SERVICE 7/11/21 Jonah 3.1-5, 10, Heb. 9.24-end Until I came across this week’s Old Testament reading, I’d never looked at Jonah. All I knew was that he is famous for living inside a whale for 3 days and 3 nights. Thumbing through the OT to find the book of Jonah is like looking for a needle in a haystack; you need the index. The book is so short you can read it in a coffee break. The fragment that Jean read to us comes right in the middle. It has nothing to do with whales’ tummies, which at first was a bit disappointing. Resorting to Google: one of the listed questions I found on the subject is: ‘Is the book of Jonah a true story?’! The latest consensus of experts is ‘Probably not: Jonah was a real guy, a prophet in the 8th Century BC; the story is satirical’. And in any case, it was a ‘big fish’, not a whale. God had asked Jonah to read the riot act to the people of Nineveh, his home city in Iraq, now a pile of sand. God said to Jonah, “Tell them, please, that their badness can’t endure. If they don’t mend their ways soon, they will pay for it.” (Think of Greta Thunberg at CoP 26). But Jonah bottled out. He ran off and caught a boat to get as far away as he could. God acted to frustrate Jonah’s escape, culminating in his being chucked overboard by the crew in a storm and swallowed by a big fish. Inside the fish Jonah reflected on his purpose, and repented, whereupon the fish coughed him up on the shore. - In Jean’s reading this morning, Jonah is given a second chance. This time he obeyed God, went into Nineveh, and preached. The people of Nineveh listened, and they changed their ways. And God didn’t bring calamity upon them. In the remainder of the book, Jonah has a sulk. He had hung around outside the city and when the promised disaster did not come crashing down as he expected, he got cross. He told God: “You see, that’s why I ran away the first time; I always knew that you’d be too soft to go through with it.” God responded by putting Jonah through a little test. You can read about it over a coffee. The story of Jonah, with his second chance, reminds me of the film: Groundhog Day. In this story, Phil Connors, a cynical, world-weary TV reporter, gets another chance to live his day again. Not just once but time after time. Not through the device of being swallowed and regurgitated by a whale, or a groundhog for that matter, but simply by waking up each morning to the same alarm buzzer in a time loop. Phil had an intellect and he had memory: God’s gifts, which together would allow him to learn, if he wanted to. Stuck seemingly forever in this loop, he finally decided to engage with the world around him in a better way. Changing what he did changed the consequences. It changed his life. I love this film in the way it shows that Goodness is not intrinsic to any single act; it only becomes manifest in the consequences. Or to put it in another way: ‘The morality of an action is judged solely on its consequences’. God, Goodness, plays out on a timeline. So, if we want to be good effectually, we must make sure that the actions which follow today’s good intentions really do lead to good consequences down the line. Right now, for example, as well as the moral will to rein in our damage to the natural world, we need moral skill. In other words: we want the practical capabilities that will yield real results. All else is just fanciful. The consequences of resting on wishful thinking; the consequences of vain talk that shuns practical reality; the consequences of resolutions that fade when frustrated, will be our downfall, our punishment. Like Phil Connors in Groundhog Day, we must be able to acknowledge our mistakes, to learn from them as we go, and to keep going. We can’t be too proud, too stubborn, or too lazy. Each of us will need to commit to real sacrifice. - The letter to the Hebrews might be one of Paul’s; we don’t know. But more important than the question of authorship is its purpose. Unlike the Gentiles, to whom Paul wrote many letters, the Hebrews thought they already had the inside track on Holy wisdom through grandfather rights. They were stuck up: proud; hung up on their historic, priestly, high-and-mighty rituals that harked back to Moses. The writer was seeking to liberate the Hebrews from their slavery to these rituals, and to open their eyes to Christ’s message and purpose. Ritual, and anything else done without thought of its relevance to life, is a vain pastime. According to Luke’s gospel, Jesus cited Jonah as he faced up to the religious scholars of the day. He told them, ‘What Jonah was to Nineveh, the Son of Man is to this age. When Jonah preached to the Ninevites they turned their lives around. And yet, when I preach to you, all you want is miracles, and all you do is quibble.’ (Sound familiar?) Today’s extract from the epistle points out to the Hebrews that Christ didn’t head straight for their temple’s inner sanctum to lord it along with the high priests. He didn’t join them in their hiding away, making the same vain sacrifices over and over again. He went out into the world and mucked in with real people. Jesus showed, once, and for all, what sacrifice really means, and what reward awaits. He showed that every day is a gift of grace; a slice of time in which we can muck in and realise God’s will. Jeremy Sargent