Jonah 3.10-4.11, Matthew 20.1-16
The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity - 24 September 2017
Queen Camel Together at Ten, West Camel Methodist Church
Fr Ian was a priest I truly admired, though we differed on many things. He was as high church as it is possible to go, his small chapel a glistening shrine to Mary, his liturgy full of smells, bells and all manner of ecclesial embellishments, plenty of them worn about his person during worship. He was in there every day, morning, noon and night, often alone, interceding for his parishioners, a model of the old-style cleric who poured himself out uncomplainingly for over 35 years in that one place. [1]
I admired all that about him: and also this - that although he was utterly convinced that scripture and tradition firmly said ‘no’ to women priests, and although he campaigned tirelessly at local and national level in the cause of keeping the priesthood a male-only preserve, eventually Fr Ian admitted that God was doing a new thing; and he chose not to leave the Church, but to stay. Not only stay, but in time Fr Ian became one of the most faithful encouragers of women priests in our locality, quietly and gently involved in their training and pastoral support. Fr Ian never ever changed his mind about what scripture and tradition said about that issue, but he grasped a deeper truth about God. Fr Ian had perceived what Jesus meant by heeding ‘The Sign of Jonah’.
On a few occasions I asked him why he had stayed in the C of E after the vote on women priests, when so many of his fellow-traditionalists, many of his closest friends, had either left the church or - worse still - stayed and sulked, moaned, stopped cooperating, made life difficult for everyone else around them. He would tell me, “I don’t want to be a Jonah. Even though I really don’t understand it, even though I really can’t believe it, nevertheless if this is the direction God is taking us, then I will learn to live with it, because I want to stay faithful to the God I love and the church I love, and the people he has sent me to serve.”
We entered the story of Jonah in today’s reading some time after his attempted escape from the mission to the Ninevites which God had called him to; after his three days inside the whale, after he had reluctantly gone to Ninevah and done what God asked him in the first place, and the Ninevites had accepted his message and turned to God in great numbers, much to Jonah’s despair.
Jonah would have preferred that God had judged these people mercilessly, that God had stayed true to the image that Jonah had of God from scripture and tradition; but Jonah had perceived that, despite what he had so far preferred to think, the truth about God’s nature was that He is gracious and merciful, full of love, slow to anger, always ready to withhold punishment, and that whether Jonah liked it or not, this was what God wanted to show to the Ninevites. Jonah didn’t much like this God - far too forgiving - and so he got angry with God and so full of self-pity about his own misdirected vocation that he asked God to take his life from him, “for it is better for me to die than to live,” he said. And in reply God simply asked, ‘Is it right for you to be angry with me?’
When Jesus’ religious critics asked him to prove himself by giving them a sign, he told them that the only sign they needed to heed was ‘The Sign of Jonah’. [2] It is the only sign which we need to heed. It asks us to acknowledge that God will always keep moving beyond the rules we have set for Him, he will always transcend our expectations, always challenge our traditions. The Sign of Jonah asks us to pay heed to this question above all: when God does this, how will we respond?
Christians not wanting to be Jonahs, have engaged in this struggle through the centuries. In the face of the growth of Nazism many Christians began to acknowledge painfully that their reading of scripture and their cultural traditions had cultivated an antisemitism which had deadly consequences for the Jewish people; and sensing that God was asking them to move in a new direction, they had to face the question of whether to turn and resist, at the probable cost of their livelihoods and even their lives, or whether to continue to be carried on the tide of conventional opinion. In an earlier time and for some centuries, church leaders, Christian politicians and business people had been convinced that scripture and tradition justified slavery - that, in one minister’s words, slavery ‘stood as an institution of God.’ [3] And when the tide of the Spirit began to shift towards abolition, these believers had to face the question of whether to move with it, or to sustain their present position and resist change.
This may be a difficult insight for some of us, but if we are to be truly ‘biblical’ then we must accept that there will be times when God wants to move us beyond what we think scripture has been telling us all these years, to open our eyes to new insights in His Word. It may be hard for us to take, but the Sign of Jonah demonstrates that our traditions are not set in stone, but movable objects which we may or may not move along with, as God reshapes them by his Spirit.
For God does not play by our rules - God does not follow our moral logic - and ‘Jesus tells us his parables not to give us moral guidance but to reveal the nature of God.’ [4]
If we were to take today’s parable, of the labourers in the vineyard, as a guide to our behaviour in the workplace, then it would be a scandal to people on all points of the economic spectrum. It would be a scandal to trades unionists for the unfair rates of pay between those who had worked all day and those who worked just one hour: heretical behaviour to those convicted that workers’ wellbeing depends on their gaining a fair wage. And it would be scandalous to business capitalists for the money wasted on the extravagant gesture towards the latecomers: heretical behaviour to those convicted that business must thrive by constantly driving wages down. But all that would be to miss the point.
By our parable Jesus is not teaching us that it is morally acceptable to take advantage of workers who bear the heat and burden of a twelve hour shift by paying workers who work only one hour the same wage, and when the all-day workers complain, to insist on the letter of the contract rather than acting in its spirit.
Rather, Jesus uses this parable to describe the radical graciousness of God’s grace, the outrageousness of the divine love, a love that surpasses human understanding at every level, logical, aesthetic and moral. By this parable Jesus communicates the outrageousness of our Father’s love for us. He reveals the nature of God rather than endorses our human sense of justice. This is the lesson Jesus gives us in this parable, asking us to hear it, understand it, believe it and act on it. [5]
This is a Sign of Jonah moment, for it causes us to view God once again moving beyond our ethical expectations of him into totally new territory, it challenges us in our traditions and ‘biblical’ understanding to acknowledge that ‘God’s morality is not the same as ours, or more precisely, that we understand the divine morality only very imperfectly.’ [6]
The parable reminds us that our morality is based on a strict law of exchange, a system of quid pro quo, of equal actions and reactions, deeply attached to the idea of equality or fairness. The parable invites us to acknowledge the destructive features of this morality, where we resent those who rise above or go ahead of the rest of the group, and do all we can to ensure that the nail that sticks up is pounded down. Jesus corrects this view of God’s morality. He teaches that God does not deal with us by the morality of exchange, but rather by the generosity of grace. If God were to deal with us according to human justice we would long ago have perished.
‘Are you envious because I am generous?’, God asks you. Does the good fortune of the other make you unhappy, are you resentful of the beautiful, and the strong and the successful, and in particular, do you resent the fortunate ones, those who are most blessed and graced by God?
‘Are you envious because I am generous?’, God wants to know. Does the the happiness of these others make you deeply unhappy? Does it matter so much to you that you should have a relative advantage over others, that you should be better off than they? Can you not appreciate that in God’s economy there is absolute gain for all, because you only really want the relative gain of some, that is, yourselves? Do you only feel that you are succeeding in life when your friend begins to fail? [7]
Are you a Jonah moaning under a tree when others do perhaps unduly well? Especially those you thought you ought to disapprove of because you think the bible or your tradition tells you so?
You know, church people are usually very proper and just, fair-minded and orderly, so God help the wretch who finds outrageous grace. Our very moral rectitude can make us cruel. It is one thing to be ‘scriptural’ in following the commandments of Moses and the ethical teachings of Paul, but let us understand the fact, patent on every page of the gospels, that Jesus was an outrageous character who took church people - who he called Pharisees - seriously only as examples of who God was not, how not to act, and of those who would not enter God’s kingdom. Clearly for Jesus God deals with us outrageously. [8]
I recall another minister, steeped in the scriptures, a great preacher and expositor of The Word. He began his ministry by applying his convictions in the area of baptism. He refused to baptise children, and also adults who were unable to make a profession of faith. As he saw it, this would be against the teachings of scripture; he insisted that the only way for people to value those teachings was this hard way of exclusion which he applied to them. And then one day he was asked to take his turn on the deanery hospital chaplaincy rota, on-call to a major hospital 24 hours each week. And the very first situation which God presented him with was an emergency baptism, the baptism of a premature baby born with only hours to live. It was his Sign of Jonah moment. You can guess the effect that it had on his own church baptism policy from that day on.
I once spent weeks preparing to make a keynote speech at a Christian anti-poverty rally. I went about my preparation by researching my subject assiduously, by studying and studying to draw on related themes in the scriptures, by writing and rewriting the talk until the words were just the right length, and just the right balance of fact and eloquence. I felt this would have a great impact on the audience, which was to include many opinion-formers and gatekeepers in the community: politicians, business leaders, civil servants and so on. My speech was well-received; but another one stole the limelight. It was given by a young mother who briefly shared her struggle to make ends meet on invalidity benefits. It was the first time she had ever stood ona stage to address an audience. She was barely audible, shook with nerves, lost her way a couple of times. But the room was deeply moved by her honesty in sharing, and the policy discussions which followed afterwards had her and her situation at their heart. My precious talk forgotten, I felt vexed at first, then jealous, and then rather foolish, at my anger and enviousness in how that event had played out.
In the weeks following, it was good to see that young woman go on to advise local councillors and government ministers, and to play a part in making some positive - if relatively short-lived - changes to welfare policy at the time. It was outrageous that God should use a contribution so modest and imperfect to make such a difference; especially compared to my tremendous effort which was instantly forgotten. But that’s how God deals with us - outrageously; and we should ‘be doubly careful to include a little outrageousness in our lives’. [9]
So, as God keeps on loving the world in ways we find hard to imagine, Jesus teaches that love does not live in the world of quid pro quo, love is not a contract; it is a wonder and a miracle. He teaches that the only sign we need to guide us is the Sign of Jonah. So come on, dearly beloved, let us never stop asking ourselves: why be envious because he is generous?
Notes
[1] Fr Ian is a composite of two or three Anglican priests in the Catholic tradition who have lived the struggle and demonstrated the character I discuss here, although I pay particular respect to the late Fr Ian Brooks, 36 years priest of St Paul’s, Croxteth.
[2] Matthew 12.38-41.
[3] Why Did So Many Christians Support Slavery? Key reasons advanced by southern church leaders, Christian History Issue 33, 1992.
[4] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace, preached on 18 September, 2005. I’m grateful to Paul Nuechterlein, Girardian Lectionary Reflections Year A, Proper 20A for the link to the late Robert Hamerton-Kelly’s words.
[5] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace.
[6] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace.
[7] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace, altered.
[8] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace, altered.
[9] Robert Hamerton-Kelly, Outrageous Grace.
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