Sunday, January 21, 2024
/Epiphany 3 (Year B)
Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Song of Jonah; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20
The Rev. Clint Brown
You are called. That is the message for today. You are called to proclaim to the world – or, at least, your own small part of it – the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. No other task that you’ve been given to do as a Christian – not your Bible reading, not your prayers, not your church attendance, not your pledge – is more tied to your success as a Christian as your commission to be an ambassador of Christ. In our readings we trace the outlines of that ambassadorship. In Mark, we see Jesus making the first call and see the response of the first disciples. In 1 Corinthians, Paul reminds us of the urgency of all this and of taking our responsibility seriously. This world, he says, and everything in it, is on the way out. Nothing lasts forever – neither the cosmos nor our lives – and so we had better make our move and make it decisively. And, finally, the story of Jonah illustrates both the failure and success of those who are called. Sometimes we get it very wrong and shirk our duties by trying to run from them; and sometimes we get it right and see whole cities transformed. Such is the life of a disciple. So to this clear and simple message, there is only one point that I hope to contribute today, and for that purpose I would have you briefly consider with me the case of the city of Nineveh.
Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian empire, and, in the march of empires, you’ll recall that Assyria stands between the Sumerians and Babylonians, on one side, and the Persians on the other, having its heyday in the 8th and 7th centuries before the time of Christ. Nineveh lay on the east bank of the river Tigris, directly across from present day Mosul. Many scholars are persuaded that the famous “hanging gardens of Babylon,” one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, are more likely to be identified with those excavated at Nineveh and constructed during the reign of Sennacherib in the early 7th century. Until its destruction in the year 612 BCE, Nineveh was known throughout the ancient world, as it is in the book of Jonah, as the “great city” (Jonah 1:2; 3:2).
The city actually crosses the stage of the biblical narrative remarkably early, being first mentioned nearly at the beginning in Genesis 10. There we learn of its founding by the great hunter Nimrod, who, incidentally, is stated to have founded another city of no small importance named Babel; and, like its sister Babel, the Nineveh of the Old Testament is uniformly maligned. The book of Kings gloats over the mysterious abandonment by Sennacherib of his siege of Jerusalem and hurried flight back to his capital, perhaps because of plague. The prophets Nahum and Zephaniah, writing a century after Jonah, proclaimed the ultimate fall of Nineveh and do not seem to know or care about Jonah’s mission or any conversion experience in the city’s history to which they might hearken. The book of Tobit, one of the apocryphal books, tells the story of a pious Jew living as an exile in Nineveh. He urges his family to flee the city before the judgment Nahum predicts. And the book of Judith, also one of the apocryphal books, recounts how an arrogant Assyrian king is outwitted and decapitated by an intrepid Israelite heroine. In the Old Testament, it is not too far-fetched to imagine that for its writers and readers the city of Nineveh was a place for cursing, the very personification of evil. What a contrast this makes to the penitent and chastened city described in the book of Jonah.
The Old Testament thus presents two images of Nineveh – the arrogant city that gets what it deserves and the repentant city that God spares – and, in the New Testament, the picture gets even more interesting. When in Luke 11:32 Jesus looks to the past for a model of the kind of response he is looking for, it is not just any city that he singles out for recognition but the Ninevites who responded to Jonah who, he says, will sit in judgment over his own generation. And this is where, I think, we do well to take note of a singularly ambiguous term that Jonah had used in his message to Nineveh. Foretelling its fate, he had cried, “Forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown!” (Jonah 3:4). That the people of Nineveh did respond positively to Jonah’s message we know, but what bears scrutiny is that their response plays on the ambiguities of this verb “overthrown.”
In most places in the Old Testament, most conspicuously in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, this verb signifies destruction, it is true; yet, in others, under the aspect of overturning what seems to be fated and inexorable, the word signifies deliverance.
Deuteronomy 23:5, “The Lord your God refused to heed Balaam; the Lord your God [overturned] the curse into a blessing for you, because the Lord your God loved you.”
Psalm 66:6, recalling the crossing at the Red Sea, reads, “[God overturned] the sea into dry land.”
Jeremiah 31:13, “I will turn their mourning into joy,” that is, in the sense of overturning the one condition for the other.
That Nineveh is to be undone for its sins would seem to have been Jonah’s proclamation, and yet because of the grammatical ambiguity of this particular verbal form it could also be read as a reflexive. “Nineveh is overthrown,” could be read, instead, as “Nineveh turns (itself) over.” In other words, Ninevah will be undone but not through destruction, but through repentance. Bear that in mind, then, as we turn to the call of Jesus. “Repent!” he commands – or, “Change your mind,” as it reads literally in the Greek – let your whole world be turned upside down and inside out, we can hear Jesus saying, and then follow him. You’ll see that the message of Jesus and that of Nineveh bear more than a passing resemblance.
My point comes to this: to be called to be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to be called to change the world, but to change the world we must first change ourselves. “Overthrow yourself,” we might say with the people of Nineveh. And the hope is that it is this ongoing work of being converted ourselves that is the most compelling witness we can make to the world. We can hide behind and make a great show with our words, but how we live in the full view of others is an altogether different proposition. Perhaps this is the thing that is keeping the most people out of the churches – that they know too many Christians. So, remember that you are called – called to be faithful in giving, faithful in attending church, faithful in piety – but, above all, to be faithful to preach the gospel. And, by the way, use words only if necessary. Amen.