When God Calls
I wonder what Jonah’s life was like before the Word of the Lord came to him. We know he was the son of Amittai. If we look at their names, Amittai means “truth telling” and Jonah means “dove.” He lived in the area near the port of Joppa, which today is part of Tel Aviv. That’s all we know about him. The son of truth telling is sent like a dove to the city of Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, at the time the most powerful city in the world. He is to go from the area around Joppa, the southern port of Jaffa in Tel Aviv today, about 550 miles northeast to Nineveh, today known as Mosel in Iraq, if you look at a map it makes sense to go to the port and take a ship up and around the cost to the Tigris river and down to Nineveh rather than heading out across desert…even today, the distance the way the crow flies is 550 miles, but to drive it is almost 2,000 miles…so, he goes to the port and gets on a ship, but instead of one headed northeast along the coast, he gets on a ship headed due west to Tarshish, about 2,500 miles away on the coast of what is now Spain.
Why? Jonah, the dove, son of Amittai, the truth teller, does not want to go to Nineveh. He is a man of faith; he heard God’s call. But, he heads in the opposite direction – far in the opposite direction. So, what do we know about Nineveh, and the Assyrians, in the time of Jonah? Nineveh was known for its wealth and power as well as its idolatry and cruelty.
Assyria dominated and launched incursions and campaigns in the Northern Kingdom of Israel and systematically deported around 4 million people over about 250 years in an effort to utilize their labor (to enslave them) and to maintain control over them (keep them weak and unable to coordinate resistance and rebel). The capital of Samaria finally fell in 722 BCE. We tend to say more about the Babylonian exile when we talk about the Biblical prophets, because the Southern Kingdom was also taken and Jerusalem destroyed in 586 BCE, but the Assyrian conquest and deportations set the stage for the Babylonians. We don’t know exactly when the Word of God came to Jonah, but it was in the midst of Assyria’s bombarding and attacking and destroying his country, his people, his life, that Jonah is told to go and proclaim, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.”
His response is understandable for several reasons. First, when God calls, the response is often resistance. Moses was not a public speaker…who would listen to him? Jeremiah thought he was too young, just a child, and besides he didn’t know what to say. Isaiah argued that he was too sinful, “I am a man of unclean lips and I live among a people of unclean lips.” Gideon argued that he was from the weakest clan and the least in his family, and too insignificant to deliver Israel from the Midianites. For Jonah? Going to Nineveh to prophecy to the Assyrians felt like a betrayal of his people. How could God expect him to proclaim God’s love to those people? Like so many others, like many of us, Jonah resisted God’s call. He knew God loved them, but he really could not see them the way God did.
Jonah’s response is also understandable because the Assyrians, the powerful establishment in Nineveh, had been so awful for so long. Surely it was dangerous for him, he could be captured, enslaved, never allowed to return home. When God calls, the task is often not without risk and sacrifice. Moses had killed that Egyptian man when he saw him beating a Hebrew slave; how could he go back to Egypt after he had fled from Pharoah? How could he face his past? Esther was called to defend her people before the Persian king, appearing in the king’s court without being summoned, a crime punishable by death. How could she risk her life? Nehemiah was called to leave the life of luxury he enjoyed as cupbearer to the King of Persia and go rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. How could he ask the king permission to be dismissed – risky in and of itself if it angered the king or he felt like Nehemiah was being disloyal to the Persians because he was Hebrew, and how could he give up his comfortable life, and go start picking up the pieces of Jerusalem?
When the Word of God came to Jonah, there was no promise that going to Nineveh would be safe and without sacrifice. Yet, God called him to go and call them to repent.
Martin Luther King, Jr. admitted in early 1968, just weeks before he came to Memphis “I’m frankly tired of marching. I’m tired of going to jail. Living every day under the threat of death, I feel discouraged every now and then and feel my work’s in vain, but then the Holy Spirit revives my soul again.” So, he interrupted his plan for a Poor People’s March in Washington that spring to come to Memphis in support of the city’s sanitation workers, carrying signs that declared, “I Am a Man.” Each one a person, a bearer of God’s image. The risk, as we know, was real, and the sacrifice. But so was the call. King wrote about it in his 1958 book Stride for Freedom: The Montgomery Story. The Montgomery bus boycott had been going on for about a month and the city’s white leaders were starting to push back hard. King was 27 years old, he’d been arrested for the first time, and had become the recipient of frequent threatening phone calls. He was ready to give up and was looking for a ticket to Tarshish. He was looking for a way to head the other direction, to keep his nice comfortable life with his wife and two-month-old little girl. Around midnight on January 26th, 1956, the phone rang, and the person on the other end threatened, “Listen, n*****, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. bowed in prayer, he wrote about that night, I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.” And the answer came, the call King heard from the voice of Jesus to continue, “He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.”
When God calls, we are never left alone. But Jonah? He gets on a ship headed due west, out into the open waters of the Mediterranean.
We’ll find out what happens to Jonah, the sailors, and the Ninevites over the next two Sundays. If you want to read ahead, the whole book of Jonah takes about 7 minutes to read.
God calls all of us. We are all reluctant at first. We all face risk and sacrifice when we answer God’s call, but we are never left alone. Thanks be to God. Amen.