The Prophet Who Ran The Wrong Way

The Book of Jonah begins the way every prophetic book begins — the word of the LORD comes to a man — and then it breaks. Jonah hears God clearly and goes the other direction. In this opening sermon of City Parish's eight-week series through Jonah, the strangeness of the book is named at the outset: every creature in the story obeys God. The wind, the sea, the fish, a plant, a worm, pagan sailors, a pagan king, even livestock in sackcloth. The only one who refuses to turn is the prophet.

The sermon works through four observations from Jonah 1:1-3. First, Jonah is not a cartoon but a man with a history — 2 Kings 14:25 shows him announcing God's generosity toward a wicked king who never repented, which means Jonah has already seen what kind of God he serves. Second, Nineveh is an archetype rather than a location: the phrase "that great city" appears elsewhere only in Genesis 10, where Nimrod founds Babel and then builds Nineveh, and God's charge that "their evil has come up before me" echoes the language of the flood in Genesis 6. Third, Tarshish is not merely the opposite direction but the far edge of the world, the source of imported luxury, the raw material for a paradise built without God. Fourth, the verb governing the whole passage is down — down to Joppa, down into the ship, down into the hold, and eventually down to the roots of the mountains.

From there the sermon turns toward the listener with a question about memory rather than belief: not what we think about our enemies, but what actually happened in us the last time one of them lost something. Jonah is not fleeing an assignment. He is fleeing the presence of the LORD, because if he goes, God might relent — and then God would be exactly who Jonah has always feared he is.