Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity 2017

Jonah 3:10-4:11 (and Philippians 1:21-30 and Matthew 20:1-16)

When the great prophet Moses asked God to show him what he was really like, ‘The LORD passed before him, and proclaimed,

“The LORD, the LORD [that is, Yahweh—a name, not a title; repeated, for emphasis], a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”’ (Exodus 34:6, 7)

This is the fundamental revelation of who God is and what God is like, and these verses are quoted over and over, about God, and back to God, more than any other in the Bible. Jonah throws them back in God’s face in our first reading, disgusted that God should be gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, ready to forgive. Of course, he wants this for himself, and for his own people: but not for the enemies of his people. That is unacceptable. If this is what God is really like, Jonah would rather be dead.

The Book of Jonah is like one of those sets of Russian nesting dolls. In fact, it is like one of those sets of nesting dolls, inside another, larger, set of nesting dolls.

The backdrop is this: God chose one people from among the nations, through whom to bless all nations; but the people he chose were serially unfaithful. Eventually, God appoints David as king; and David’s son Solomon is king after him; but under Solomon’s son, the kingdom divides, north and south—Israel and Judah—sometimes in uneasy alliance, sometimes in open conflict. In the north, there is an unbroken line of kings who lead the people away from God, until eventually Israel is swallowed-up by the Assyrians (whose capital is Nineveh).

Assyria, in turn, is swallowed-up by the Babylonians.

In the south, the line of kings who lead the people away from God is occasionally interrupted by a king who calls them back to covenant faithfulness. It is never lasting, but it does delay the fall of Jerusalem by 135 years. Assyria fails to swallow them up; but Babylon succeeds, and carries the people of God off into exile.

Babylon, in turn, is swallowed-up by the Persians. And at this point, the king over the Persian empire sends the people of God back to Jerusalem, in three waves. They are, so to speak, vomited up out of the belly of a great fish.

Persia, in turn, is swallowed-up by the Greeks. Greece, in turn, is swallowed-up by the Romans. And Rome, in turn, is swallowed-up by the triumph of Jesus, by the conversion of the Roman empire, which brings this biblical sequence—although not history, and not the ultimate purposes of God in Christ Jesus—to an end.

The prophets understood the rise and fall of nations to be appointed by God, in exercising his slow-but-sure judgement on injustice. The Book of Jonah sits within that worldview. Jonah was a prophet who lived in the northern kingdom of Israel at a time when it felt relatively secure, under its longest-reigning king (by quite some distance), Jeroboam II. Nonetheless, Israel was rotten: God sent prophets, but would they listen? Meanwhile, Assyria was on the rise, a definite threat, notoriously violent: would God intervene?

We don’t know when the story of the prophet who was sent to take the message of impending judgement to Nineveh first began to circulate by word-of-mouth, or when it was first written down. But we do know that, unlike the people of Nineveh in the story, God’s people didn’t repent. We do know that they were swallowed-up, and eventually vomited up again; and we also know that they kept telling the story, in trying to make sense of their experience: even Jesus, living eight centuries later and in the Roman empire, refers to it.

All of which brings us to our second set of Russian dolls. God instructs Jonah to go to Nineveh. When Jonah runs away, in the opposite direction and to the ends of the earth, God appoints a storm to surround him, and then a great fish to swallow him, and then a plant to shelter him, and then a worm to attack the plant, and then a hot east wind to beat down on Jonah’s head. God, we are told, appoints these things—a storm and a fish and a plant and a worm and a wind—to fulfil his purposes, just as he appoints kings and empires.

In other words, the story of Jonah is the story of the people of God, over and over: the iniquity of the parents being visited on the children, until it is dealt with, until they might truly be set free.

The iniquity is in wanting to keep God’s goodness for ourselves, while demanding his judgement on others. Jesus addresses a variation on the theme in our Gospel reading, where the hired labourers grumble against the landowner, failing to share his compassion—his insistence that those without security of employment do not go hungry—envious because he is generous.

If we are honest, I think this is still a work in progress.

The Book of Jonah ends with God restating what Jonah has thrown back in his face: that who God is, is who God is, in relation to all people, everywhere. God is concerned about Nineveh. God’s fundamental attitude towards her hundred and twenty thousand citizens is mercy [the word comes from the root, to carry in the womb] and grace. God longs to show steadfast love and faithfulness. This love is expressed in great patience; but at the same time, this love will not turn a blind eye to injustice—for how can genuine love do that? The cry against wickedness will not be ignored; but God is also quick to respond when the wicked repent. This is the scope of God’s concern for Nineveh, that great city.

Might God say to us today, should I not be concerned with Sunderland, that great city, in which there are almost two hundred and ninety thousand persons who do not know my concern for them?

The motto of our city is Nil desperandum auspice Deo: ‘Do not despair, but put your trust in God.’ This is, of course, the advice of the king of Nineveh to his people, when confronted with their own wickedness. It is more often shortened to Nil desperandum, which is, at best, a whistling in the dark.

What might happen, were we to share God’s concern for the people of our city?

What might happen, were we to proclaim that concern—a concern in which even the bad news is good news, and the good news is very good indeed—to all we meet?

The day is far gone, but it is not yet too late. The landowner comes looking again and again, calling labourers into his vineyard.

Twelfth Sunday after Trinity 2017

Jeremiah 15:15-21 and Romans 12:9-21 and Matthew 16:21-28

This morning I want to speak about the wrath of God. The wrath of God has fallen out of fashion. It is something we are uncomfortable with, and so we focus on the love of God, the compassion and faithfulness of God, the wide sweeping inclusivity of God. We might even seek to differentiate between a wrathful God of the Old Testament—and the apostle Paul—and a loving Jesus. That would be a tragic mistake. God’s love demands the wrath of God, as an expression of that love. The Bible speaks of the wrath of God over 600 times; so, it is important that we understand what we mean by the wrath of God—and why it is a good thing.

Listen to how God reveals his glory—that is, his character, or nature—to Moses:

‘Yahweh, Yahweh, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’

This passage, from Exodus, is perhaps the passage from the Bible most quoted across the rest of the Bible. In addition to direct quotes, it is alluded to countless times. It is the foundational passage for how we are to understand what God is like—and, by extension, how we are called to be as God’s people.

I don’t have time to unpack this passage today, but to summarise: God’s fundamental stance towards us is an active, intervening, engaged, enduring, unchanging, love; a love that, whenever we are estranged, will always move to be reconciled. This love is slow to anger, and utterly opposed to all that separates us from each other. Why? Because the opposite of love is not hate—as we are so often told—but indifference. He will root-out that which separates us, even if doing so takes several generations, because mercy is unimaginably greater than judgement.

God, then, is slow to anger. This means two things: one, that God gets angry; and two, that God is slow to act on his anger. Me, I am quick to anger. And my anger is most often an unhealthy reaction to my ego being bruised. I get angry when, emptying the dishwasher, I want to put bowls away in a cupboard and my wife has the effrontery to sit on the chair right in front of the cupboard door when there are four other identical chairs around the kitchen table. I get angry when we must wait while four cars go past before we can turn out of a junction because they are all too selfish to let us in (and I’m not even driving the car). I get angry when I lose mobile phone signal passing through the underground sections of the Metro.

I have a long way to go in being conformed to the likeness of Jesus. He got angry about dehumanising lust and bloodlust. When a mob came to him seeking to stone an adulterous woman, he took time to process his response. When he eventually spoke, it was with such compassion and grace that it turned the men from their bloodlust, and the woman from her lust.

Jesus got angry about people being afflicted by demons, driving the demons out, forcefully. He got angry at the temple authorities giving over the space that was intended to be set apart as a house of prayer for all nations for other purposes; and—having gone to the temple countless other times and not done this—overturned the tables.

I believe that God gets angry about child abuse, sexual assault, human trafficking, the rich maximising their profit margin by cladding the homes of the poor in a death-trap, zero-hours contracts, the arms trade, racism, the West’s overconsumption of the resources of the natural world, global poverty, and our sheer indifference towards most of these things, to name but a few.

A god who, like me, is quick to anger would be hellish, literally. A god who did not get angry, even more so. How God’s slow anger works out is what we mean by the wrath of God. Both our quick anger and our resigned indifference need to be conformed to it.

The book of Jeremiah, from which our first reading this morning is taken, is all about God’s wrath. It is a testimony that shows us that God allows a people to reap the consequences of turning away, handing them over to their choices, withdrawing his protection: but that he does so incredibly reluctantly, in the hope that they will turn back to him as a result, before disaster strikes. Indeed, Jeremiah is not alone among God’s friends in being frustrated by how much opportunity God gives the people to pull back from the brink of disaster, how patient his love is. Jeremiah calls on God to bring down retribution for him on his persecutors—even accusing God of being unfaithful for having not yet done so: truly, you are to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail.

But God responds by declaring that the way in which he will bring retribution on Jeremiah’s persecutors for him is this: that if Jeremiah will turn back to God, God will strengthen him to continue to speak for the God who longs for reconciliation, until his persecutors turn back to God, and are reconciled to Jeremiah. This is how God will deliver Jeremiah from the wicked and redeem him from the grasp of the ruthless: by the wicked repenting and being transformed into the righteous.

It is this principle of hopeful forbearance, of allowing rebellion against God to play itself out until it over-extends itself, and of—even then—embracing those who turn back in a new beginning that plays out in the agreement of the persons of the Trinity that the Son should be handed over to his persecutors, suffer death and be buried, rise again, and ascend to the right hand of the Father, where he intercedes for us and from where he will come again to judge the living and the dead, taking his place over a kingdom that shall have no end. It is breath-takingly good.

How, then, are we to live in faithful relationship with such a God? Well, Paul also wrote at length about the wrath of God to the church in Rome: about how God had handed us all over to the consequences of our rebellion, in the hope that all might be saved. You can read about that in the first eleven chapters of his letter. But in chapter twelve he shifts from how we are saved and what we are saved from, to what we are saved for. And in our second reading this morning he exhorts his hearers to:

“Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer…Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them…Do not repay anyone evil for evil…Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.’ Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

When you are wronged—genuinely wronged, not simply nursing a bruised ego—know that God has not abandoned you, but is playing the long game. When we are wronged, we need to remind one another of that hope, keep it before us, encourage one another to join in the long game, by praying, blessing, serving. In this way, we ‘leave room for’ the wrath of God.

Where we see others wronged, allow our anger to be conformed to God’s slow anger, by praying, blessing, serving.

Where we see others wronged so very many times that we grow numb, allow our indifference to be conformed to God’s slow anger, by praying, blessing, serving.

This is an outrageous way to be asked to respond. Some would call it naïvely idealistic; others, condoning injustice. And if we are quite mistaken in believing in this God revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, and fleshed-out in Jesus of Nazareth, then it is quite possibly both these things. Almost certainly so, in fact.

But if the story we confess is true, it just might change everything.