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Jonah 4 + Luke 19:41-44
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
All that he can see is this false narrative that keeps telling him that he can take his pain and he can transfer it to someone else. And that when he does, it will make him feel better, but that is not true. Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome to church today. My name is Jeremy. I am part of the team here at Commons, and this is Palm Sunday. So wherever you are joining us from, we are so grateful that you are.
Speaker 1:At the best of times, we try not to take it for granted that you gather and you worship with us, but particularly during this time, the fact that you have joined with us from couches and tables and living rooms and iPhones. We are just so incredibly thankful for all of the ways that this community continues to come together and support each other during this time, particularly at this point during Holy Week. It's an interesting time to be hit with this moment in history. Our in person gatherings were shut down mid Lent, and that just happens to be a season of lament and loss. And certainly, I think all of us are familiar with that over these past days.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, Lent is about rhythm and ritual. And so when we were forced to move from our in person gatherings to online, we talked a lot as a team about whether we should stick with what we had planned or whether we should just sort of abandon everything that we were working towards and do something completely different. And, of course, over these past few weeks, we've had to adapt. We've had to adjust. But we continue to do that with a sense of normalcy as much as we could.
Speaker 1:Because our sense was that sticking with Lent and embracing the season that we were in, leaning into all of that planning and tradition could actually become a bit of welcome stability in the midst of everything that was unstable around us. And so in the midst of crisis, there is something important about reminding ourselves that we are surrounded still by a much bigger story. But part of Lent is also reminding ourselves that there are seasons of loss followed by seasons of resurrection and celebration. And even though we're not quite yet there in the world, we are still very much in the midst of loss right now. Just as we have chosen to do with Lent, we intend now as a community to stick with tradition to celebrate well.
Speaker 1:Because today begins Holy Week. And Holy Week begins our movement toward resurrection, and resurrection might not feel like it has found us just yet. But maybe this is part of why we need our stories now more than ever. And so today, we will rehearse Jesus' entry into Jerusalem. On Maundy Thursday, we will journey together through the stations of the cross.
Speaker 1:On Good Friday, we will gather here again online to mourn the death of Jesus. And then next Sunday, resurrection Sunday, we will come together in our homes to celebrate the return of light and love and life to the world. This reminder that nothing can stop good news, not even this distance between us. But before we jump into the sermon today, I do want to give you a heads up that next week on Easter Sunday, we are going to celebrate. One of the ways that we are going to celebrate together is to share the Eucharist.
Speaker 1:Every year on Easter Sunday, we serve each other at the table of Christ. And last year, we did that in two locations at our two parishes. This year, we are going to do that in the same thing in hundreds of homes across our city and beyond. And so we'll have some more information about that this week. But however you will be watching next Sunday, we want to encourage you to prepare the elements for that moment.
Speaker 1:To gather some bread and wine, whatever you have to represent the table of Christ. But together, we are going to bless our meal, and we are going to share together in that celebration. So please keep that in mind this week as you prepare yourself for resurrection and Easter. Now today, we're gonna move toward the story of Palm Sunday, but we are gonna do that through the lens of this last chapter in the Jonah story. We have a lot of ground to cover today, so we're not gonna do our normal recap that we usually do.
Speaker 1:But, of course, sermon from last week is available on YouTube where you are watching this right now. So if you missed it, you can click on that after and you can catch up that way. Let's pray. And then today, we will find our way from Jonah and Nineveh to Jerusalem together. God of all grace, may we recognize you when you draw near to us.
Speaker 1:May we recognize what truly brings light and love into our world. And we celebrate the coming of the one who is peace here among us. And for those times that we have, all of us, missed your coming. Perhaps we were looking the other way or we were looking for something else. Perhaps we were too clouded by images of strength and power and glory or revenge to understand what it was that you truly offered to us.
Speaker 1:Would you forgive us for the ways that we have broken your heart? Would you heal and repair and redeem our imagination of you? Would your spirit begin within us to recalibrate, to forgive, to bring your grace even into our worst moments? All so that we might begin to see you more clearly, Then to join you in your story of kingdom. We might learn to sing with all creation.
Speaker 1:Hosanna in the highest to the one who saves us now. In the strong name of the one whose resurrection we await. We pray. Amen. Okay.
Speaker 1:Today, it is Jonah and Palm Sunday. But today, we are going to need to talk about bad prayers, doing well, enjoying our anger, and finding salvation from it. But let's back up to that moment from last week where God responds to Nineveh and Jonah responds to God. This is starting in Jonah chapter four verse one. But to Jonah, this grace seemed very wrong and he became angry.
Speaker 1:And he prayed to the Lord, isn't this what I said, Lord? When I was at home, this is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew even then that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in love. A God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take my life away from me for it is better for me to die than to live.
Speaker 1:Now couple things here. Jonah continues to be sort of the height of drama in this story, and his response here is essentially, if you're going to let them live, you might as well kill me. And that probably feels at least a little overboard to us. I think it's meant to. Because, again, this is part of the humor of the storyteller, the way that he is using the narrative here.
Speaker 1:Because Jonah expresses for us the emotions that we probably know better than to say out loud. That said, that doesn't mean that you or I don't know what he's feeling in this moment. Because all of us, we have found ourselves in those moments where things don't feel fair. And we'll find our way back to this. Because even though Jonah's response is meant to be exaggerated and overblown, there's something very important here that Jonah is expressing for us.
Speaker 1:But first, I wanna go back to the very start of this chapter to pick something up. Because what the text says is that Jonah prayed to the Lord. Isn't this what I said, what I tried to forestall when I fled to Tarshish for I knew that you are gracious and compassionate. And I want you to notice a couple things here. First, this is a weird prayer.
Speaker 1:I mean, this is supposed to be Jonah furious with God. And what does he say? He says, I knew that you were gracious and compassionate. I can't believe that you are so abounding in love and slow to anger. I am disgusted by you, God.
Speaker 1:A couple weeks ago, I was making dinner for my family. I do all of the cooking in our house. Rachel looks after everything else, and so that's a pretty good deal for me, and I like cooking anyway. So on this day, I decided that I was going to make for dinner one of my son's favorite, Tomato soup and grilled cheese. Not particularly exciting, but this wasn't a lazy Saturday afternoon meal.
Speaker 1:I was going to kick this up a little bit. And so what I made was fresh tomato basil soup. I made sourdough grilled cheese with a Reggiano crust. And by the way, when you are making grilled cheese, forget about the butter. The thing is to spread the mayonnaise lightly, thinly on your toast.
Speaker 1:Real mayonnaise, not that Miracle Whip nonsense that you've heard about. But spread that on your bread and then fry it in the pan. With that, I promise you this will give you the perfect golden brown caramelized crust, plus it's just much easier to do. So get your journal. Write that down.
Speaker 1:I will give you a second. That will change your life. It's the most important thing you've heard today. But this is one of my son's favorite meals. So I get it all set up.
Speaker 1:I cook these beautiful grilled cheese sandwiches. I make this fresh tomato basil soup, and I call out dinner's ready. And he yells down from his bedroom, what is it? And I say, one of your favorites, tomato soup. And he says, did you make it from a can or did you make it from scratch?
Speaker 1:Because I only like it when it comes from a can. Undeterred, I yelled. Well, I guess you could say that this one came from a very special can, and he said, let me guess, you're the can not coming. And so here I am making my son's favorite meal, going above and beyond to make sure that it's special only to get complaints that I didn't open a can and dump it into a microwavable bowl. And now we have God extending grace, compassion above reproach, only to have Jonah pray, I knew that you would try to pull some nonsense like this God.
Speaker 1:I can relate in some small way here. But here's the thing. The writer still acknowledges even this moment as prayer. Now there are different words for prayer in Hebrew, and there are different types of prayer all through the Hebrew scriptures. But this is not just angry prayers or confrontational prayers.
Speaker 1:This is just prayer. This is speaking to God. This is the normal language simply to express ourselves to the divine. And notice this here, nothing is off limits in this imagination. Absurd arguments that on their face fall flat.
Speaker 1:Angry, invective that is couched in religious terms. Part of the point here is that the writer wants to show us Jonah's state of mind. The the fact that he is now beginning to lose himself to his anger his rage, but also that even this too can be sacred when it is brought before God. And it's okay that your prayers are not always sensical right now. It's okay that you sometimes place blame in the wrong places right now.
Speaker 1:It's okay that you might be struggling to make sense of the things happening around you right now. Because the validity of your prayer is not measured by your arguments. It is expressed in the authenticity that you bring with you before the divine. Now understand that God is always going to try to change you in prayer. God is going to try to redirect you in your prayer, to move you away from your ego toward what is good for you, and all of that will depend on whether you are willing to actually encounter God in your prayer.
Speaker 1:But what you bring with you need only be whatever it is that you honestly feel in this moment right now. Because that's what prayer is at its heart. And so, Jonah prays his ridiculous prayer and God still responds to him. The Lord replied, is it right for you to be angry? Now, this is a tricky little phrase because it's only three words in Hebrew, so getting the tone right can be difficult.
Speaker 1:Essentially, what the Hebrew says here is to be good, to be angry to you. Now the NIV that you can see on the screen right now says, is it right for you to be angry? And a lot of different commentators argue that this is basically it, except that it should be even more antagonistic, something more like what right do you have to be angry? And certainly in the context of that story, you can imagine God responding that way. Like, if I want to be gracious, what right do you have to be upset by that?
Speaker 1:Immediately, that makes me think of this story, one of Jesus' parables, the parable of the workers in the vineyard. This landowner goes out and hires workers in the morning, and he hires more at midday, and he hires more in the afternoon, right, at the end of the day. But at the end of the day, he pays everyone a full day's wage. And unsurprisingly, those workers who have worked all day get upset. That's not fair, they say.
Speaker 1:The landowner, the vineyard owner says to them, look, we agreed on a fair wage for a day's work, and I paid you exactly what we agreed upon. If I want to be generous to them, what is that to you? It's it's a story about our insatiable need to define our value in comparison to someone else. Like, I'm not really concerned about whether I have enough. I'm concerned with whether I have more than you do.
Speaker 1:That's a very important story, a lesson that particularly here in the wealth of the West, probably a lot of us need to learn to pay attention to, but it does seem a little out of left field here in this story. And so there is another way to read this response from God. One that I found a lot of Jewish commentators are more amenable to, That is simply to take these words at their face value. To be good, to be angry to you. Or as the ESV has translated this passage, do you do well to be angry, Jonah?
Speaker 1:In other words, is it good for you to be angry? Is it helpful for you to be this upset? Is your anger making you better? Is it healing you, or is this anger that you are carrying with you somehow hurting you even more than you already were, Jonah? And I rather than God losing God's cool, rather than becoming upset with Jonah in the way that Jonah has become upset with God, God simply asks Jonah this question.
Speaker 1:And this, it seems to me, is that same gracious God that confounds Jonah in responding to the Ninevites. Because Jonah says, like, I can't believe this. I hate this. I wish I was dead. I don't want to be in a world where my enemies get the kind of grace that you give.
Speaker 1:And yet, God doesn't scold him. God doesn't belittle him. God doesn't tell him that he doesn't have the right to have these emotions. God simply asks if he's willing to see things in a new way. And I love this moment because I know that God has done far more than me or for me than I will probably ever know to even acknowledge in my life.
Speaker 1:One of the things that I find myself most grateful for is that God continues to help me see the world more truthfully. And that is rarely easy. Because here's the truth. I like being angry. I like being offended.
Speaker 1:I like enjoying rehearsing scenarios in my head where those who annoy me get their comeuppance. If you hurt me, I want to hurt you. And not only that, I wanna be there to savor it when it happens. I wanna let that wash over me and soak in it. I want revenge served, not just cold, but with multiple courses and a good glass of wine on the side.
Speaker 1:And in those moments, I think sometimes we imagine God who uses forgiveness as a stick against us. God who comes to us and says, look at, you better forgive because who do you think you are? And if you don't, you're going to get it far worse than them. If you think this is bad, I will crush you like a bug if you don't get in line with me. But the thing is that is not what I have encountered in God, and that is not what we see here even in Jonah.
Speaker 1:Instead, what we see here is a God who finds us in the midst of our anger, who meets us in the midst of our rage, and who offers us a way out salvation from it. Jonah, do you do well to be this angry? Jeremy, is it good for you to be this upset? Are these your emotions? Is this healing you, or is this somehow making things worse?
Speaker 1:Is hurting you? Are you actually hurting yourself more than you need to? And this is the difficult thing that Jonah needs to understand in this story. That at its heart, forgiveness is not what we owe to anyone else. Forgiveness is what God offers to us to save us from ourselves.
Speaker 1:And that certainly doesn't make things easy. It definitely doesn't make things quick. In fact, sometimes it's that truth that is precisely what makes forgiveness so hard. But it's also what's tripping Jonah up here. And it's why he struggles to get his head around what God is doing because he doesn't want to see the world as it really is.
Speaker 1:He doesn't want to become aware of the scars his desire for revenge are leaving on his heart. He doesn't wanna see the damage that he's doing to himself. All that he can see is this false narrative that keeps telling him that he can take his pain, and he can transfer it to someone else. And that when he does, it will make him feel better, but that is not true. And this is where the story gets really real.
Speaker 1:Because Jonah is a comedy. But Israel and Aziria, that is an old story, and it was very raw. See, Assyria was one of the longest reigning empires in recorded human history. From February all the way to the seventh century BCE, they dominated their slice of the world. That's almost two millennia.
Speaker 1:Now Israel emerges in their shadow and goes unnoticed for a couple centuries, but in July, Nineveh and the Assyrians, they invade Israel, and they conquer Samaria and they end the line of Jeroboam. But that's not the end of the story because the Assyrian Empire had been doing this for a long time. They were good at conquering and so they came with a plan. What they did was they took the Israelites, and they shipped them off throughout the empire, and they forced them into mixed marriages with Assyrian loyalties in an attempt to dilute the distinctiveness of this Hebrew story. And over time, the children of those marriages became known as the Samaritans.
Speaker 1:And even by the time of Jesus, some seven hundred years later, the pain and the hurt and the hard feelings from this Assyrian conquest had been transferred down to those children. Jews and the Samaritans, they despised each other, and all of that came out of all of the hurt that had happened because of Nineveh. And so Jonah is perhaps written back looking at this history, wondering what could have been different if we had responded differently to our enemies. And it's a comedy because how else do you broach the trauma of something like Nineveh? And yet somehow, God looks into all of that hurt, all of that history, all of that trauma and says to Jonah, do you do well to be angry?
Speaker 1:Not because you don't have a right to be angry. Not because what happened to you and your people was okay, but because you now are hurting yourself. You are injuring yourself. You are taking all of that evil that has been done to you, and you are now inflicting it back on yourself over and over and over again. And maybe you don't need to anymore.
Speaker 1:And this is a hard lesson when we are consumed with rage. And so Jonah leaves town, and he goes up on this hill, and he watches to see what will happen, whether God really will be this kind to this kind of people. And when final act, when last metaphor plays out in the story, God gives Jonah this plant to provide him some shade, and Jonah is happy. He loves that plant. He takes great joy in it, but then the plant withers.
Speaker 1:And the sun beats down on Jonah once again, and except now instead of getting up to look for shelter. Instead of getting up and moving on and finding somewhere safer, instead of looking after himself, Jonah instead chooses his misery all over again. And this is the truth that sits at the heart of the Jonah story. Because it's not about Nineveh deserving God's grace. They don't.
Speaker 1:It's about God desperately wanting to free us from the rage that is stealing life from us. The rage that causes us to return to our misery, to sit in the scorching sun, to be injured by everything that has already happened. Because here's the thing, if your imagination is tit for tat justice and hurt for hurt, pain for pain, and injury for injury, then forgiveness is always going to feel wrong to you. And that's natural. It's normal.
Speaker 1:That's the way of the world. It's karma. It's everything that society conditions us to think, but forgiveness isn't about balancing the scales. Forgiveness is about ensuring that our pain does not continue to circulate in the world. It's about choosing to take all of the hurt that has been done to us, to process it, to feel it, to confront someone with it so that they can turn from it, but then to say, regardless of what you choose, this hurt stops here with me.
Speaker 1:And I will not allow you to continue to mistreat me, but I will not pass it on to someone else either. Because I refuse to be part of this cycle of violence that has dominated the world. And whether you choose to see it or not, I do, and I know that this isn't good for me to hold on to. And that's why Jonah can't make sense of this story. Nineveh may have changed their ways, but they haven't hurt the way that he hurt, and that's really what he wants.
Speaker 1:But that is also what Palm Sunday is about. Because you see the Ninevites may have conquered Israel, but the Babylonians then conquered Assyria. And then the Persians conquered Babylon, and the Greeks came along to conquer Persia, and then Rome emerged to conquer Greece. By the time of Jesus, the Jewish people had been subject to five successive empires. And every year at this time at Passover, the current bully, the Roman Empire, they would send their representative to Jerusalem.
Speaker 1:An official would travel from Rome and enter Jerusalem from the West every year. Roman legion of soldiers would flank them. They would ride on a war horse, and they would do this during the Jewish holy time to remind them that they were conquered. And every year at this time, the protests would emerge, and the violence would erupt, and Rome would use that opportunity to flex their muscle and assert their dominance again. But on this year, there was something new on the horizon.
Speaker 1:Because the same day that Rome's representative entered the city from the West, Jesus came to Jerusalem from Bethpage in the East. While Pilate rode a war horse, a symbol of going out to battle, Jesus rode a donkey, a symbol of peace, a sign that the war was already over in his mind. Where Caesar's man was flanked by soldiers and weapons, Jesus was met by the poor and the weak, and they laid their cloaks on the road before him, and the contrast could not have been more stark. The symbolism of these entrances more potent, and yet, still like Jonah, we called out for revenge. You see, even as the crowds came to meet Jesus, they sang their political slogans like Hosanna.
Speaker 1:They waved their political symbols like palm branches. They called for a political savior like a king, and they imagined Jesus taking the role of Caesar, crushing their enemies the same way their enemies had crushed them. And Luke records for us the crucial moment here. As Jesus rounds the corner surrounded by a crowd and Jerusalem comes into view. The gospel says that as he approached Jerusalem, he saw the city and he wept over it and said, if you, even you had only known on this day what would bring you peace.
Speaker 1:But now it is hidden from your eyes. Days will come when you and your enemies, they will build an embankment against you. They will encircle you and hem you in on every side. They will dash you to the ground and your children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another because you did not recognize the time of God's coming to you.
Speaker 1:And the point here is not God's judgment on Jerusalem. The point here is what happens when we miss God's offer of peace and we continue on with our wars. Jonah, do you do well to be angry? Jerusalem, do you do well to want your war with Rome? Jeremy, do you do well to hang on to everything that hurts you for longer than you need to?
Speaker 1:Because here's the truth of it. I and probably you have never experienced trauma like the Assyrians inflicted on Israel. And I've never suffered through generations of oppression the way the people of Jesus' day did. In fact, the truth is I have lived a very charmed life full of grace and peace. And yet still, all the time, I find myself all too willing to hold on to pain long after it has served its purpose in my life.
Speaker 1:Because it's okay to hurt, and it's okay to be sad. It's okay to look around you right now and lament about everything that you have lost in this moment. And I'm not trying to take the truth of your story from you, not for a second because that hurt that you feel, it will show you what is wrong in the world. And if you let it, it will help you identify where you can contribute to justice. It will sharpen your ability to empathize and then work with the people around you for the good.
Speaker 1:But when we begin to think that someone else's pain could ever replace ours Or that we could somehow transfer what we feel to them that making them hurt could make us feel better when we forget that grace is what brings us peace. What happens is we find ourselves circling the drain looking for wars, and eventually, we find them. Because what God offers to Jonah and what Jesus calls Jerusalem to see, what the divine speaks to you in your heart right now in this moment on the verge of resurrection He's like grace and peace is more than a platitude. It is the way that salvation comes to the world. Lowly on a donkey, in the shadow of the empire with peace in the face of violence and grace in the midst of blame.
Speaker 1:And I don't know your story. I don't know where you have been or how you have been hurt, and not for a moment do I want to diminish any of that. But what I do want to do today, as we enter this holy week together, as we begin our ascent toward resurrection, is to point to the largeness of the story that surrounds all of us always. That you are even now surrounded by grace. That no matter what you have held on to or how long you have held it, no matter what you have caused or how you have run away from it, it is grace that will bring you through to the other side.
Speaker 1:May you know that you are loved this Palm Sunday. May you know that this love will bring you through to resurrection. Let's pray. God, for all of the ways that we have absorbed the story of your grace and peace, and we have somehow minimized that into a platitude. May we come to embrace.
Speaker 1:May we come to recognize. May we come to embody the largeness of your story. That forgiveness and welcome, that invitation is what saves us from ourselves. We are invited to come to your table to have our sins forgiven, to have our hurts wiped away, to have you invite us to sit with you, to bask in your peace, to absorb your grace, also that we might share that with those near us. God, there are times when we hurt, and that's okay.
Speaker 1:May that hurt be true. May it be honest. May we feel it. May we be authentic. But once we have learned from it, once you have used that in our lives, may we be ready to send it away, to hold it for no longer than we need to, to guard ourselves, to protect ourselves, but not choose to wallow in that hurt.
Speaker 1:And God, as we learn to forgive first ourselves, then the people around us, as we come to see your story embodied in all kinds of interactions every day. May we be slowly drawn step by step to the heart of your love and grace. May we recognize your invitation. May it change everything for us. In the strong name of the one whose resurrection we await.
Speaker 1:We pray. Amen.