1. Jonah appears before us as a prophet on whom has been placed a burden that he is trying to shirk. He is commanded to go to the capital city of the fierce and merciless enemies of his people, and to proclaim the destruction of that city if its inhabitants do not repent of their sins.
Nineveh was the home of rapacity, injustice, violence, and cruelty, conducted on a truly imperial scale; and God, speaking to Jonah, says, “Their wickedness is come up before me.” That proud city had sent forth its desolating armies into neighbouring kingdoms, through mere lust of conquest, and had aroused the intensest hatred of every conquered nation, and no less that of every nation which sympathized with the oppressed. The great city of the East must perish; and yet, only forty days before the appointed day of ruin, a voice of warning should reach it, proclaiming the justice, yet implying the tenderness, of God. Of that message of mercy Jonah was to be the bearer.
While God, then, was moved by the grace, compassion, and mercy of which Jonah speaks so admirably, and desired through the ministration of Jonah to bring the Ninevites to repentance, that He might save them, the preacher whom He chose was full of hatred toward them, and refused to go because he desired their destruction.
2. Jonah represents the national feelings, which he shared. Why did he refuse to go to Nineveh? Not because he was afraid of his life, or thought the task hopeless. He refused because he feared success. He had been brought up in the most narrow period of Jewish orthodoxy-the time when Israel believed in the limitation of Divine sympathy to her own work and her own borders. She looked upon herself as the only child of the human family on whom the eye of the Father could complacently gaze. It was for her the earth was allowed to bloom. It was for her the natural mercies of God were still continued. It was for her the thunders of Divine judgment were prevented from falling. She believed herself to be the salt of the earth-that which kept the earth alive. All heathen lands were outside the sympathy of the Eternal. They moved in a circle of their own-a circle which had no point of contact with the plan of the world. The kingdom of God was a Jewish kingdom. The providence of God was a Jewish providence. The triumph of God was a Jewish triumph. Into this faith Jonah was born; in this faith he grew. He was reared in the belief of the tribal sympathy of God. He reached manhood in the persuasion that the salvation of the world meant the salvation of Israel, and that the climax of Divine grace would be attained in the glory of the Jewish nation.
Jewish prophets preached to Jews, and to Jews only. They often gave utterance concerning foreign nations, but only in their own land, or if in exile, as in the case of Ezekiel, still to their own people. Jonah is in an unheard-of position when commanded to bear his testimony in a foreign land, among Gentiles and heathen. Then the sequel, and indeed the whole cause of the book, make it manifest that the real purpose of his errand is to bring the Ninevites to repentance in order that the threatened destruction of their city may be averted. Thus it is to be an errand of mercy-and that to the heathen-a strange idea to come to a Jew! God's goodness was being stretched rather too far if it was going to take in Nineveh. Jonah did not want it to escape. If he had been sent to destroy it, he would probably have gone gladly. He grudged that heathen should share Israel's privileges, and probably thought that gain to Nineveh would be loss to Israel. It was exactly the spirit of the prodigal's elder brother. The thing that God did in sparing the city “displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry. And he prayed unto the Lord, and said, I pray thee, O Lord, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.” That was the secret of his disobedience. He was indignant that the Lord should care for the haughty heathen city; indignant that he, a Jewish prophet, should be charged to call an alien people to repentance; rather let the doom come down upon them without warning and without hope.
Israel was set among the nations, not as a dark lantern, but, as the great lampstand in the Temple court proclaimed, to ray out light to all the world. Jonah's mission was but a concrete instance of Israel's charge. The nation was as reluctant to fulfil the reason of its existence as the Prophet was. Both begrudged sharing privileges with heathen dogs, both thought God's care wasted, and neither had such feelings towards the rest of the world as to be willing to be messengers of forgiveness to them. All sorts of religious exclusiveness, contemptuous estimates of other nations, and that bastard patriotism which would keep national blessings for our own country alone, are condemned by this story. In it dawns the first faint light of that sun which shone at its full when Jesus healed the Canaanite's daughter, or when He said, “Other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.”1 [Note: A. Maclaren.]
It is frequently remarked that a certain individual is “very exclusive”; or that certain society, supposed to comprehend within itself many desirable qualities, “is a very exclusive society.” The expression is invariably held to be of the most complimentary nature imaginable, and the grande dame who could achieve the reputation of being the most exclusive of her time was the grandest dame of all! Still more remarkable was a local article on Old Trinity, New York, in the columns of the New York Herald, in which the writer evidently intended to express himself in the most complimentary terms regarding this church, and he therefore described it as “the most wealthy and exclusive church in New York.” But why “exclusive”? the average reader would inquire. Is the ministry of the gospel to be judged by a curious social standard that holds up exclusiveness rather than inclusiveness as a cardinal virtue? And whom does it exclude? Is it the poor only who are excluded, because it is, as its chronicler describes, a “wealthy” church? Or is it the absolutely sinful and immoral who are excluded from the teaching of Him who declares that He came to save sinners? Or is it the ill-clad, or the ill-bred, or the people who, though sufficiently well-to-do and well-clad and well-bred, are still not “in society”? It would be interesting to learn just what people or class of people are excluded by an “exclusive” church. To be exclusive is to exclude. Now, the note of the day, in all its higher and nobler trend of thought, is to include, to share, to communicate. Emerson has remarked that “exclusiveness excludes itself.” All that we keep out we go without. If we admit no one we deprive ourselves of every one. If we admit a few, in order that we may lay that flattering unction of excluciveness to our souls, we exclude the many. There is a great universal love which the world only dimly comprehends. There is a transcendent greatness of life into which every soul may and should enter. There is the joy of possessing, and the infinitely greater joy of sharing, all spiritual possessions. If you have greater knowledge, better manners, finer culture, do not exclude those who have less, but include and share, and thus find in it its divinest sweetness. Exclusiveness is the attribute of the barbarian, the savage, or the defective person. Why should it be affected by those whose greatest glory should lie in the inclusiveness of all human aid and human affections?1 [Note: Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful, 71.]
3. Jonah was ordered to forsake his own people and be the first missionary to the heathen. Only by a noble submission and denial of his own will and his own wisdom could Jonah yield to the command of God; and only through a not less severe struggle against the Divine Spirit could the servant of Jehovah renounce a mission to which his Lord had called him. Of that inward conflict the Word of God says nothing; it only gives us the result of it, which is very sorrowful. We read: “But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord; and he went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish: so he paid the fare thereof, and went down into it, to go with them unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord.”
We behold the recreant prophet of the Lord, false to the high inspirations that sought to fill his heart, seeking shelter on board a ship that will bear him far away to a land where the name of Nineveh is unknown. In a little the sails are spread to a favouring breeze, “the ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,” and the vessel is speeding its way “o'er the wild waste of waters.” The prophet has turned his back alike upon his mission and upon his God.
When we read Dr. Brooks' sermon on “Going up to Jerusalem” it seems to have a prophetic character, as though the preacher, in urging upon his hearers to gain some clearer perception of the appointed result toward which the steady tendency of their lives was growing, was thinking and speaking of himself. Life was changing for him now to its last appointed phase. From this time his own face was set, like that of the Master before him, to go up to Jerusalem; and when friends remonstrated and would fain hold him back, he went steadily forward, and as they looked after him in his stride toward the end, they were amazed. “Do not pray for easy lives. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks. If the life which you have chosen to be your life is really worthy of you, it involves self-sacrifice and pain. If your Jerusalem really is your sacred city, there is certainly a cross in it. Ask God to fill you with Himself, and then calmly look up and go on. Go up to Jerusalem expecting all things that are written concerning you to be fulfilled. Disappointment, mortification, misconception, enmity, pain, death, these may come to you, but if they come to you in doing your duty it is all right.”1 [Note: A. V. G. Allen, Phillips Brooks: Memories of His Life, 471.]
4. Jonah did not suppose that he could literally escape from the presence of God. He did not suppose that there were corners in the universe, still less in the inhabited globe, from which the presence and power of its Maker are excluded. The words “from the presence of the Lord” should be rendered “from being before the Lord.” It was not God's inevitable and encompassing presence, but his own sense of standing before Him as His servant and minister, from which Jonah fied. Distinguish between God's actual, matter-of-fact, unseen, but all-encompassing presence and our personal sense of it. From the former, escape is impossible; from the latter, it is, alas! only too easy. What Jonah wanted was a distraction that should relieve him from the sense of duty which belonged to his prophet-conscience, from those scruples which the mistaken patriot within him would fain have crushed. He would change the mental and spiritual atmosphere; he would turn his back on a country where all that met the eye spoke of the power and reality of the Sinaitic revelation; he would interest himself in human life, under other and different aspects; the language, the commerce, the customs, if not the religion, of the Spanish seaport might give a turn to his thoughts which would enable him to forget the past. So he “went down to Joppa, and found a ship going to Tarshish.”
What most stands in the way of the performance of duty is irresolution, weakness of purpose, and indecision. On the one side are conscience and the knowledge of good and evil; on the other are indolence, selfishness, love of pleasure, or passion. The weak and ill-disciplined will may remain suspended for a time between these influences; but at length the balance inclines one way or the other, according as the will is called into action or otherwise. If it be allowed to remain passive, the lower influence of selfishness or passion will prevail; and thus manhood suffers abdication, individuality is renounced, character is degraded.… It was a noble saying of Pompey, when his friends tried to dissuade him from embarking for Rome in a storm, telling him that he did so at the great peril of his life: “It is necessary for me to go,” he said; “it is not necessary for me to live.” What it was right that he should do, he would do, in the face of danger and in defiance of storms.1 [Note: S. Smiles, Character (ed. 1874), 192.]
Deep in his meditative bower,
The tranquil seer reclined;
Numbering the creepers of an hour,
The gourds which o'er him twined.
To note each plant, to rear each fruit
Which soothes the languid sense,
He deem'd a safe, refined pursuit,-
His Lord, an indolence.
The sudden voice was heard at length,
“Lift thou the prophet's rod!”
But sloth had sapp'd the prophet's strength,
He fear'd, and fled from God.
Next, by a fearful judgment tamed,
He threats the offending race;
God spares;-he murmurs, pride-inflamed,
His threat made void by grace.
What?-pride and sloth! man's worst of foes!
And can such guests invade
Our choicest bliss, the green repose
Of the sweet garden-shade?2 [Note: J. H. Newman, Verses on Various Occasions.]
