Jonah 1.1-16: What Kind of Person Are You?
This sermon was preached on May 12th, 2024.
1 The word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai: 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.” 3 But Jonah ran away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa, where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord.
4 Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea, and such a violent storm arose that the ship threatened to break up. 5 All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own god. And they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship.
But Jonah had gone below deck, where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep. 6 The captain went to him and said, “How can you sleep? Get up and call on your god! Maybe he will take notice of us so that we will not perish.”
7 Then the sailors said to each other, “Come, let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity.” They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. 8 So they asked him, “Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us? What kind of work do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you?”
9 He answered, “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. 10 This terrified them and they asked, “What have you done?” (They knew he was running away from the Lord, because he had already told them so.)
11 The sea was getting rougher and rougher. So they asked him, “What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us? 12 “Pick me up and throw me into the sea,” he replied, “and it will become calm. I know that it is my fault that this great storm has come upon you.”
13 Instead, the men did their best to row back to land. But they could not, for the sea grew even wilder than before. 14 Then they cried out to the Lord, “Please, Lord, do not let us die for taking this man’s life. Do not hold us accountable for killing an innocent man, for you, Lord, have done as you pleased.” 15 Then they took Jonah and threw him overboard, and the raging sea grew calm. 16 At this the men greatly feared the Lord, and they offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows to him.
Up & Down
God calls Jonah to “rise up and go!” to Nineveh. The way it introduces it “the word of the Lord came to Jonah…” is the common way that the OT speaks about prophets—those relatively small class of people called to proclaim God’s truth to his people. And it’s usually followed by “and that prophet rose up and went.”
Take for instance the book of Isaiah. In chapter 6 we have the instance when Isaiah was called by God. “Whom shall I send?” And Isaiah responds “Here I am! Send me!” In that moment, God calls out and Isaiah, in a sense, comes to himself. The call of God is one that invites a response, and the word that God says brings a word from Isaiah—one where Isaiah can recognize himself as someone called—someone empowered to go.
To know ourselves as those brought into relationship with God and called by him is to know that we are people empowered and enabled to step into our particular world sent by God with a responsibility within it. It’s what all the OT prophets discover, it’s what the disciples of Jesus discover in the NT. It’s what we discover when God awakens our hearts and turns us out from our inward bent to look through the glasses of his love at the people and places around us.
What makes Jonah unique among OT prophets is what happens when he is called to rise up and go. He rises up, but flees. And that fleeing actually begins a downward spiral that signals to us how badly things are about to go. In v3, he starts descending. Jonah went down to Joppa. He found a ship, paid the fare and went down onto the deck of the ship. Then in v5, he goes down below deck. In chapter 2, he will go even further, when he speaks of his time in the ocean as going down to the roots of the mountains—picturing his situation as one where he had come as close as possible to death. Down, down, down.
Jonah was fleeing from God because he didn’t like that God was seeking to show grace to the people in Nineveh. Jonah hated these people. Jonah wanted one kind of grace for him and people like him, and a different kind of grace for the Ninevites. But there’s only truly one kind of grace that God gives—grace to those who don’t deserve it. That’s what grace is, after all.
Jonah knew this, of course. It's why he ran. He fled because he knew that God was a gracious God who forgives. And he allowed his prejudice to dominate his heart and drive his desires and imagination, rather than submitting his prejudice to God and allow his desires and imagination to be transformed.
This remains a very real danger for all of us. To allow our prejudices—or even our well-informed opinions—to be the thing that dominates who we are. It’s why Jesus teaches us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer “to forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Or why he teaches us to pray that God’s kingdom will come. It's a prayer for King Jesus to reign over the hearts of more and more people—and that necessarily means grace coming to those who we may not think deserve it. And God may not be calling us to go to Nineveh, but he is calling us to rise up where we are and live from the gospel toward those who we may consider enemies—or who may consider us enemies.
In the face of a world of darkness and brokenness and sin, not to descend further into our own selfishness, but to rise up to the God who is calling us to life, calling us to follow after him.
What Kind of Person Are You?
Jonah has gone down down down. And he discovers quickly that to flee from the God of life is to run straight into the arms of chaos and death. Very quickly everything starts to come undone.
A storm arises and it’s severe enough that “the ship threatened to break up.” (4) The sailors, as strong and burly as sailors always are, begin to cry out to their gods. The sailors, whose livelihood depending on them delivering cargo to get paid begin throwing the cargo overboard in panic.
But where is Jonah? Down, below deck, asleep. He seems to have lost all hope. The sailors are doing everything they can to save each other’s lives, and Jonah can’t even be bothered to get out of bed! This lack of care for others is alarming.
Jonah doesn’t remain asleep. He’s awakened and confronted by a series of questions from the captain of the ship and from the sailors themselves. Starting in v6: How can sleep?! Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble?! (8) what kind of work do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? What kind of person are you?!
It’s confronting questions that we, as the people reading and hearing this story may ask of Jonah. Jonah, what kind of person are you to try and flee from God, endanger other people in the process, and then act with utter disregard for your own life and theirs?
But it’s more than that—it’s a question that holds a mirror up to us. What kind of person are you?Are we people like Jonah, who is willing to claim his faith in God, which he does in v9, but have no fruit to show that our hearts have been captured by God’s love?
Jonah is claiming a faith that has no reality in it beyond words. And faith without works that spring from that faith is dead. He can say the right words, but in his heart Jonah wanted a God who hated who he hated, a God that Jonah can use to make himself feel superior to these sailors.
But look at the hypocrisy of what he has said—that he worships the true God? But does he? He’s running away from this God! He’s denying what this God has explicitly told him to do—But he still feels superior to these pagan sailors. What? They are at least trying to work to save life. Jonah cannot be bothered get out of bed for the lives of others. He can’t even be bothered to pray, even though these sailors are praying and working as hard as they can. It’s why they ask, exasperated, in v10: “What have you done?!”
This question from the sailors’ mouths is the same as God’s question to Adam in Genesis 3. And what we see in Jonah is that his sin is just like Adam’s—the consequences of his silliness and senselessness spills out to others.
What hope is there for Jonah and these sailors? Not Jonah’s ethnic pride. Not his claims of being a devout person of God. Not all the effort of the sailors, and not their desperate prayers. It was going to require something else. As the sailors themselves ask in the last of their series of questions: “What should we do to you to make the sea calm down for us?”
Man Overboard
Notice what Jonah doesn’t do or say next. Jonah doesn’t say “let me pray to the true God that I claim to worship.” No, he doesn’t pray at all. He actually suggests they throw him into the sea. This is not a noble suggestion, like the story of a soldier jumping on a grenade to protect his fellow soldiers, or someone taking a bullet for someone.
It seems he’d rather hold onto his prejudice and die rather than, follow God’s calling and live. In fact, Jonah doesn’t value his life at all—he tells the crew to treat him like excess baggage and toss him overboard. But I have to ask, if Jonah really thinks this is what needs to happen, why didn’t he hurl himself overboard? Because he’s still refusing to take responsibility for himself or others. He knows this storm has come because of him, but he still remains passive.
The sailors hear this for the wild suggestion it is, and they allow their care for his life (even though he's the one that has brought this danger onto them!) to overrule his suggestion. As it says in v13, they “did their best to row back to land.” (And notice here that Jonah still does not help!) But this does not work, and they decide that they will need to take Jonah’s advice. But before they do, they pray—this time not to their false gods, but to the true God. If this is what it takes to stop this storm and save many lives, then forgive us. Then they toss him into the sea, and it grew calm. One man is handed over to the storm so that everyone else will be saved.
The story of Jonah loomed large in the imagination of Jesus. There are times in the gospels where he references Jonah, speaking of his calling in mission in terms of Jonah—the town where Jesus grew up was only 3 miles from the town Jonah was from. Of course, this wasn’t Jesus saying that he was like Jonah. It was Jesus showing himself as the one to whom Jonah had pointed all along.
In Jesus, we see the one who was called by God to go to those who were trapped in darkness—to those who, apart from God’s grace, are God’s enemies. But Jesus did not flee from this calling, but took it on. As Scripture tells us, he did not consider his place as the eternal Son of God to be something to be held onto, but gave up the honor and glory that was rightfully his to become a human being. And not a human being who lived in luxury in a place of prestige or privilege. No, the Son of God humbled himself and lived in poverty, in obscurity. Jesus stepped into our human nature so that the outcasts, the sinners, would find God’s grace.
In Jesus we see one who did not disregard the lives of others, but served them. One with the power of the Creator, who put that power to use for the good of others. One who did not hide himself away in disregard for the storm of sin raging in our world and threatening to overcome everyone, but one who went straight into the storm to offer people a harbor in the tempest.
Jesus, who did force people to throw him overboard, but walked straight into the condemnation of his crucifixion. Who flung himself into the ocean of our sin so that we are not overcome by the storm of God’s wrath.
Jesus who absorbed the power of death and the power of sin and gutted them of their ultimate power, turning to us in the victory of resurrection from the dead to offer us freedom from guilt and freedom from the fear of death, so that we can walk in the knowledge of God’s love for us shining forth in Jesus.
This is a fantastic example of what it means to read the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus. Because ultimately we have the book of Jonah in Scripture to point us to the ultimate work of God’s redemption, the work of Jesus. Jonah is not just a book that reveals ourselves to ourselves—which is does, exposing our hypocrisies, our prejudices, and what God is calling us as his people to in our world. But if that’s all it did, we would be stuck with our sin revealed to us, but with nothing we can do about it.
Jonah reveals to us a God who seeks people out by his grace, and points forward to Jesus—the true and better Jonah—who has a power that can not only stop a storm on a sea, but can bring a grace stronger than our sin, a love stronger than our fear, a Savior who will go down down down, not to flee from God but to chase after us into every dark corner of the human experience.
We are so like Jonah, with our silliness and senselessness. With our prejudices, with our apathy. In the things we do, and the good things we left undone. The question before us this morning is whether we will bring all of this to Jesus, to allow his forgiveness to transform our hearts. Or whether we’ll keep trying to run or work hard to keep the storm of life from overwhelming us.
Your hard works will not save you, no matter how hard you row. Your good intentions will not save you. Your background and ethnicity will not save you, neither will anything else. Only the grace that comes to us through Jesus gives us any hope that our lives will not end in shipwreck. So come to him. Toss all that other stuff overboard and find in him the peace that your heart longs for.