Sermon Notes: Do you love your enemies?

 

Third Sunday of Epiphany

 

Prayer of Invocation

 

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with  you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

 

Prayer of Illumination

 

Lord Jesus, you call us to follow you wherever you go, to love who you love. You call us to repent, to turn from our evil ways; you give us moments like these to examine ourselves--you invite us to measure ourselves in light of your mercy and grace. Search us, and know our hearts; try us and see if there be any idolatrous way in us, and lead us in the way everlasting--that your name may be glorified, and our hearts be healed.

 

Proclamation

 

“Forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”, Jonah cried out in the capital of Assyria, that city that embodied all that was wrong with the world. 

 

Haven’t we all in some circumstance wished that we could do that to someone, or some place? O, to call down God’s destruction on those who wish us harm--to those who do us harm, to those who destroy all that we stand for!

 

Nineveh was the epitome of all the corruption, decay, and evil in the world; what is more, it was the den of God’s enemies. It was all the bad things of  Las Vegas, Washington DC, Baghdad, and Moscow mashed together  into one place. The place of decadence, abuse of power, chaos, and the hub of those who wished God and His people harm. That was Nineveh. 

 

 But our text in Jonah jolts us: “And the people of Nineveh believed God. They called for a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them to the least of them...When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he said he would do to them, and he did not do it (Jonah 3.4-5,10).” This was a miracle, something no one could ever anticipate, or even dare to hope for. Sort of. Jonah feared this would happen. 

 

Our Old Testament reading for this morning has the potential of being very misleading if we fail to read it in the context of the whole of the book. If we were to only read the verses given to us in the lectionary, we might be led to believe that the book of Jonah, and it’s message for us this morning,  is primarily about God’s miraculous and transforming mercy and grace. We might think that the point of this passage is to simply remind us that God loves His enemies, that His mercy stretches to even those that actively destroy His people and who openly promote wickedness as a way of life (which is what Nineveh was known for); that it is about the need of those kind of people (“them”)  to repent from their evil way and believe in God. It is about that--but there is much more to the story. 

 

The book of Jonah is not so much a book about “them” as it is a book about “us”. Read in its entirety, it holds up a mirror to our own interior life and leaves us with a penetrating question: do we love God’s enemies the way God does? Do we see “them” as God sees them? Do we presume upon God’s mercy and grace and want His privileges only for ourselves? Read in this season of Epiphany, in which we celebrate that the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ is for all people, the book of Jonah invites us to ask, Do we really believe that God’s mercy is for everyone? Do we really embrace salvation for all? Are we ok that God loves His enemies--our enemies?

 

Jonah is a book that calls us to repent from our evil way; to turn from our own self-righteousness, and our presumption about how God should and will act. It is a book that calls on us to deal with our own prejudices, hatred, and indignation towards God’s enemies, towards those who oppose us and our ways. It is a book that reminds us that when we point the finger at others, there are three more pointing back at us. 

 

The Book of Jonah is for we who have received the word of God, His commissioning, His call for our lives, but who flee from that calling, not because we feel inadequate or ill-equipped, but rather  because we don’t really want God’s mercy to be extended to others like it has been to us--because it would mean that “them” would become part of “us”.  It is a book that reminds us that we must never try to predict who God will love, and how God must go about His work of restoring all things. 

 

“Now the word of the LORD came to Jonah...Arise, go to Nineveh, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me (Jonah 1.1-2).”

 

And what is Jonah’s response to this word from God? “But Jonah rose to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the Lord (Jonah 1.3). He went as far west as he could go to get away from the presence of the Lord, and the mission that God had for him. 

 

The text doesn’t immediately tell us why Jonah does this. Was he afraid? Did he feel inadequate, unqualified for this privileged call?

 

Jonah gets on a ship heading the opposite direction from where he needed to be going, and he puts all of his traveling mates in peril. “The Lord hurled a great wind on the sea (Jonah 1.4).” While the mariners are scrambling to secure the ship in the midst of the storm, Jonah is in the cab sleeping. “Call out to your god’, they cry to him. “Perhaps the god will give us a thought, that we might not perish (Jonah 1.6).”

 

You likely know the story. Jonah, who ironically boasts that he worships the God who made the sea and the dry land” confesses that he is fleeing from the presence of the LORD (YHWH). He tells the mariners to toss him into the sea--this will stop the storm. He indirectly acknowledges that this storm is because of his refusal to obey God. 

 

With fear, the mariners hurl Jonah into the sea, and he is swallowed up by a large fish. From what we can gather from chapter 2, it seems that Jonah makes this request to be thrown into the sea not as a kind of atonement for his sin, but rather because he presumes that God would somehow deliver him. If you read carefully his prayer in the belly of the fish, he never acknowledges his sin or disobedience; there is no repentance or sorrow for what he has done. There is only the presumption that God, because of His loyal love, would deliver him: he called upon the steadfast love and mercy of God, knowing God’s faithful commitment to show His mercy to those who call on His name. 

 

And God did deliver him; the fish vomits Jonah on to dry land, and once again God delivers His word to the wayward prophet “the second time”: “Arise, go to Nineveh, and call out against it the message that I tell you (Jonah 3.2). Jonah marches into the city and calls out: “Forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown”. This word overthrown has a double meaning. It can mean “overturn” in the sense of destroy (which is what Jonah hoped for), but it can also mean “transformed” (which is what Jonah feared). Which would it be?

 

The people of Nineveh, the text tells us, “believed God” and repented from their evil way and the violence that they were characterized by. And God saw, and relented. This is the text we read this morning. We may find it easy to rejoice in this, but this was not good news for Jonah. 

 

He was angry. “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry (Jonah 4.1).” More to the point, Jonah saw this as an evil thing that had happened. 

 

It is here that we learn why Jonah fled from the presence of the LORD, why he refused to go to Nineveh in the first place: “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster (Jonah 4.2). Jonah was a man who knew experientially God’s transforming, never-quitting, faithful love and mercy. And this was the problem. He hated the Ninevhites, the perennial enemy of God and His people. He hated them so much that he would rather die than see them receive mercy and join God’s family.  God’s mercy in his own life was somehow transformed into self-righteous hatred of the other. And what is God’s response?  

 

God deftly asks Jonah,  “Do you do well to be angry?” (Jonah 4.4) Is your anger justified? With this piercing question, God invites Jonah, and us, to attend to our anger and hatred towards our enemies, towards those whom we despise and want to see punished for their evil and wrongdoing. “Is this,” God asks, “the right response?”

 

Jonah’s response to this probing question is to perch himself in a place outside of the city to pout, and to see if God would indeed relent. There God provides shade for Jonah, but then destroys the plant, leaving Jonah to languish in the blazing middle eastern sun. “It’s better for me to die than to live”, Jonah declares. “But God said to Jonah, “Do you do well to be angry for the plant?” 

 

“Yes!” Jonah replies. “Yes, I do well to be angry, angry enough to die.” That’s what hatred and anger does, you know. It destroys us; it would have us killed.

 

“You pity the plant,” God says, “but you do not pity the Ninehvites who are cut off from my life.” (Jonah 4.11). 

 

Provocatively, the text leaves us there. It does not tell us what Jonah’s response was. And this is God’s way of inviting us into Jonah’s hatred, into his world of rage and angst, to ask us: are we overcome by hatred and anger towards those who we perceive to be our enemies? Do we see “them”, the hated other, as God sees them? Are we like Jonah? 

 

The core problem that the book of Jonah is dealing with is not “them” but “us”, we who are filled with prejudice, hatred, anger, and self-righteousness. We focus more on others’ sin than on our own, who presume upon God’s grace and mercy; we who want God’s favor, fellowship, and privileges, but who use that as a weapon against others. 

 

The book of Jonah invites us to repent--to turn away from our hatred and anger towards those who we see as our enemies. It invites us to hear its message in concert with Jesus’ own word delivered to us: 

 

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes the sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly father is perfect (Matt 6.44-48).”

 

Our Gospel text this morning reminds us that like Jonah, we all have been commissioned, called to join God in His mission of reconciling all things: “Follow me (Mark 1.17)” is the call. 

 

And to hear that call, to respond to this call in faithfulness we must “repent and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1.15). Repentance is not a one-time act. Responding to the gospel, believing in the gospel is a constant act of repentance--turning from our false hopes, our presumptions about how God should work in this world. To repent is to get on board with what God is doing, to align ourselves with His will and mission. 

 

Jonah challenges us to think about the gospel and repentance in relation to those we hate, those that we see as outsiders, those that we regard as out of bounds. Jonah challenges us to probe our own anger and hatred towards others, and to deal with it. 

 

Who is your Nineveh? Who is that person, or people whom you despise, whom you would rather see punished and destroyed? Who are those that you do not want to see transformed by God’s mercy?

 

The Book of Jonah calls us to focus on “us” more than on “them”--for we have our own problems to deal with--we have our own evil and wickedness that we must attend to. Jonah reminds us that God’s mercy and grace can become for us self-righteousness and presumption,  a weapon that we use to cut others off from God, and to seek the destruction of others. 

 

We are Christ’s body--His eyes, hands, and feet in this world:

 

Yours are the eyes with which He sees

Yours are the feet with which He walks

Yours are the hands with which He blesses all the world

 

We have been commissioned to embody in small, tangible ways God’s radical, transforming, enemy-loving mercy. But we can’t do this if we are overcome by anger, hatred, prejudice, and self-righteousness. To be the faithful body of Christ, we must repent--constantly. We must examine our dispositions towards others. We must understand always, that we are guests and not hosts. That all the privileges we have are not obligations from God, but rather they are gifts that are intended to be given away. 

 

Eucharist

 

And each Sunday, we remind ourselves of this; even more--we participate in this. God’s enemy love. When we come to the Table each Sunday, we remember that “God shows his love towards us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died or us...For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life (Rom 5.8,10). When we come to this Table, we remember that we are called to bless those who persecute us, bless and not curse. We are called to repay no one evil for evil, to never avenge ourselves, but leave it to God. To the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, we are called to feed him; if he is thirsty, we are called to give him something to drink. In short, we are called to not overcome evil by evil, but to overcome evil with good--just as our Lord did with us. (Rom 12.14-21)

 

This is the gospel, worked out in everyday life. And when we come to the Table, we are invited to “follow Jesus”--His commission, His pattern of life. We are called to repent and believe in the gospel. 

 

Who is your enemy? Who is your Nineveh? Do you see your enemies as God sees His enemies? Are you ok that God loves his enemies? Are you overcome by evil? Or will you overcome evil with good, with God?

 

 

Benediction

 

Do not repay evil for evil or reviling for reviling, but on the contrary bless, for to this you were called that you may obtain a blessing (1 Peter 3.9)