bleeding out loud

In the Jewish tradition, Nineveh’s response to God is held up as a shining example of true repentance. The Jewish sages suggested that the repentance of Nineveh was so sincere and far reaching that “even someone who had stolen a beam and built it into his house destroyed the entire building and returned the beam to its owner” (Jonah, JPS, 1999). Verse 10 says that “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened.” The Hebrew word for “turn” is the word “shuv.” It means “to turn,” but it also means “to return.” Repentance-true, life altering repentance-is about more than just dying to sin. It’s also about returning to the kind of life we were created for. Repentance is about stopping and going, dying and living, giving up and taking on. It is surrender and liberation all at once.

God’s compassion in the story of Jonah is not random. It’s aroused by the repentance of the sailors and the Ninevites. It triggers something in God that he can’t resist. “Repentance has an explosive impact upon God; God is highly sensitive to repentance. He responds vigorously to repentance even at the slightest hint of it, even if a person has committed terrible sins” (Meet the Rabbis by Brad Young, Hendrickson Publishers, 2007). There is a Jewish tale about the power of repentance in which King Manasseh, one of the most wicked kings in Judah’s history, repented and sought God’s favor. According to the tale, the ministering angels in heaven were so outraged at Manasseh’s sin that they blocked his prayer from entering God’s heavenly court. But God ripped a hole in his own throne to make a way for Manasseh’s prayer to reach him (Meet the Rabbis by Brad Young, Hendrickson Publishers, 2007). God is just waiting for us to return to him.

One of the most powerful images of repentance in this chapter of Jonah is the king of Nineveh getting off his throne. It’s an acknowledgment that he’s not in control, that there is Someone else who belongs in that seat. Repentance is a way of getting off the thrown of our own lives, of stepping down and confessing that we are not capable of living the redeemed kind of life God created us for when we try to do it under our own power. Jonah’s invitation to Nineveh, and Jesus’ invitation to us is to repent. God is just waiting for people to turn from their sin and return to him. The question is, “How will we respond?” Will we respond like the sailors and the Ninevites or like Jonah? Will we respond like the sinners and tax collectors of Jesus’ day or like the Pharisees and teachers of the law?

“We have grown accustomed to sin, and the fragments of scripture lie shattered in our life; charity has withered with calculation, and the sparks of purity have burnt out. Yet still we come on Yom Kippur (or during Lent), and God who said, ‘I have forgiven’ whispers it again to us, and waits for our reply.

What shall it be? What form will it take?
Let us repair what can still be repaired.
Let us give back the gain we earned by injustice.
Let us make peace with our injured brother.
Let us restore the person we wronged.
Let us admit what is false in ourselves.
Let us put right what is wrong in our family life.
Let us not sour the joy of living.

May God give us the courage to do these things and help us to rebuild our lives. And when we have finished our tasks, may He permit us to enjoy the light sown for the righteous so that He can delight in us.

The Gates of His Mercy are still open. Let us enter.”

From Forms of Prayer for Jewish Worship III: Prayers for the High Holidays of Awe. 8th ed. 5745, London: Reform Synagogues of Great Britain, 1985.

Jonah [LENT @MH, WK 3 Excerpt]

Reflections on Jonah’s prayer from the belly of the fish~

Surprisingly, none of the words in Jonah’s prayer are original. Instead, he borrows every last one straight out of psalms 3, 5, 18, 30, 42, 69, 120, and 139. For as long as the Psalms have been around, people of faith have used them to learn how to pray. The explanation is simple enough. There are moments in our lives when we simply don’t know what to say to God-moments when we’re so angry, so confused, or so flat out uninspired that we can’t choke out even the simplest prayer. In such moments, the Psalms are a helpful companion. When you can’t find your own words, borrow someone else’s. When you can’t find your own hope, borrow someone else’s. Time and time again, people find themselves staring at the songs that are sung on Sundays, unable to sing the words. The fact of the matter is that there are moments when our heart does not choose to say, “Lord blessed be your name.” And in those moments, it’s the community around us, singing “My heart will choose to say, Lord blessed be Your name” that gives us the courage and the faith to keep on trusting. Praying borrowed words has a way of guiding us into the presence of God in those moments when we can’t seem to find the way ourselves. But there is more.

One of the great mysteries of the Christian story is that words have a way of becoming flesh. In Hebrew, davar means “word,” but it also means “event.” Words don’t simply convey ideas. They also make things happen, just as God’s speaking in Genesis 1 made creation happen. They have the capacity to get loose in a person and rattle around inside them for weeks on end, sometimes for a lifetime. These are the kinds of words that don’t let you alone-they linger, they nag at you until you change. They literally become flesh. So Jonah, with his back against an intestinal wall, recalls the Psalms and weaves these borrowed words into a prayer. But the deeper irony is what kind of Psalms Jonah chooses to pray.

There are basically two kinds of psalms: psalms of lament and psalms of thanksgiving. Everything about Jonah’s situation points to lament. He’s angry. He’s on the verge of death. But Jonah, remembering the Psalms, prays a prayer of thanksgiving. It’s an odd choice given his circumstance. A similar thing occurs in the book of Job. In one twenty-four hour period Job loses everything: His vast wealth gets stolen by thieves, all of his servants are killed-except for the few who live to tell him what happened-and every last one of his children is killed in a freak windstorm. It is immediate and overwhelming loss, and Job’s response is not what you would expect. “At this, Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head. Then he fell to the ground in worship and said: ‘Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised (Job 1:20-21, TNIV).’” Both Jonah’s prayer and Job’s worship are so counter-intuitive, so unexpected. Who gets swallowed by a fish and prays a prayer of thanksgiving? Who loses everything and falls to the ground in worship?

In the midst of overwhelming sadness and hopelessness, Jonah reaches into the rich history of the psalms and prays words of hope and trust. And his prayer might be the single greatest truth his life reveals: Prayer helps us live into truths that we sometimes don’t feel or can’t see. The truth that despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, God is in control. God can be trusted. God hears the prayers that rise up to him out of the depths. They come up before his face, and he is concerned. In the Jewish community, a mourner prays the mourner’s prayer every day for a calendar year. The prayer itself has nothing to do with grief. Instead it’s a prayer about the character of God. The idea is that the mourner may not feel the words to be true, yet, somehow, surrounded by a group of friends praying the prayer every day for a year, that mourner learns to live into the truth of the prayer.

In our moments of sadness, confusion, and anxiety praying Psalms of thanksgiving helps us move beyond our helplessness into the realm of God’s helpfulness. They move us out of our own smallness and into God’s bigness. In the same way, there are moments when we would prefer to stay on the surface-when we would rather keep praying Psalms of thanksgiving when what we really ought to do is pray a Psalm of lament. Whatever our circumstance, the Psalms show us the way when we can’t find it on our own.

There’s one problem. Jonah never says anything about Nineveh or his running. He doesn’t apologize. He doesn’t repent. He doesn’t say he’ll go to Nineveh. And judging from what we’ve seen of him so far, his omission is suspicious. So which is it? Are his words sincere? Is he a changed man? Or is he simply saying all the right things? Or, as is so often the case, is it a little of both at the same time? Maybe one of the most precious gifts of the story of Jonah is that God so often works in the world through people who are a curious mixture of dignity and depravity, sincerity and selfishness. Either way, his prayer comes up before God, and God commands the fish, and it vomits Jonah onto the dry land.

Here’s an excerpt from week 2 of the Jonah writing:

“Illusions are like that. We don’t give them up easily. In fact, we don’t normally give them up at all until they stop working for us altogether. And like Jonah, sometimes the only thing that can save us is to be thrown overboard, to have our illusions stripped away. There are storms that blow up out of nowhere and upset our agendas. We get brought to our knees by suffering. And in many ways, storms bring with them a kind of salvation. They rescue us from ourselves because we are never more open to God’s bigness than when we are most aware of our own smallness and helplessness. Storms mess with our agendas. Suffering, more than anything, shapes us in the way of Jesus. It softens us and opens us to a kind of Christ-likeness that we wouldn’t experience otherwise. Jonah’s hang up is that he doesn’t want to face the darkness in Nineveh, but one wonders if he’s running just as much from the darkness in himself.”