March 8: Nineveh Repents
♫ Music:
Day 23 - Thursday, March 8
Title: Nineveh Repents
Scripture: Jonah 3:1-5
Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah the second time, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and proclaim to it the proclamation which I am going to tell you.” So Jonah arose and went to Nineveh according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly great city, a three days’ walk. Then Jonah began to go through the city one day’s walk; and he cried out and said, “Yet forty days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” Then the people of Nineveh believed in God; and they called a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest to the least of them.
Poetry: Jonah
By Randall Jarrell
As I lie here in the sun
And gaze out, a day’s journey, over Ninevah,
The sailors in the dark hold cry to me:
“What meanest thou, O sleeper? Arise and call upon
Thy God; pray with us, that we perish not.”
All thy billows and thy waves passed over me.
The waters compassed me, the weeds
were wrapped about my head;
The earth with her bars was bout me forever.
A naked worm, a man no longer,
I writhed beneath the dead:
But thou art merciful.
When my soul was dead within
me I remembered thee,
From the depth I cried to thee.
For thou art merciful:
Thou has brought my life up
from corruption,
O Lord my God...When the king
said, “Who can tell
But God may yet repent, and turn away
From his fierce anger, that we perish not?”
My heart fell; for I knew thy grace of old—
In my own country, Lord, did I not say
That thou art merciful?
Now take, Lord, I beseech thee,
My life from me; it is better that I die…
But I hear, “Doest thou well, then, to be angry?”
And I say nothing, and look bitterly
Across the city; a young gourd grows over me
And shades me—and I slumber,
clean of grief.
I was glad of the gourd.
But God prepared
A worm that gnawed the gourd;
but God prepared
The east wind, the sun beat
upon my head
Till I cried, “Let me die!” And
God said, “Doest thou well
To be angry for the gourd?”
And I said in my anger, “I do well
To be angry, even unto death.”
But the Lord God
Said to me, “Thou hast had pity on the gourd”—
And I wept, to hear its dead leaves rattle—
“Which came up in a night, and perished in a night.
And should I not spare Nineveh, that city
Wherein are more than six-score thousand persons
Who cannot tell their left hand from their right;
And also much cattle?”
RELUCTANT OBEDIENCE
Jonah is a picture of a reluctant servant. His response of reluctant obedience is centered in his attitude toward the people of Nineveh. That he shunned his privileged position as God’s spokesman is clear by his aggressive response to ignore God’s call—he ran in the opposite Direction.
We can understand Jonah’s tension when we review the circumstances of his day. The Assyrians were a cruel people who maintained control over Israel. We might say in sympathy for Jonah it is no wonder he was reluctant and rebellious to respond to God’s assignment. While we can sympathize with him, the fact is, Jonah was blinded by his own prejudice. He judged the Ninevites and condemned them as worthy of annihilation and unworthy of God’s Mercy.
Today’s music causes us to experience the intensity of Jonah’s feelings. He had an overwhelming emotional conflict of strong tension and anxiety. The dissonance of the music reminds us of his experience in the fish. I have no doubt he lived the rest of his life with these nightmares. His experience must have changed him.
God’s call came a second time, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it the message that I tell you.” Even though he was loathe to respond, still he went to Nineveh. Upon arrival he preached the world’s shortest sermon, “Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” The message was powerful resulting in guilt, shame, and despair as seen in today’s art. I suggest to you this miracle is far greater than the others in the story. This city with upwards of a million people ALL turned to God.
Poet Randall Jarrell points out Jonah’s demeanor was one of total self-absorption. The “I,” “me,” throughout the poem reveals Jonah is all about himself. Even when he recognized God’s mercy, it was a “mercy for me.” The poet reflects on his condition with phrases like, “my heart fell; for I knew Thy grace of old” and “it is better that I die.”
Here is a lesson for us. Reluctant obedience causes us to deceive ourselves to think God is pleased with our effort. We assume half-hearted obedience is good enough. The fact is incomplete obedience is the same as disobedience. As I define it, obedience is doing what I’m told, when I’m told to do it, with the right heart attitude. God works through us, even when we are reluctant, just as he did for the Ninevites through Jonah. But in responding the way he did, he missed God’s blessing. He sacrificed the best for the good.
Another challenge to us is Jonah’s ethnocentric judgment of his enemies. We need to gain God’s perspective on all the peoples of the world. That perspective includes his command to love our enemies. Jonah’s tension was never truly resolved. Like hanging chads the story concludes with unresolved dialogue. Pondering the message of Jonah I ask myself how many times and ways, have I reacted as he did. The Lenten season leads me to repentance of attitudes and actions that were not completely obedient.
Prayer:
We praise you Lord, for the gift of wisdom that allows us to hear and obey your word. We thank you for the call you have given each of us to spend our lives in your service. Help us to reject the folly that the world considers wisdom. Through the cross may we come to understand what you have called us to, and how you intend for us to be.
In Jesus’ name, we pray.
Amen
Fr. Richard Rohr from the book God for Us
Dr. Glenn Collard
Director of Coram Deo International Ministries
About the Artwork:
Jonah Preaching in Nineveh
Jacob Steinhardt
1923
Woodcut
38 x 30 cm
This simple, bold woodcut illustration from the Book of Jonah is straightforward in execution and content. It shows Jonah with his finger pointing above to the foreboding cloud in the heavens as he preaches to the people of Nineveh to repent. Steinhardt has grouped the figures together so tightly that they seem to become one person that Jonah addresses. The one figure in the foreground leans almost entirely out of the frame and covers his ears in an attempt ignore Jonah’s call to repentance.
About the Artist:
Jacob Steinhardt (1887–1968) was a German-born Israeli painter and woodcut artist mainly depicting biblical and Jewish subjects. He attended the School of Art in Berlin in 1906, then studied painting with Lovis Corinth and engraving with Hermann Struck. From 1908 to 1910 he lived in Paris, where he associated with artists Henri Matisse and Théophile Steinlen. After serving in World War I, he returned to Berlin, married, and then immigrated to Palestine. In 1934, Steinhardt opened an art school in Jerusalem and in 1948; he became Chairman of the Graphics Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. The Jewish Museum Berlin houses the largest Steinhardt art collection in the world, including numerous graphic artworks and unpublished documents donated by the artist's daughter.
About the Music:
“Shaker Loops: IV A Final Shaking” from the album Adams, John: Violin Concerto; Shaker Loops
About the Composer:
John Coolidge Adams (b. 1947) is one of America’s most admired composers. His compositions, both classical music and opera, have strong roots in Minimalism. Shaker Loops done in 1978 is a minimalist four-movement work for strings. His operas include Nixon in China (1987), which recounts Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China, and Doctor Atomic (2005), which features Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb. He also wrote the music for The Death of Klinghoffer, a controversial opera based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestine Liberation Front in 1985, and the hijackers' murder of wheelchair-bound 69-year-old Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer. One of John Adams’ most recent works is an oratorio based on the life of Mary Magdalene called The Gospel According to the Other Mary. Adams is currently Creative Chair of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
About the Performers:
The Orchestra of St. Luke's, founded in 1979, is an American chamber orchestra based in New York City. The core members of the orchestra comprise the St. Luke’s Chamber Ensemble, named after the Church of St. Luke in the Fields in Greenwich Village, Manhattan. The larger ensemble now performs at several venues throughout New York, including the Brooklyn Museum and Carnegie Hall. For this recording, the ensemble was conducted by the composer himself, John Adams.
About the Poet:
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, novelist, and the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate. Best-known as a literary critic, but also respected as a poet, Jarrell was noted for his acerbic, witty, and erudite criticism. Jarrell's passion for clarity extended from his criticism to his poetry. Julian Moynahan asserted in The New York Times Book Review that "Jarrell was a master of the modern plain style, the style which in poets like Frost, Hardy and Philip Larkin used to connect the vicissitudes of ordinary experience with modes of primary feeling which move deep down within, and between, all of us." Jarrell's themes were "relatively few and closely related as they evolve through his thirty-year writing career: in the poems of the thirties, the 'great Necessity' of the natural world and the evils of power politics; in the poems of the early forties, the dehumanizing forces of war and ways to escape or recover from these through dreams, mythologizing, or Christian faith; in the poems of the fifties, and continuing into the sixties, loneliness and fear of aging and death, again opposed by the imagination in dreams and works of art; and in some of the last poems, the defeat of Necessity and time through imaginative recovery of one's own past."
About the Devotional Writer:
Dr. Glenn T. Collard is the Director of Coram Deo International (Before the Face of God), in Charlotte, North Carolina, a ministry encouraging a resurgence of historic, authentic worship in today’s church. He writes, “The central concept of Coram Deo International is to live every day before the face of God. I believe this is the key to both the spiritual formation of the individual and of the resurgence of the church. The unifying principle is to anchor our current praxis to the ancient church fathers.” Glenn and his wife Dianne are the parents of three children. Their oldest son, Tim, is with the Lord. They have two other grown children, who are married and serving the Lord. They are the proud grandparents of five granddaughters.