I want to offer a brief reflection on a great sermon that my colleague Sam preached in chapel yesterday on Jonah 3:1-10. It was a perfect sermon for the Lenten season, as we reflect on our own relationship with God and with others, repenting of where we have sinned and fallen short.
Here is the text:
Then the word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time:
“Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.”
Jonah obeyed the word of the Lord and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”
The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them,
from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth.
When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust.
This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh:
“By the decree of the king and his nobles:
Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from God’s fierce anger so that we will not perish.”
When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways,
God relented and did not bring on them the destruction God had threatened.
Sam started the sermon by naming Hitler as someone who often comes up in theological conversations as the border of God’s mercy.
“Sure, God is gracious,” we say; “Sure, God’s forgiveness and radical love are vast, but surely, they don’t extend to everyone. Surely, there are limits. Do we really think someone like Hitler deserves God’s mercy?”
This strategy—using someone we find particularly heinous and objectionable as a justification for keeping people outside God’s grace—is neither novel nor new. In fact, Ninevah was Jonah’s Hitler.
Apparently, Ninevah’s infamous reputation was well-deserved. Across the Near East, Ninevah was well known for its brutality and mercilessness, and Jonah was quite sure that the Ninevites deserved the divine punishment they had coming. As anyone who has read Jonah knows, the prophet had absolutely no interest in mercy for Ninevah. Jonah was actively rooting for Ninevah’s destruction, and actually fled from God to try to avoid having any role in their possible redemption.
The question for us today is, “Sound familiar”?
Who, today, is your Hitler, your Ninevah? Who is the individual or group that you are so convinced is (or should be) outside God’s mercy and grace that you want no part of sharing the gospel of God’s love and forgiveness with them? Whose destruction are you hoping for?
Lent is the perfect season to repent of our self-righteous judgments, and our condemnation of those we find offensive and undeserving of God’s love—those we put on the “outside” of God’s circle of grace.
The fact is, God’s mercy is limitless, and God’s grace is unbounded—resisting every attempt of ours to reign it in, according to our standards and assessment. But our sinful tendencies to divide and condemn are so strong, we need regular reminders of this fact.
In the same chapel service, we sang “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy,” and I want to close this reflection with stanza three, which I think is particularly pointed and spot-on:
For the love of God is broader than the measures of our mind;
and the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.
But we make this love too narrow by false limits of our own;
And we magnify its strictness with a zeal God will not own.
This Lenten season, we give thanks for the expansive breadth of God’s mercy, shown so clearly in Christ’s outstretched arms on the cross, which embrace you, me, the whole human family, and God’s entire creation. No exceptions.
Happy Lutheran 