Over the edge. That is where so many employers seem to be pushing their workers these days. Perhaps you have felt it yourself. You work hard, sometimes too hard in what seems like 24/7 and even then the work just never stops. Your job drains you, mentally, physically and even spiritually. You put in long days to the point of exhaustion, struggle with workplace stress and wind up tired, irritable and uninspired. It feels as though your job is killing you.
Of course, things could always be worse. In the May-June 2005 issue of “Mental-Floss,” that is a magazine and business journal, they published a list of jobs that really do kill. Using statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a job familiar to our little corner of the world, “timber cutter,” ranked as the most dangerous job in America, with an annual fatality rate of 117.8 per 100,000 workers.
But timber cutters are only part of the story. Between 1980 and 1887, more than 100,000 people died in work-related accidents and these deaths occurred in the construction industry (19 percent), the transportation industry (17 percent) and in manufacturing (15 percent). Mining, agriculture, trash collecting and job related auto accidents also ranked quite high.
The ten most dangerous jobs in America are: timber cutters, fishers, pilots and navigators, structural metal workers, drivers, roofers, electrical power installers, farm workers, construction laborers and truck drivers. What it seems to boil down to is, working can be hazardous to your health.
No figures exist – at least no figures I could find – telling us just how dangerous it is to be a pastor these days, although considering my health insurance premiums it must be pretty hard to keep us healthy and reliable anecdotal evidence suggests that lingering too long at food-laden tables during church potluck dinners could be a huge problem as well. In reality, all joking aside, preachers who live and serve in parts of the world beyond the United States, probably have a far better idea of how dangerous it is to be a pastor than I ever could.
To this list, however, we would be remiss if we forgot to add the category, “Biblical prophet.” I don’t think you could find very many jobs in the Biblical era more dangerous than being a prophet. They frequently got killed as a routine part of doing their day-to-day jobs.
Jonah knew those scary statistics, well scary reality at the very least, all too well. He knew how hazardous and difficult it could be to speak for God to a bunch of people who claimed to be people of God and yet didn’t live as people of God. Perhaps Jonah, and maybe even other prophets as well, thought God should give them hazardous duty pay.
As a result, Jonah was far from being an enthusiastic participant when a word from God outlining his next mission crosses his in-box as it were. I think Jonah might have even heard the old words from Mission Impossible, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it is to go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” The only problem is, God doesn’t put in that clause saying, “should you choose to accept it.” God tells us what to do and when we are to do it.
It must have sounded a lot like an impossible mission. You can almost hear the Mission Impossible theme playing in the background. God is sending Jonah to the capital of Assyria, one of Israel’s most powerful enemies and God was asking Jonah to preach against that city. Jonah probably thought he needed more than hazardous duty pay of this assignment.
Think about it this way, it would be like God telling one of us today to fly to Baghdad, Damascus, Riyadh or Kandahar, then we are to walk the streets, calling out to the Muslim extremists to repent of their sins. Make sure your life insurance is up to date before you leave. Would any of us really want that job? I didn’t think so. I can promise you I wouldn’t want it either.
So Jonah does what most of us would do under the same circumstances and bolts in the opposite direction, taking off for Tarshish in an effort to escape the presence of the Lord. Psychologists tell us we all have a basic instinct to fight or to run away. Jonah’s fight or flight instinct, as the psychologists refer to it, is working really, really well and he chooses flight. I don’t blame him. So, he hops a boat, encounters a storm, is thrown overboard, and is swallowed up whole by the now famous fish, or whale whichever you prefer that we now teach our children about. Finally he is spewed out as fish puke on dry land.
You might think God would believe poor Jonah to have had enough, would let him off the hook, no pun intended, and then would send someone else in his place, but no. The word of the Lord comes to Jonah again: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, and you will, is to go to Nineveh, that great city and proclaim the message I will tell you.”
Well apparently this time Jonah has come to the realization that there are fates far worse than death and God knows about all of them. So, as I am sure we can all imagine, reluctantly, our hero, Jonah starts to make his way to Nineveh and then walks to streets of the city, still smelling, probably of fish and definitely of fish puke and I am sure looking very much like he has seen better days, after all, he had just spent three days giving a rather large fish indigestion. Jonah enters the city and walks and shouts all at the same time. “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” he prophesied. Jonah shouts and shouts like some kind of madman. This prophet who couldn’t possibly look too much like a prophet cries out against the 120,000 or so residents of a, for that day, enormous and powerful city, not knowing if they will hear him and listen to him… or just start off my tearing him to pieces and then making him vulture food. Hey he had already been fish food, why not now bird food. I feel certain that Jonah expected the people to give him strange looks and then to just outright ignore him was the best case scenario for his walk through Nineveh.
To everyone’s surprise, especially Jonah’s, the Ninevites actually did hear and took to heart what Jonah had to say. They professed a belief in God and even more, they repented of their sins. They proclaim a fast and remove their normal everyday garments and in their place they put on sackcloth and ashes. Sackcloth and ashes were worn during times of grief but they were also the Biblical era equivalent of a prayer of confession. From the oldest citizen all the way down to the youngest child in town, from the king down to the peasant, they wanted to show God their change of heart and attitude. Yes, even the king of Nineveh gets up off his throne, took off his robes and crown, covered himself sackcloth and ashes, and sits down again, not on his thrown, but in the ashes. He was serious. He called on the Ninevites to do the same. He asked everyone in the city to turn from their evil ways and from the violence that both is within them and on their hands. Can you imagine John McClain, our mayor asking all of Diboll to repent and walk around in burlap clothes with ashes on their heads? We would think he had lost his mind and run him out of town. The king asked everyone in the city to turn from their evil ways and return to a faithful worship of God.
When God sees what they do, he changes his mind. Nineveh doesn’t become another Sodom and Gomorrah. They don’t all die in a cloud of fire; they love. Bummer. Apparently, God is just a total big softy. Well, that is at least what our friend Jonah was thinking by this point in the story.
He goes over the edge. Think about it. Our hero takes on this killer job, a job God almost kills him forcing him to take, and what does God do? God relents and lets this no account city live. Why in the world would God ever do a thing like that? They deserve to die?
So Jonah decides to sit down right there outside of town and have himself a pity party. So, God sends Jonah a vine to shade his head and that makes Jonah happy, well sort of, it maybe makes him a little bit happy. But, the pity party isn’t over quite yet. God sends a worm to eat away the inside of the vine causing it to die. Now Jonah is really steamed because he has no shade on his head.
Jonah is mad. He is angry. He is angry with God for not stomping the entire city of Nineveh into a mud puddle. Jonah wanted to see a repeat of Sodom and Gomorrah. Beyond all that, Jonah is now peeved because the shade he had from the vine was gone too. So we find Jonah sitting there getting his head sunburned, stewing away. He was having a good ole pity party.
Grace was a concept of which Jonah clearly didn’t have a clear understanding. Jonah wanted to see Nineveh get what they deserved. Never mind that what Nineveh deserved is what all of us deserve. But, even if we set that aside, what Nineveh deserved was what Jonah himself deserved.
It is interesting to compare Jonah’s attitude with that of Abraham before God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham spent his time trying to talk God out of destroying the two evil cities. Jeremiah wept over the sins of the people as he saw them fall into God’s punishment. Jonah, on the other hand, is angry because God didn’t destroy Nineveh.
There is a message for us in this story of old, but it has nothing to do with how dangerous our work-world occupation may or may not be or even how dangerous it can be when we are in the service of our sovereign God. The lesson has everything to do with God’s grace.
As I think about this story I just keep thinking about how much we are more like Jonah than most of us care to admit. We can actually see yet another example of this when Jesus tells the Parable of the Workers in the Field and how the workers who had worked all day got angry because they got paid the same as those who had only worked a couple of hours. We want everyone to get what they deserve. No, better, we want them to get what we think they deserve. It really doesn’t matter much to us about grace, unless, of course, we are the recipients of that divine grace.
The danger isn’t in the occupation we hold. The danger comes when we have preconceived notions about how God is supposed to function and operate in the world around us. We think it is our world when in reality it is God’s world. Yet if we volunteer to serve God with our own agenda, our own job description our own outcome statements in hand – we’re setting ourselves up for great disappointment and there is a pretty good chance a pity party is soon to follow. If you don’t believe me, you could, of course, ask Jonah.
The message of the book of Jonah is really about one thing above all else and it has nothing to do with fish or whales or any other sea creature. It is about the grace of God. We, as people of faith need to hear the word of God and obey it. When we do, we will find grace. Jonah himself found grace when he tried to run away from God’s call. God’s grace was found in a fish. When Jonah followed God’s call the result was life, not death. When Jonah finally followed God’s instructions he saw, he didn’t like it, but he saw the possibilities for renewal and regeneration for the people of Nineveh. New life comes from obeying God, even when we think we’re in a killer job, because God’s grace is always so present in our lives and in the lives of others.
Jonah ran away from his job and he found the grace of God. It was grace that Jonah saw in his own life and then was passed on to the people of Nineveh. That grace is there for us too.
