Deserts

In order to understand our first reading for this morning you have to understand just how much Jonah hated the Ninevites. I mean he hated the Ninevites. And for good reason. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire, and the Assyrian empire was a brutal regime. They were militaristic, aggressive, blood thirsty. They destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC and southern kingdom of Judah in 701 BC. So, when Jonah said he would rather die than see the city of Nineveh spared, he wasn’t kidding around, he meant every word. Do you remember how the story of Jonah begins? God comes to Jonah and tells him that as God’s prophet he is to go to the city of Nineveh and proclaim to the Ninevites that they must repent for their evil ways or be punished. Now, given how he felt, you might think that Jonah would relish such a task, but quite the opposite. Jonah was afraid that the people of Nineveh might actually listen to God and repent. And if they repented, God might actually spare them the punishment Jonah was so sure they deserved. So, what did Jonah do, he tried to get out of this assignment by running away from God. This is when we get to the part of the story that so many of us remember from Sunday school. Jonah gets aboard a sailing ship, trying to get as far away from God as he can. But you can’t escape God, and after a series of storms, Jonah is thrown overboard where he is promptly swallowed by a whale, or as scripture actually says – a large fish. That large fish brings him back to where he started and spits him out on the shore, because as I said, you can’t run away from God. So, knowing he has no choice, Jonah relents and goes to Nineveh to deliver God’s message of warning. And just as Jonah feared, the Ninevites do in fact repent and God does in fact spare them the punishment Jonah was so eager for them to receive. Our passage for today finds Jonah pouting like a child because God showed mercy to the people Jonah hated. Sitting under a bush, Jonah has to confront the fact that God’s idea of what people deserve is often very different from our own. He has to deal with the fact that, as St. Isaac the Syrian said in the 7 th century – “As a handful of sand thrown into the great sea, so are the sins of all flesh as compared with the mercy of God.” Jesus throughout his ministry repeatedly tried to tell people about the extravagant grace and mercy of God. He tried over and over again to reveal that the God of the Ten Commandments was also more essentially the God of love. The God who destroyed the enemies of Israel in the Old Testament was also the God who cared deeply about the outcast and the sinful. The God who demanded obedience from David and Saul was also the God who was willing to die on the cross. We saw this in our gospel last Sunday when the disciples ask Jesus if they should forgive someone seven times. Jesus tells them – no, they should forgive 77 times, meaning there is never a limit to forgiveness. In parables like the Prodigal Son and our gospel for today – the parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard – Jesus tells his disciples that the God they think they know is far more extravagant than they could ever imagine. He tells them that God closely resembles the father of the prodigal son who waits every day for the opportunity not to punish his wayward child but for the opportunity to love, embrace and celebrate that child’s homecoming. The God Jesus wants us to know is a God who provides for all those who work in the vineyard whether they have been there all day long or only started an hour ago. Like the owner of the vineyard, God doesn’t give us what we deserve, he gives us what we need. Jesus wants us to know that God’s love is all encompassing, and God’s mercy is boundless – whether we like it or not. Now, I don’t know about you, but all of this makes me just a little bit uncomfortable. I mean, I get how Jonah felt when the Ninevites were spared after doing such terrible things. I get how those early vineyard workers felt in our gospel for today when the people who only worked one hour got paid as much as those who worked twelve hours. I get how the older brother felt in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Here he was the dutiful son who stayed home to work on the farm, who probably made straight A’s in school, who never stayed out past 11, and who always obeyed his father. He did everything he was supposed to do but did his father throw him a party? No, he threw a party for his little brother who skipped town, embarrassed his family, blew the family inheritance and then only returned home because he was destitute and desperate. God’s ways may be different from our ways. God’s mercy and grace may be boundless, but they also sometimes seem unfair. I remember back in 1981 when a young Turkish gunman named Mehmet Ali Agca stood in St. Peter’s Square and shot Pope John Paul II twice in the stomach at close range. The Pope nearly bled to death. It took hours of surgery to save him, and after that he never really recovered his health. However, four days later, while still in the hospital and too weak to appear in public, John Paul had a message recorded for the crowd gathered in the square. In it he asked them to pray for the man who had shot him — his brother, he called him — whom he said he had sincerely forgiven. Now, that is a remarkable thing to say four days after someone has put two bullets in you. But he did not leave it there. Two days after Christmas in 1983, John Paul had himself driven to Rebibbia prison in Rome, where he walked into Agca’s cell. There is a photograph of the two men in a bare white room, sitting in folding chairs with the Pope holding the hand of the man who tried to kill him. They talked quietly for about twenty minutes. When he came out, reporters asked John Paul what had been said, and he told them that it was a conversation between brothers, and that what passed between them would stay between them. He never told anyone. He went on to minister to Agca’s mother, and later his brother. Just as the father of the Prodigal Son didn’t wait at home but ran to greet his wayward child, Pope John Paul got up, crossed the city, and went to find the man who had injured him — before he was asked, before there was an apology, before there was anything at all. That’s the way our God works – mercy turns up somewhere we had already decided it did not belong. As St. Bernard of Clairvaux once said, “The measure of love is to love without measure.” Let me close this morning by asking you a couple of questions. In his letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul says that we are supposed to be “imitators” of God and walk in love as Christ loved us. As an imitator of God, what kind of mercy and grace are you extending to others in your life? What would it take for you to give a second chance to the friend who never reached out to you when you were sick or in the hospital? What would it take for you to go to the sibling who wronged you, before they ever offer an apology, and seek to heal that relationship? What would it take for you to offer a bit of grace to that colleague whose politics you cannot abide and go sit and listen to them? Finally, are you willing to extend to yourself a bit of grace and mercy, especially if you think you don’t deserve it? I know so many people who can give the benefit of the doubt to others in their lives, who can forgive a friend for almost anything, but who can never forgive themselves for what they have done or left undone even though they may have repented numerous times. If you fall into that category, remember – mercy and grace are there for you too. The mercy of God does not stop at the edge of your own life. As the old hymn says, “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea; there’s a kindness in his justice, which is more than liberty. There is welcome for the sinner, and more graces for the good; there is mercy with the Savior, there is healing in his blood.” That, my friends, is good news for you, for me, for all of us. Amen. The post Deserts appeared first on Washington National Cathedral .