Sunday’s lectionary readings are once again about answering the call of God. The Old Testament story this week is the book of Jonah. The book begins with the word of the Lord coming to Jonah saying, “Go at once to Ninevah, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness comes before me.” God clearly doesn’t hate Ninevah. There is wickedness there, but God calls it a great city. And as we see later in the story, God has pity on the city-its people and its animals-and saves it. Jonah knows God’s going to do this. As one scholar writes he doesn’t resist God because God is asking him to bear a message of doom and hopelessness, Jonah resists God because he knows God is merciful. He’s protesting God’s love. In chapter four, Jonah says, “That’s 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.” What a thing to be angry about-that God is gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. It’s one thing if all that love and mercy is directed at you and your own people. But it’s another thing altogether if it’s directed at a people who are the enemy. People you despise. People who are wicked and violent and deserve to die. That’s the way Jonah saw it anyway. The people of Ninevah didn’t deserve a prophet. Ninevah was the capital city of the Assyrian empire. And whether this story was written before that empire conquered Israel or afterwards, they were still the superpower of the day, the biggest threat on the horizon, and greatly feared. The Assyrians did eventually conquer Israel, sending its citizens into exile. Ninevah was the enemy. Jonah can’t stomach the thought that God would send a prophet to Ninevah, so he flees in the opposite direction, trying to get away from God and this most distasteful call.
Jonah doesn’t want to carry a message that might lead to the salvation of the enemy, an ungodly people. But that’s the task God calls him to do, and there’s no escaping it. Jonah goes to greater lengths than any of us probably would to try to flee from God and God’s call. But God comes after him-or rather, God is there before him. Jonah should know that there is nowhere he can go to escape God. He might as well have said “yes” in the first place. But then we wouldn’t have such a great story. Jonah is a story about the persistence of God, and the ultimate futility of resisting God. Though Jonah didn’t see it this way, his story is really one of good news. Whether we like what God is asking or not, it is good news that God doesn’t give up on us-especially when the message we are to carry is one of repentance and new life. It’s good news that God can use someone like Jonah to carry out God’s will that even a city like Ninevah would repent and be saved. If God calls the likes of Jonah, then God surely calls and uses us with all our weaknesses, protests, questions, and hesitancies.
Likewise, in the gospel lesson from Mark, there’s good news and hope for us all in the fact that Jesus called these four fishermen to come fish for people. The way they responded is indeed admirable. Not a hint of hesitation. But that’s pretty much the highpoint in their role as Jesus’ disciples. In the rest of his gospel story Mark portrays them as a pretty dense bunch. They never really get who Jesus is, in spite of all he tells them and all they see him do. Jesus tells them, “to you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God.” But they never really get that secret, that in Jesus, God has broken in among them. When they ask him to explain the parable of the sower, he replies, “Do you not understand this parable? Then how are you going to understand all the parables?” They see him calm the storm on the sea, and still ask one another, “Who is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” Jesus asks them at one point, “Do you still not perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes, and fail to see? Do you have ears, and fail to hear? Do you not remember? Do you not yet understand?” Mark repeatedly tells us that the disciples did not understand what Jesus was saying or just who he was. They desert Jesus and flee when he is arrested in the garden. And the last disciple we see is Peter as he denies knowing Jesus three times. Yet these flawed, thick-headed, fearful men are the ones that Jesus has called to follow him, and we know they eventually get it and tell the story, or we wouldn’t have the Christian faith today.
God called the likes of Jonah, Simon, Andrew, James and John to carry the good news of the gospel. To bear a message that would call people to repentance. He called those first disciples to be fishers of people. To gather people in to the kingdom of God that had become present in the person of Jesus Christ. None of them could refuse. Jonah tried. The disciples faltered along the way, but in the end they carried out the ministry God had called them to. It’s futile to resist, so we might as well just say “yes” and get on with it. Get on with being disciples, in whatever shape our particular call to discipleship takes. Get on with proclaiming the good news of God.
