Justice, Mercy, and the Love of God | A Sermon on Jonah (and Us)
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin for the people of St. George’s Episcopal Church on the Third Sunday after Epiphany, January 24, 2021.
The Book of Jonah is best known, of course, for a minor character –the big fish, or whale—and yet this short book offers an outsized study in justice, mercy, and the love of God.
It begins with God calling Jonah to journey to Nineveh and to cry out against them. Nineveh is part of the Assyrian Empire –the very enemies of Jonah and his people –and you think Jonah would jump at the chance to call them out (or, at the very least, feel honored to have been chosen a prophet of God). Instead, he boards a boat going in the complete opposite direction.
God doesn’t care of course for Jonah’s behavior. He sends a storm that threatens everyone on the boat carrying Jonah. The crew eventually throws Jonah overboard, where he is swallowed by a large fish. Only after sitting in the belly of the beast for three days, Jonah repents, asks for forgiveness, and is promptly spewed out upon dry land.
This is where we find him in today’s reading from the Old Testament –in his second act, so to speak –still covered in fish goop I imagine. God has given him another chance and Jonah finally obeys, entering the heart of the city and spreading God’s call to repentance. And, as it turns out, he is quite successful. The people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth (Jonah 3:5).
End scene.
This is a story about second chances, redemption, the transformative word of God. I mean, look at Jonah, a reluctant prophet, but one who, when given a second chance, turned it around and was wildly successful in the end. Look at Nineveh, that once wicked city, transformed as if overnight, a beacon of hope for all. No more to see here.
And yet. The Book of Jonah has a last act, and it’s not this one.
Jonah is aware of God’s might and is keen to witness God’s judgment on a people long wicked and only recently repented. So, he waits –even after his work there is done. And watches for the judgment of God.
And, God does judge Nineveh; but God acquits, changing his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them (Jonah 3:10).
And Jonah, the very vessel of God’s redeeming Word, stands looking on, witnessing a fundamental truth about the God we serve.
In the words of poet Amanda Gormon:
“One thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy.”[1]
Jonah of course knows this to be true and professes this as the very reason he never wanted to go to Nineveh in the first place: “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning! For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing” (Jonah 4:2).
God’s just mercy did not surprise Jonah. In fact, the very certainty of its form and function stirred something ugly up within him.
Something dark and something deep rose to the surface; something that had Jonah setting up front row seats to witness a hoped-for destruction of God’s own people.
Tell me that you haven’t been there, in that front row seat, and I’ll ask you to look again. To dig deeper. To be a bit more honest. Who among us hasn’t longed in some way for retribution? Hasn’t hoped that our adversaries would get their just desserts? Hasn’t felt the kindling of a far cry from love in our bellies and seen it surface in ugly ways? Of course, we have.
There is little doubt that Jonah had good cause to be both angry with and to fear Nineveh, God himself acknowledged the wickedness of that place. And Jonah wanted justice. And, you know, I get that. He wants that kind of justice that makes you feel like there is something fair about the world. Something right. Something orderly and clear.
For me, it’s the type of justice that acknowledges that there are good people and bad people. That puts the people we celebrate in fundamentally different categories than the people we condemn; the people that do us harm, individually and communally. It’s a justice that is clean and clear and wholly directed by my own sensibilities and understandings of this world of ours. It’s that kind of justice.
That’s the justice Jonah waits for, even though he suspects it isn’t coming. God’s will be done now. Not Jonah’s. And this will, God’s will, drives Jonah to a desperate prayer. “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning, he says; for I knew . . . And now, O’Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live” (Jonah 4:2-3).
This seems awfully dramatic. But what if what’s happening here is not just Jonah being a big cry baby but is actually Jonah speaking truth out of his own hurt, his own grief. Consider this, if Jonah has good reason to fear and to be angry with Nineveh then to pass through its streets unharmed, to be delivered from that wicked belly unscathed, must have been an enormous emotional task. To see the Ninevites with new eyes must have been disorienting at best.
To come face to face with someone or something that has oppressed you, fought against you, sought to end your life or the lives of those whom you love and maybe even been successful- this is not for the faint of heart. This leaves its mark.
And social scientists tell us what we already know because we’ve seen it and experienced it for ourselves: this type of hurt, of grief, of brokenness can lead to us to become vindictive, to become the abusers, the oppressors, the wrong doers. It can lead us to cry for a kind of retributive justice that will never truly set things right or make things whole, but will make us, as yielders of might, feel right.
Look at our justice system. As civilized as it might be on the surface, it cannot make us whole –even when it’s well-functioning. True, it may penalize the wrongdoer. But it’s only ultimately as good as the power behind it and it can’t give us what we ultimately want.
What it can do, if we are not careful, is convince us that we with the power to punish have the right to punish; that we the victims are fundamentally different than those the perpetrators; and that mercy is, somehow, antithetical to justice.
Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative operates at the fulcrum between society’s retribution lust and the failure of the criminal justice system to provide any sort of true balm for our need, he writes, “We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. Our shared brokenness connected us.”[2]
Jonah cries out that it is better for him to die than to live, and you’ve got to wonder if Jonah is on to something. Because, if we truly want to participate in God’s justice, we’ve got to let go of the love of our own. We have to be willing to put to rest that within us that rebels against the truth of shared brokenness. That rebels against a narrative of belovedness of all. That rebels against the reconciling work of God’s just mercy.
There is something within him that must die if Jonah is to get on board with the type of justice that God offers. If Jonah is to ever accept the mercy extended to him by God, Jonah must be willing to be made whole. And this, this being made whole, necessarily involves acknowledging his connection with Nineveh and its peoples and its sin. It necessarily involves the edict Be merciful, just as your father is merciful (Luke 6:36). It necessarily involves trusting God with the rest.
Our ideas of justice will never make us whole; even mercy can’t on its own. It takes repentance, reconciliation, making amends, changed actions –but mercy is the posture of true justice.
In the words of Stevenson, “We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity."[3]
“One thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy.”[4]
Let us always strive to witness to the Truth: God’s mercy is just. And God’s justice is mercy. And this is Good News. For everyone. No exceptions.
Amen.
*Image is the former gas chamber at New Mexico State Penitentiary courtesy of Wikimedia commons.
[1] Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb,” https://www.theamandagorman.com.
[2] Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 289.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Gorman, “The Hill We Climb."
