeded in his mission was, to him, the biggest insult of all. 

Jonah failed to realize that God loved the Ninevites, despite their wickedness. The bitterness we witness in Jonah is something that’s common to all of us when we are confronted with the fact that God loves the people we despise.

We say, “love the sinner, hate the sin.” In reality, we hate only sin when other people do it or when it hurts us. We don’t love sinners as much as we love our moral superiority over them because they are guilty of things we’ve never done (or think we’d never do). 

This recent election cycle has exposed just how much we fear and hate our fellow Americans. I fear we went to the polls to elect the person we believe will deliver us from our enemies: those heartless reds or those godless blues. We are so convinced of the depravity of “those people” that we fail to see our own.
In the end, you can’t love God with a hard heart. In 1 John 3:15, it is written, “all who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them."

Ultimately, you don’t deserve God’s love any more than those people. In fact, you deserve it less if you believe you deserve it more.

As strange as it sounds, Jonah needed repentance more than the Ninevites did, and everything that happened to Jonah served to teach him that you cannot comprehend God’s love for you without comprehending God’s love for them. And you’re not going to learn this if you stay among those you love easily. As a disciple of Jesus, you should expect him to send you to love and serve people who are unloving, unlovely, and unlovable; people who are offensive to your religion, to your politics, to your eyes, ears, and nose, and offensive to your soul. God may call you to give your money or time to someone you don’t think deserves it. God may call you to forgive someone, all the while you know they’re not sorry for what they’ve done. God may call you to soften your heart that this election season has hardened, call off your dogs, bury the hatchet. I’m not saying “abandon your principles;” just to remember that this is God’s world, that we are all God’s people, and that only Christ is King.Why?

Because you can’t love God with a hard heart. God will remain a mystery to you until you participate in God’s love for the people you don’t like. 

You probably won’t see the instant results Jonah does, but genuine Christian love plants seeds of righteousness which will bear fruit in due time. If your heart is still hard, don’t be surprised if God pursues you like he pursued journey in order to break it, so that you will know who your God truly is.