Download July 8 2016 Jonah Chapter 1 part 9

Friday Morning Men’s Bible Study
St. David’s Episcopal Church
Jonah
It is more profitable to know Jesus than to know about Him.
Weekly Edition – July 8, 2016
Jonah – Chapter 1 – part 9
The Storm
7 Then
the sailors said to each other, “Come, let us cast
lots to find out who is responsible for this
calamity.” They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. 8 So
they asked him, “Tell us, who is responsible for making all this
trouble for us? What kind of work do you do? Where do you
come from? What is your country? From what people are
you?”
9 He
answered, “I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the
God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.”
Three Reflections on Today’s Text
1) Last week we examined the casting of lots in the ancient
world. This week we examine the context in our story of
Jonah.
Jonah
One of the Twelve Prophets
1.
The Word of the Lord
2.
Jonah’s mission
3.
Jonah flees
4.
The storm
5.
The great fish
6.
Three days in the belly
7.
Jonah delivered
8.
Nineveh repents
9.
Jonah pouts
10. The gord
First Consideration: Calamities Unite Neighbors
11. God’s mercy
1) Round three of our story begins. In the first round, God
places a call upon Jonah to go preach a message of
repentance to the Ninevites. As we know, Jonah flees
and goes in the opposite direction. In the second round,
God hurls a great wind at the great ship of Tarshish, the one Jonah is using to escape the Lord’s call, and it
is swept up in a perfect storm. The Lord uses the ship’s captain to get Jonah’s attention. Now in round
three, Jonah must contend with the entire community of sailors whose lives he has put at peril.
2) The sailors call out, each to his neighbor, and this community of Gentiles comes together. The choice of the
word “neighbor” in the original Hebrew text is an important word. Neighbors are creatures who should love
one another, not bear false witness against one another, not covet one another’s goods, or wives, and so on.
3) “Neighbor” is a key term used in the Torah – the word of God given to Israel, to indicate those who are
bound together in ethical bonds of community and mutual obligation “to love your neighbor as yourself”
(Leviticus 19:18) and “you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” (Exodus 20:16)
4) Jesus taught the Pharisees and Scribes of His day with the example of the Good Samaritan. A man had
fallen into the hands of robbers, and was beaten and left for dead. In turn, a priest, a Levite and a much
reviled Samaritan came upon the scene of bloody and beaten man. Both the priest and Levite look the other
way, but the Samaritan had mercy on him. Jesus asked which of the three was a neighbor to the man. The
Jews were unable to utter the name “Samaritan” – so they answered evasively by saying “the one who had
mercy.”
5) The book of Jonah now prompts us to add a new definition – it means our neighbor is everyone in the same
boat with us, so to speak, threatened by the same storms, and fighting against the same sea. All of us
mortals need one another, which is why Holy Scripture calls us neighbors and puts us under obligations to
one another.
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Friday Morning Men’s Bible Study
St. David’s Episcopal Church
Jonah
It is more profitable to know Jesus than to know about Him.
Application: Times of calamity have a way of causing us to unite as neighbors. Somehow, in the face of
tragedy and unspeakable evil, neighbors have a way of putting their differences aside to discover how much we
have in common. In God’s economy, the last will be first, and the first will be last. What are some ways that I
can choose to serve my neighbor by placing myself in second or third or last place for my neighbors benefit?
What might this look like in a practical way? In what ways do I neglect to put my neighbor first?
Second Consideration: Jonah is Found Out
1) At first God spoke to Jonah. Next the ship’s captain spoke to him. Now a whole boat-load of sailors talk to
Jonah with one voice, as if all the nations were addressing Israel together: “what’s with you? Please tell
us.”
2) They won’t let Jonah be silent any longer – they need him to speak or they will die. It’s time for Jonah to
give up the goods. The lot has fallen on him. It is irrefutable, Jonah is the one on whose account this evil
has befallen the ship, and they want to know what he has done to cause it.
3) Yet the sailors don’t come right out and say it – they are too wary for that just yet. After all, whoever this
Jonah is, and whatever he has done, both he and the sailors are contending with some mighty and powerful
god, and the sailors are careful not to provoke further wrath from this god, whatever his name might be.
4) “Tell us about yourself.” They invite Jonah to come clean with them; if the shoe fits, wear it – and wear it
fast before the angry sea swallows us all alive!
5) There is no doubt about it, the word “evil” which was originally addressed by God to describe the people of
Nineveh has definitely migrated to Jonah now. The Hebrew text uses the word ‘evil’ rather than ‘calamity’
and the difference is significant. A calamity can be merely a natural event, like a tornado or flood, but this
evil with which the sailors contend is about eternal matters of life and death. The evil in which the sailors
find themselves originated right here with the prophet who stands before them who rejected the call of the
Living God. Yet they are remarkably fair and patient with Jonah, wary and circumspect: there is a dreadful
power associated with this man and they don’t want to get in the way of it.
6) The sailors pose a long series of questions, none of which get to the point. Normally, the first question
asked of someone who has been picked out by lot is “tell me what you have done?” (1 Samuel 14:43,
Joshua 7:19, etc.) But instead of demanding that Jonah confess his crime, the people onboard give Jonah a
chance to explain himself. Perhaps there is something in his identity, his homeland, his ethnicity, his
occupation, that will help explain all this – maybe, just maybe, it isn’t as bad as it all appears.
Application: As Christians our vocation is to share the Good News. Jesus told us not to hide our lamp under a
bushel, but to place it on a lamp stand for all to see the reason for our hope; the cause of our joy as men and
women who are free in Christ Jesus our Lord. What harm do I bring to my neighbor by keeping
my faith in Jesus Christ a private matter, holding it tightly but not
sharing it with others? How am I shining out the Good News to
my neighbors at work, at home, in my community?
Contemplative Corner
(Thought for the Week)
Third Consideration: Jonah’s Evasiveness
1) Ah, the caginess of sin. It might be easy for us to miss it in
the text, and indeed, that is exactly the point of sin – to
dodge, to be shifty, to attempt to “pull the wool over one’s
eyes.” There is nothing straight-forward or direct about it.
So it is evasive, cunning, slippery.
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God has saved us and has called us to a
holy life, not because of any merit of
ours, but according to His own design –
the grace held out to us in Jesus Christ
before the world began!
2 Timothy 1:9
Friday Morning Men’s Bible Study
St. David’s Episcopal Church
Jonah
It is more profitable to know Jesus than to know about Him.
2) Jonah speaks for the first time. Yet this prophet of the LORD, the Living God, whose only job is to speak,
continues to run in the opposite direction of God’s call. Jonah never gives his name.
3) He answers the last question first, and never gets around to answering any of the other questions, never
mentioning, for example, that he is a prophet from Israel.
4) The answer Jonah does give is rather evasive and cagy. Replying to the answer about his ethnicity (“from
what people are you?”) Jonah describes himself as a Hebrew – which is a very vague term, far less
descriptive than “Israelite” – a word that is never used in the story. In fact, Hebrew is a rather peculiar term,
in that unlike other terms for ethnicity, it does not locate him as belonging to a particular place (like
“Ninevite” or “Assyrian”) or clearly identify his lineage (like “Israelite” – literally son of Israel or “Jew” –
literally son of Judah.)
5) Hebrew is used in the Old Testament to refer to a loose group of peoples, not necessarily speaking the same
language or having the same ethnic or national roots, some of whom trace their lineage way back to man
named Eber, many generations before Abraham. (see Genesis 11:16-27) From Holy Scripture and extraBiblical sources, it seems the term Hebrew is derived from the Egyptian “Habiru” referring to what are
typically homeless, often refugees, sometimes mercenary soldiers or deserters, always in some sense
outsiders and foreigners.
6) In Genesis, when the sons of Israel are not yet a nation, but one man’s family, the Egyptians treat Hebrews
as a whole class of dirty scum, (Genesis 39:14) who are too dirty to eat in the same room (43:32). In
Exodus Moses and Aaron describe their God to Pharaoh as “the Lord, the God of the Hebrews” in the sense
that He is the God of a people that to the Egyptians are nothing but dirty, homeless foreigners – scum.
7) In essence, this is now how Jonah presents himself to the people on the boat. What he conveys to them is, in
effect, “I am just a foreigner, having no real home (not true), worshipping at no temple (not true), having no
ancestral identity (not true) serving no God but the One up in heaven (true, but doing so poorly at best).”
This anonymity is cause for greater fear among the sailors – after all, if any god bothers with such a man, it
must be the one who surveys the whole wide earth and sea from up in heaven – the God above all other
gods.
8) Sin has a way speaking half-truth, of taking a shred of something that is true and weaving it with lies and
evasiveness and falsehood into something that is entirely false and untrue. Sprinkled with just enough truth
to make it sound plausible, maybe even possible or likely, sin masquerades as truth, darkness masquerades
as light.
Application: Before the eyes of God we all at times appear as silly as a teenager hopelessly caught in some lie
or half-truth, spinning their words in an attempt to hide the truth from parents who know better. After all, which
parent hasn’t “been there; done that.” We all try to hide things from our all-knowing God, and from our
neighbor, and many times we are not really honest with ourselves. None of us wants our shame exposed, or our
essential nakedness to be seen by others, so we prefer to be cagy. Are there areas of my life where I haven’t yet
come clean, so to speak, where I am still trying to hide or be evasive?
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Friday Morning Men’s Bible Study
St. David’s Episcopal Church
It is more profitable to know Jesus than to know about Him.
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Jonah