A Meditation on Crankiness (and Grace) - Jonah 3:1-5, 10

Today’s sermon topic is crankiness. Hopefully you haven’t experienced too much of that while stuck at home during winter weather this week. But if you did, you’re in good company. Have you noticed that there is a cranky thread that runs through the bible? Take, for example, the older brother of the prodigal son. He couldn’t believe that his father not only forgave his screw-up of a brother, but welcomed him home with open arms and a big feast. Or, remember Jesus’ parable of the day laborers in the vineyard? Some worked all day, while others came late, and they all got paid a full day’s wage. The people who worked all day grumbled, as you would, and the owner simply said, “are you envious because I am generous?” In both cases the head character is a stand in for God, who bestows grace extravagantly to all, despite the fact that some are more worthy than others. And this makes people cranky. It violates our sense of what’s fair or just. This is a particular sticking point when we deem ourselves more worthy or righteous than others. We think there should be some kind of reckoning in our favor, some kind of vindication, and when we don’t get it, we’re prone to crankiness, even bitterness.

Today we consider arguably the crankiest prophet in the Bible, Jonah, who struggled mightily with this. There are other adjectives than cranky that we could use for him, like stubborn, narrow-minded, and downright petulant. He’s great fun, really. His story is a tall tale, full of humor and hyperbole. He is the one who landed in the belly of the whale. That happened because God wanted to send him on a mission, and Jonah literally ran in the opposite direction, even getting on a boat to escape. Through a series of events and a storm, Jonah ended up in the great fish, who unceremoniously threw him up on the shore, putting poor Jonah back on track for the divine mission he was trying to avoid.

That was to go to Ninevah, a great Assyrian city, the city of the Israelites’ enemies to be exact. We’re told that it was a huge city, three days’ walk across, which, by the way, is highly doubtful given the archaeological record. Then, when he was just one day in, all Jonah said was, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” It was a one-line sermon that didn’t even mention God. It would be fun to try that on a Sunday sometime. In a shocking turn of events, the whole city immediately repented, adults and children alike. The king declared a kingdom-wide fast, and in a delightful detail, even the cows put on sackcloth and ashes. God relented on whatever punishment God had planned. And Jonah couldn’t stand it. He hadn’t wanted to go in the first place, and he sure didn’t want to see his enemies spared and now in good standing with the God of Israel. So he went and pouted outside the city. God and Jonah got into an argument about a bush that God provided to shade Jonah in his self-assigned time out. He snapped at God, suggesting that it would be better for Jonah to die than to live. And finally God says at the end, “Should I not be concerned about Ninevah, 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?” Wise closing words, compared to the childish mood of the prophet.

It’s a fantastic story, and we cheer at the end when Jonah gets his comeuppance. We’re clearly meant to side with God on this one, seeing how wonderful it is that God would be gracious even to Ninevites. Which is all well and good, until we realize that the same principal applies to our enemies, too. To those who disagree with us, those who are different, those who hate us, those we don’t like, and those who vote oppositely from us. This lesson applies particularly in an election year. The story of Jonah is meant to shine a light onto our own crankiness, our own hard-heartedness and narrow mindedness. This is the uncomfortable side of God’s grace. We can only side with God for so long before we realize that there are hatreds and biases in us that grace won’t tolerate. The good news of Jonah’s struggle is that in the final scene, in which Jonah is sulking and nursing his hard heart, God’s grace has the final word.

There is an important honesty in all of this. We cannot heal what we don’t acknowledge, and we cannot grow if we stay too comfortable. And if we bring Christ into this conversation, it’s important to recognize the power that Christ has to transform us. We gather around this table in all of our sometimes cranky glory. We bring whatever judgments and divisions we walk around with, often holding tightly to them. When we share the Eucharist together, the same God who loved both the Israelites and the Ninevites welcomes us all to the same table. It’s a place where are hearts can be transformed and our divisions healed. We learn to see God’s gracious concern for all, for people we think are on the right or wrong side of things. That grace should make us uncomfortable at times, because it makes demands on our occasionally hard hearts just like it did on Jonah’s. And like faithful and problematic Jonah, when all is said and done, we wouldn’t really have it any other way, would we?

This particular biblical witness has prophetic power to counter the large scale conflicts in our world. It also has the power to speak to the micro-aggressions of our hearts that large go unspoken and unnoticed. The good news is meant to heal on small scales and large, on Jonah and on Ninevah. So if you do ever find yourself feeling cranky or self-righteous like Jonah, that’s probably a good sign that God is trying to break through with a reminder of how grace actually works. “Should I not be concerned about Ninevah?” God once asked. Grace is always bigger than we are. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.