How Not to Be
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’ So Jonah set out and went to Nineveh, according to the word of the Lord. Now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across. Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.
Alright—so if we take this passage that Rebecca just read for us at face value, it’s kind of nice, but it’s also… really boring. It’s just a passage in which Jonah, a prophet, is warning the people of the city of Nineveh they’re gonna be overthrown in forty days. And the people of the city heed this warning, and they immediately repent, and God decides not to destroy them. So easy sermon, right? I can just talk about how important it is to be good, God-fearing people, and God will be forever merciful and forgiving. Well that would not be doing the book of Jonah justice, and it was also be a very boring and shallow sermon.
So a lot of is probably know the basics of the story of Jonah—it’s the story of a reluctant prophet who eventually, after being swallowed by and imprisoned in the belly of a giant fish, gives into God’s command to prophesy to Nineveh—and as verse 10 tells us today, Nineveh repents, God forgives, and everyone’s happy, right?
Nope—in fact, Jonah is pissed. Jonah wants God to destroy the Ninevites. He doesn’t like the God is ultimately merciful and forgiving. He doesn’t like that God called him to prophesy and then didn’t even follow through with his threat of destroying the city. He yells at God, in chapter 4, verse 2, “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” And he’s angry about that! He even says that’s why he tried to avoid being a prophet— it wasn’t because he was scared, it wasn’t because he was humble; he tried to run away from God because he knew God was going to forgive the people of Nineveh, the people Jonah clearly is pretty prejudiced against.
Throughout the Bible, it does seem that God picks those you’d least suspect as prophets, but usually the prophets God chooses are at the very least compassionate. And they’re usually humble, simple, but ultimately brave people. Jonah doesn’t seem to be any of these things. From the very beginning of the story, he’s a coward— the story begins with Jonah running in the direction opposite Nineveh, and hitching a ride with some gentile sailors, which is how he gets on the open ocean and is eventually swallowed by the famous giant fish.
Now, Jonah is one of the shortest books in the Bible, so it’s hard to preach on it without getting into the whole story and all its context, but if we want to focus on passage Rebecca read for us today, then what I want to home in on is verse 5: “And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on a sackcloth.” They didn’t question Jonah’s prophesy at all—they believed him and in turn, believed God, and believed in God’s mercy, and so they turned from their debaucherous ways.
Let’s think about this sudden reversal to the good in contrast with Jonah’s behavior— Jonah supposedly a good, god-fearing Jew, spends this book running away from his duties—running away from direct orders from God. The only time he gets even vaguely repentant is when he’s in the belly of a fish, waiting to be digested, at which point God lets the fish vomit Jonah onto Nineveh’s shores. I think, considering the fact that he’s a coward and a jerk during this entire story, that his repentance wasn’t especially genuine; surely he was just scared of dying inside that fish. And Jonah never really gets any kind of redemption, he never gets a real come-to-God moment. At the end of this book, Jonah’s whining about God being soft, and so then God takes away the shade that was giving Jonah some relief where he was staying and asks Jonah,
You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; …and should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left?
And that’s how the book ends—with a question. No answer from Jonah, no epiphany from Jonah, no admitting he messed up, no admitting maybe the Ninevites weren’t so bad—just an apparently rhetorical question from God making it clear that the Ninevites, because they didn’t know better, don’t deserve to be destroyed.
This whole story, particularly Jonah’s wildly cruel and obnoxious reaction to the Ninevites’ change of heart and being spared by God, really got me thinking about the concept of schadenfreude— that is, taking pleasure in others’ misfortune or pain— and how it seems like today more than ever people are really taking pleasure in people’s downfalls. I think we’re all guilty of this, to an extent, right? Maybe you stumbled upon your high school bully’s Facebook page and maybe they’re not very successful and life, and maybe you’ve taken some secret joy in seeing that— but it goes so far beyond that—in the early days of covid, it was everywhere, and it came from both side of the political spectrum: first it came from the conservative right, as people in major cities were dying by the hundreds—people laughing at the deaths of “coastal elites;” but then things turned and as covid made its way to redder or more rural areas of the south and Midwest, some on the left pointed and laughed as if to say “I told ya so” as people were dying. It doesn’t get much crueler than that.
In an article from National Geographic about how it does, indeed, seem as if people are getting crueler these days, a Columbia University psychologist Colin Leach is quoted as saying “At its core, schadenfreude is a malicious disregard of another’s humanity.”
And this is what was happening with Jonah, right? He had absolutely no regard for the humanity of the Ninevites. He didn’t see them as fellow humans, he othered them, he saw them as less-than, he saw them as deserving of utter destruction simply because they didn’t know the same God as he did, simply because their culture was different than his. Thankfully, God didn’t see them this way. God is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, ready to relent from punishing” as Jonah says verbatim in chapter 4, verse 2. Honestly, Jonah sounds like a pretty miserable person. He runs from God, he gets angry when an entire civilization is spared from destruction— he’s so miserable that multiple times in his book he asks God to just kill him. He’d rather die than live under a gracious, loving, and forgiving God.
Later in that same article I referenced earlier, psychologist Colin Leach says, that feeling schendfreude is “often fueled by one’s own sense of inadequacy.”[i] So let’s think about our passage today—the Ninevites immediately do the right thing and turn to God when they hear Jonah gives them their warning… whereas Jonah, this whole time, has been running from God, has been doing everything in his power to ignore and disregard the orders and warnings God gives, and it takes a giant fish for him to finally relent, but even then it’s not genuine, as we see from his anger at the Ninevites being spared. I can’t help but think that Jonah feels insecure, feels ashamed, seeing how quickly these people he’s probably looked down in his whole life do the right thing, when he’s been running away from the right thing this whole time. I imagine that these feelings of anger come from his own sense of inadequacy and envy that he just doesn’t seem capable or willing to turn towards God and accept his fate and his orders.
But we’ve all been there, right? Hopefully not in the way Jonah’s been there where we dislike someone or a group just because they’re different than us, which leads us to these feelings of inadequacy or jealousy—we’re human, after all—and we’ve all had that thought “why them and not me?” I definitely had those thoughts when I was trying to get pregnant again and people around me seemed to have no problem—it’s an awful feeling! Because it’s valid, and it’s human, but it doesn’t feel good. So it makes sense that Jonah is so miserable if his baseline is malice and envy.
So it seems to me, that the book of Jonah, which is more fantastical and over-the-top and ridiculous than maybe any other book in the Bible is sort of a lesson on how not to be— don’t be like Jonah! Petulant, jealous, avoidant, he’s kind of the worst!
Well in my research for this sermon, I discovered that there’s an opposite of schadenfreude—it’s freudenfreude— finding joy in other people’s success and happiness, rather than misfortune. Some psychologists actually created a program called Fredenfreude Enhancement Training, and they give a couple tips on how we can work on feeling more freudenfreude in our lives. The first is to ask questions, and to show an active interest in other people’s happiness. The creators of this program discovered that even if, initially, your heart isn’t in it, and maybe you’re still feeling some pangs of jealousy, that will gradually fade away as you make an effort to connect, and understand how a person got to this positive point their life. Another way to build feelings of freudenfreude is—and this is my favorite one—to “view individual success as a communal effort.”[ii] No one gets to the top alone—we have friends or family who have supported us; we have advisors, mentors, the list goes on—and this helps us to realize that when we work together and support on another, we can all get to where we need to be. It’s not, “ugh, I’ll never get there, I’m not as good or as smart as that person,” but rather, “we can all get to this amazing place in life if we have the supports around us, and if we built one another up, and isn’t that wonderful?!”
For this epiphany season, I seem to have fallen into a theme unintentionally—connection. Two weeks ago we talked about the fact that the need for social connection and the lack thereof in this post-pandemic world does so much harm, makes people fall prey to echo chambers of rage; and last week we talked about how Jesus was that connection between our humanity and the perfection of heaven that is possible here on earth when we do the work Jesus calls us to do—to make sure everyone is housed, fed, and safe. And today, we’re talking about connecting with others who are different than us and rejoicing in their goodness, their success, their happiness, in order that we can all feel that happiness in some capacity—because it really is a group effort, a communal effort.
So let’s not be like Jonah. Let’s not be upset or angry when we see people around us surviving and thriving. Let’s not fall prey to echo chambers of rage and jealousy, let’s not rejoice in the misfortune of others. It’s not a good way to be. Rather, let’s work to connect with one another, and to really support each other as we try to make our way in this cruel world. Let’s forgive and rejoice when people we once despised change their ways by really seeing their humanity; let’s rejoice when we see people’s happiness; let’s try to release some of our jadedness and cynicism in this new year, as we continue to try to connect to one another and connect this earth to heaven. Amen.
[i] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/cruel-schadenfreude-misfortune-pleasure-empathy?loggedin=true&rnd=1705771211170
[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/25/well/mind/schadenfreude-freudenfreude.html
