I’ve entitled my presentation tonight “I Don’t Want To Do It.” That refers to my general understanding of the reaction of prophets to their call to be a prophet. Most seem to have a response that could be paraphrased as “I’d rather work at McDonalds than be a prophet!”
That also helps to explain what I mentioned last week - that part of our responsibility as Christians is to discern those who are called to various roles within the church, and one test of discerning a real prophet from a false prophet, to me, would be to see if they proclaim themself as a prophet or if they seem to enjoy being a prophet. To me, that would cause me to suspect that the call to prophecy is at least questionable. Prophets generally have a very hard life, as we’re going to see tonight. Most wouldn’t choose that life.
I asked you to read for tonight an excerpt from the Book of Exodus detailing the call of Moses, and the Book of Jonah. Some of you might wonder about me including Moses in our study. There is, after all, no book of prophecy called “The Book of Moses.” However, the 16 men who wrote the prophetic books of the Old Testament are not the only people the Bible refers to as prophets. Moses is described as “a prophet” in the Book of Deuteronomy, when he is recorded to have said that God will raise up for the people “a prophet like me.” So Moses is a prophet, and if the primary purpose of a prophet is to speak God’s Word to the people then it’s easy to see how Moses qualifies. I think it’s fair to say that with the exception of Jesus (and Jesus was God in the Flesh) no human being has ever spoken God’s Word more clearly or directly than Moses. In that sense he’s the classic prophet. Elijah is sometimes referred to as Israel’s greatest prophet, but I think that’s because Moses seems to exist on a level that no one can even be compared to in this sense at least.
When we speak about Moses and try to understand him, one of the things we have to do is deconstruct what Cecille B. DeMille did with him in the famous movie “The Ten Commandments.” I didn’t ask you to read Chapter 2, but we would have found only a very bare bones sketch of Moses’ early years - that Moses was born to a Hebrew woman, who wanted to spare him from being killed by the Egyptians, because Pharaoh, who was afraid because the Israelites had multiplied and become too numerous for the Egyptians to control, had ordered that “Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile.” Moses’ mother placed a 3 month old Moses into a basket and placed him among some reeds at a spot in the Nile where Pharaoh’s daughter would find him, and Pharaoh’s daughter adopted him. All that is portrayed in the movie, but from that point on DeMille engages in what we might call “excess.” There’s no suggestion in the Bible, for example, that Moses was seen as a potential future Pharaoh and was therefore in his own right a threat to anyone. The only reason Moses had to flee from Egypt was because he had killed an Egyptian man, and as Chapter 3 opens Moses was described as a simple shepherd, when he suddenly started to see visions and revelations of God. My point is that there was nothing particularly special about Moses. He wasn’t called to be a prophet because he was a great and powerful man or because he had lived an incredibly important or noteworthy life. The only thing noteworthy about him might be that, because of his childhood spent as the adopted grandson of a Pharaoh, he knew the right people in Egypt - but that clearly wasn’t enough to spare him from the fear of being punished for killing the man. So Moses is not insignificant, but he’s not especially glamorous either. There’s nothing about him that earns him the right to be a prophet - once again (a point I made last week) Moses’ call to be a prophet is yet another example of God calling whomever God chooses to call without any need to explain why God calls them.
Moses is described with the familiar story of the burning bush. God is revealed through the burning bush and instructs Moses to return to Egypt as the one who will free God’s people from bondage. It’s probably worth pointing out that Moses (at least at this point) isn’t instructed to go to the people of Israel. He is to go directly to Pharaoh. Prophets don’t just speak to God’s people. That’s an important point. Prophets speak to foreign nations as well - a point that’s going to be made when we reflect on Jonah as well. Moses would have known Pharaoh. Chapter 2 tells us that the old Pharaoh had died, so presumably his son is the new Pharaoh - that would make him Moses’ uncle by adoption. This Pharaoh is presumably the brother of Moses’ Egyptian mother. The thing that’s made abundantly clear in the story is that Moses doesn’t want to do this. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” he asks. The truth is that he’s afraid to return to Egypt. He’s already wanted for murder, remember, and now he’s going to be telling Pharaoh that Egypt has to release its Hebrew slaves, who were a huge part of Egypt’s labour force. In other words, he is not going to be a popular figure. Like all prophets he’s going to speak against the established order, and he comes up with lots of excuses in his conversation with God (remember that we learned last week from Habakkuk that prophets speak both for and with God) about why he shouldn’t be sent, or about why his mission would fail. “I don’t even know your name.” “I don’t think they’ll believe me.” God answers him pointedly. “My name is I Am That I Am.” “I’ll give you the power to do signs to prove yourself.” Finally it comes down to “God, I’m not a good speaker.” God becomes impatient. “I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.” Finally, Moses just lays it on the line: “Pardon your servant, Lord. PLEASE SEND SOMEONE ELSE!” And God has had it. “I told you my name. I’m giving you power. Now you say you can’t speak. Fine. I’ll tell you what to say and you can tell your brother Aaron what to say but you’re not getting out of this. I’m telling you to go to Pharaoh and you’re going to go to Pharaoh! Case closed!” The point seems to be that excuses don’t work with God. If God wants you to do something you’re going to do it. Some way and somehow you’re going to do it. That likely explains why prophets who don’t want to be prophets end up being prophets anyway. In the end, they simply have no choice. God’s call is too strong to be ignored or denied or resisted and God won’t let the call be ignored or denied or resisted.
Moving on to the Book of Jonah, we have one of the shortest books of the Old Testament attached to one of the most famous names and stories of the Old Testament. Everybody has heard of Jonah. But sometimes we forget that Jonah is a prophet, because the only thing that a lot of people seem to know about him is that he was the guy who got swallowed by the whale. It wasn’t a whale. It was a “great fish.” But that’s the image people have. But he was “Jonah son of Ammitai.” That’s all we really know about him as a person - and he was called to preach against “the great city of Nineveh.” That tells us that this prophecy (unlike most) doesn’t have the Babylonian conquest and exile in its background. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian Empire - the Empire that came before Babylon and was eventually conquered by Babylon. If you followed events in the military conflicts in Iraq over the years, it might help to know that Nineveh is on the outskirts of what today is Mosul, in Iraq. At the time God called Jonah to prophesy to it, it was probably the largest city in the world. In Chapter 3 it’s described as “a very large city” that took “three days to go through.” It’s significant that God’s instruction to Jonah is to “preach against Nineveh.” Apparently, he’s to go to this great city - the capital of his country’s enemy - and proclaim publicly that God is going to destroy Nineveh, and probably by extension the entire Assyrian Empire. You can imagine that Jonah expects he will not get a hearty welcome, and in any event, he simply doesn’t want to go.
Jonah’s immediate reaction to God’s call is - guess what - to run away! So he runs off to the nearest port and boards a ship - which means that assuming he’s in Israel when he receives the call and he’s boarding a ship in the Mediterranean that can only be heading west, he’s not only trying to refuse the call, he’s trying to get as far away as possible - because Nineveh is well to the east of Israel. It’s that decision that leads to the story of Jonah being swallowed by the great fish.
What do you make of that story. It’s tempting to just dismiss it outright as a myth. A great fish couldn’t swallow a human being and you surely couldn’t live for three days in its stomach if it did. There is a story from the 19th century of a man named James Bartley who claimed to have been swallowed whole by a sperm whale off the coast of the Falkland Islands and was supposedly found when his fellow sailors cut open the whale’s stomach about 36 hours later and found him still alive inside. There’s a lot of inconsistencies in the story, and most people doubt it, but it is apparently possible for a sperm whale to swallow a human whole, since they can swallow giant squid whole. But it’s generally accepted that you couldn’t survive in a whale’s stomach for more than a few minutes. There was an account about 10 years ago of a lobster diver off the coast of Massachussetts who found himself in the closed mouth of a humpback whale, but who wasn’t actually swallowed. But those are whale stories. There aren’t actually any fish that I’ve discovered (and I did some research on this) who could swallow a human whole. There’s a fish called a whale shark, whose mouth is big enough but whose throat wouldn’t be big enough because it only eats plankton and its throat is adapted for that. A large great white shark might be big enough to swallow a human whole, but that’s just not what they do. They bite and take chunks out of large prey. They don’t swallow it whole. So, did Jonah get swallowed by the “great fish” (whether it was a fish or a whale) or not? Well, as in a lot of biblical stories maybe taking it literally is the wrong approach. Maybe it’s a matter of what the story represents.
Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh and went to great lengths to avoid it. The “great fish” story certainly makes a point. For Christians, we probably think mostly of Jesus using this story of Jonah spending three days and nights in the belly of the fish as a prophecy of his own fate of spending three days and nights in the tomb. But in the specific context of this prophecy and when it was written, the point of the “fish story” seems to be that when God calls you, you can’t say “No.” The fish swallows Jonah and then spits Jonah out on dry land - presumably pretty much back where he came from. It’s as if God said “So. Did I get your attention yet?” All we really need to take from this account is that Jonah has no choice in the matter. After being spit out, Jonah hears God again: “Go to the great city if Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” So, he’s called to go to Nineveh as a prophet; he’s going to Nineveh as a prophet. But this is a bit different. It’s no longer “preach against” Nineveh. It’s now “proclaim to it the message I give you.” So Jonah goes and proclaims to the Ninevites that they have 40 days before they’re destroyed, basically. And lo and behold, what happens? The people of Nineveh believe him and they repent and God forgives them. It’s important to note that this is another of the stories that demonstrate that God is the God of the world and not just Israel. Nineveh would have had its own gods that they believed in, but they understand that the God of Israel was “God.” Even the King of Nineveh (probably another title for the Emperor of Assyria) acknowledges that this God is God. He doesn’t ask whatever gods the Ninevites believe in to save them. Instead, he says “Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.” And this is why Jonah didn’t want to be a prophet. He knew it too! “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” He’s upset with God. He didn’t want Nineveh forgiven. The Ninevites (the Assyrians) were Israel’s enemies; HIS enemies. He just wanted God to destroy them; not to warn them. So the prophecy depicts not only that God’s call has to be responded to; it establishes God as a God of mercy and compassion - even toward those whom God’s people consider their enemies.
Jonah’s prophecy has one of the bleakest endings of all the prophetic writings. Jonah apparently heads into the desert. God provides “a plant” that grows up and covers him with its shade, making his conditions bearable, and then the next day God sends “a worm” to destroy the plant. Jonah is left with nothing to comfort him - except, possibly, God’s presence, although Jonah seems to take little comfort from God. He’s just left angry and bitter. “When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.” But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?” “It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.” There’s a pathetic, almost childish tone to Jonah’s words. And God uses the plant and its fate to make a point - you were concerned about a single plant. Shouldn’t I be concerned with the people (and the animals, God says) of the biggest city in the world?”
And the prophecy ends on this bleak note. We never hear of Jonah’s fate. Did he die there? Did he finally get up and go back to Israel? Did he ever forgive God for being so merciful? Did he come to terms with the role he played in convincing Nineveh to repent? We don’t know. The story just ends on what I think of as a rather unsatisfying note. In a way, I want a sequel!
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