The Third Sunday before Advent, 7 November 2021, during the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow.
In our rapidly-overheating world one of the many myths currently being busted is the myth that we human beings always put our survival first. It is true of other species; who, ‘when confronted by an impending threat, such as winter, invest great resources into avoiding or withstanding it: by migrating or hibernating, for example. Humans are a different matter. It seems that the more we learn about the chronic threat of climate and ecological breakdown, the more we go out of our way to compromise our survival. [1]
We are more engaged than ever before in those activities fatally damaging our planet, like we’re hell-bent on ever-more coal-burning, car use, deforestation, throwaway food production, and so on. Is this behaviour of ours a wilful last-ditch binge like we’re guzzling all the buffet and booze left on the Titanic? Or is it rather that because we’ve been so poorly informed - often deliberately misinformed [2] - on this topic that we’ve just not realised the impact of what we’ve been doing?
The book of Jonah has only four short chapters. I commend it to you, because as well as being very funny it’s a text which can speak to our times. At the start we find God distressed by the behaviour of the people of Nineveh; it’s only at the very end that God explains his concerns to Jonah: God is troubled, he says, that the people of Nineveh ‘do not know their right hand from their left’.
What could that mean? The context is that Nineveh, on the eastern bank of the holy River Tigris was the flourishing capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire: Nineveh the Great, they called it, transformed by King Sennacherib into a capital worthy of his vast empire through one of the most ambitious building projects in ancient history, in which he expanded the size of the city, constructed great city walls, numerous temples, a royal garden, and the Southwest Palace, which Sennacherib called his ‘Palace without Rival’. For several decades Nineveh was the largest city in the world, three days walk across, according to the book of Jonah. [3]
We can imagine that life in Nineveh in Jonah’s time was as comfortable as is life in any of our affluent cities today: its people well-supplied with luxury goods and comfort foods in and out of season, entertained and cultured, busy with industry and finance, new homes, new builds, the work of constant expansion. And yet, despite all this greatness they enjoyed, a compassionate God saw how the Ninevites had become a people who didn’t know their right hand from their left, a people - in other words - losing their way, troubled in their ease, psychically impoverished in their wealth.
Were they troubled in knowing that their great city of empire thrived at the expense of nature: clearing land, diverting watercourses, demolishing forests, carving quarries out of hillsides: all to facilitate the building of their homes and stadia and streets? Was their psychic unease rooted in a shamed awareness that their comfort came through other people’s suffering: the native people removed by force off their land; tenant farmers priced out of their meagre existence; the everyday enslavement and exploitation of the workers who serviced the smooth running of the empire?
If so, then we might identify ourselves with the people of Nineveh in Jonah’s time; for like them, we too are sadly aware of the many ways that our ease is enabled through the domination of nature and the domination of other people; and this troubles us deeply. On the climate crisis we feel we can’t do right for doing wrong: for example, when we virtuously give up plastic bags we then learn that producing our replacement organic cotton tote bags has an environmental impact 20,000 times worse than plastic. [4] Bewildered by insights like this, we can feel like we’re a people who don’t know our right hand from our left. Unsure of what is right and what is wrong we’re haunted by the question, how then should we live? In this sense we are all Ninevites now.
But the Nineveh story offers a strange kind of hope to us in this week where the world’s leaders meet to discuss action on climate change and we, the people, wait in hope and fear to discern the shape our future might take. For the Nineveh story offers us a glimpse of some unlikely heroes - for it was the actions of the people which effected change in Nineveh; and this unexpected and very welcome twist invites us to consider what this might mean for all of us - Ninevites - now.
In the story, God’s chosen messenger Jonah refuses to take on his prophetic task, runs away not once but twice, like a convinced environmentalist in our day fearful of being ridiculed or attacked for speaking out. And the king of Nineveh in Jonah’s time was too engaged in a political and military struggle against his brother for the overall rule of Assyria, to be involved with the concerns of the people. Except, of course, just enough to keep onside with them to hold on to their support.
It was the people who caused the sea-change which saved Nineveh. God got to them before Jonah did; the people had been somehow conscientised by God’s yearning for them to wake up and face the uncomfortable truths about their contradictory and fatally compromised situation, to open their eyes to their errant behaviour; and they had begun to turn - to take first steps to walk a different path. The starting point for them was to put on sackcloth and proclaim a fast.
In another of this story’s lovely comic turns the next scene shows the witless king of Nineveh, hearing what the people had done, then himself deciding to put on sackcloth and proclaim a fast. ‘Who knows?’ he says, ‘If we all turn from our evil ways God may turn things around for us.’ How the crowds must have loved hearing the king repeating their own words back to them as if he’d thought of it all himself from the start. Was this a case, as Greta Thunberg might have put it if she’d been there, of a politician ‘pretending to take our future seriously’? [5] Or had the king been convinced by the people’s hopeful action, convicted and genuinely changed?
Regardless of his motive, when the people acted hopefully the king was compelled to follow. We might take the key story of the book of Jonah as the salutary tale of the king who took his lead from the people. Does that thereby encourage you that the future of the planet is by no means entirely reliant on the outcome of one conference - significant though it is - but is probably far more reliant on the ordinary people of the world realising that we have to change; turning our backs on our old ways and beginning to do things differently ourselves: the people lead, the politicians follow. As that young Swedish campaigner said last month, ‘Hope is not passive; hope is not ‘blah-blah-blah’. Hope is telling the truth; hope is taking action; and hope always comes from the people’. [6]
To this day the Orthodox Church celebrates what they call The Fast of Nineveh; three days commemorating the hopeful new beginning those Ninevites made in fasting and repentance. [7] If you like the idea that there’s something of the Ninevites in us today, and if you’re keen to take hopeful steps forward for the sake of this world we love, whose survival we long to assure, then perhaps you’ve found yourself in a very good place to start, here, rooting and grounding yourself in this, our humble act of prayer - for we the people, and the governors of the nations and the principals of the corporations who will follow our lead.
Notes
* The Common Worship Lectionary inexplicably omits verses 6-9; I have thus restored it to this passage to enable the readers’ appreciation of the effect of the people’s actions on their king.
[1] George Monbiot, Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction. Guardian, 30 October 2021.
[2] See the Union of Concerned Scientists website.
[3] Wikipedia: Nineveh; Sennacherib.
[4] Zoë Schlanger, Your cotton tote is pretty much the worst replacement for a plastic bag. Quartz, 1 April 2019. Quoted in George Monbiot, Capitalism is killing the planet – it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction. Guardian, 30 October 2021.
[5] Greta Thunberg mocks world leaders in 'blah, blah, blah' speech - BBC News, 28 September 2021.
[6] Greta Thunberg mocks world leaders in 'blah, blah, blah' speech - BBC News, 28 September 2021.
[7] Wikipedia: Fast of Nineveh.
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