Grasping at Belief : Week 2
(Note: For those that are stumbling upon this enterprise for the first time, an explanation of of my Grasping at Belief posts can be found here.)
Lessons
Jonah 3: 1-5, 10
1 Then the word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time: 2 “Go to the great city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the message I give you.” 3 Jonah obeyed the word of the LORD and went to Nineveh. Now Nineveh was a very large city; it took three days to go through it. 4 Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” 5 The Ninevites believed God. A fast was proclaimed, and all of them, from the greatest to the least, put on sackcloth…
10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.
More so than any of the scriptures I have been asked to read over the past two weeks, this story from Jonah is the hardest not to approach from my secular mindset. It is also, ironically, the one that speaks the most to me about both the power of belief and the desire for belief.
The point of the fable seems obvious enough. God looks down and sees a city full of sin, and reacts much the way I do when I find dirty dishes under our kids beds. He sends his messenger Jonah to let them know that “Hey! When the smitin’ comes, this is basically why.” But the citizens en masse do something that those warned in Old Testament stories rarely ever do. They believe Jonah, and in their shame they truly repent. In the story they do not offer this as a quid pro quo; rather, they just seek to humble themselves. I did what I always do, which is read the parts that have been taken out of the story. In this case, the missing chapters 6-9 hammers home this repentance even more:
6 When Jonah’s warning reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, took off his royal robes, covered himself with sackcloth and sat down in the dust. 7 This is the proclamation he issued in Nineveh: “By the decree of the king and his nobles: Do not let people or animals, herds or flocks, taste anything; do not let them eat or drink. 8 But let people and animals be covered with sackcloth. Let everyone call urgently on God. Let them give up their evil ways and their violence. 9 Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish.”
In this part the Church leaves out, there is the hope of a quid pro quo voiced by the King, but the image of the leader of the people in ash and sackcloth is a powerful image nonetheless.
And in the face of all of this humbleness and repentance, God does a very un-Godlike thing. (At least unlike the Old Testament God of similar stories.) He relents, and stays his hand. When you think about it, this vision of God is quite remarkable, and quite at odds with our vision of Him being omniscient. In this story, God seems genuinely surprised by the people he has created. I like this God.
However, as I said earlier, I cannot stay my own secular hand when confronted with this story. Because for me, there is another conclusion that I come to when a proclaimed prophet tells everyone that the end is nigh on a very specific date, and then explains that God changed his mind when the Big Show is a no-show.
As humans, we love myths, and tend to find the measure of meaning in them in direct relationship to their distance from us chronologically. There were two Christian sects I used to find particularly unbelievable, the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Because of what I viewed as their failed beginnings, I could never figure out why anyone would still willingly belong to either church.
If you don’t know much about the history of either church, each was founded with a belief in a coming apocalypse; in each case the date of the end of the world was very, very concrete. For the 7th Dayers that day was declared to be sometime between the spring of 1843 and 1844. When the Spring of 1844 came and went, the date was changed to the more concrete October 22, 1844. For the people of The Watchtower, the day the nonbelievers would perish was pegged as coming in October of 1914. None of these came to pass. And yet each church still has followers. I think it must be easy for many to say that this is because “those people are gullible, not like those of us in the mainstream faiths!” And yet here we have the story of Jonah in Nineveh, turning that mockery back on the tongues that voiced it. When you need early converts to your faith, nothing quite gets the buts in the pews like fear of The End.
So what am I to take from this story, other than:
A). If people are not sufficiently humble, God will punish them. (Which the world itself constantly refutes.) Or,
B). People who want to believe in something enough are able to do so in the face of all kinds of evidence to the contrary.
Reading scripture is designed to help me find and strengthen faith, but the story of Jonah in Nineveh is making me turn away from it.
Additional readings for this week were Psalms 62: 6-14, Corinthians 7:29-31, Mark 1:14-20
Communion & Dismissal
Due to a travel schedule & family visiting there is no real Communion & Dismissal section for this week. Two books that I am starting are The Case for God by Karen Armstrong and God: A Biography by Jack Miles. I will most likely write about one or the other of these for next week’s Communion. I will most likely be writing on my experience with prayer next week as well. Apologies on making this a shorter entry, but family is family, and I get to see my Oklahoma brethren too seldom to take too much time away from their company.
On the topic of people sticking with a belief after a prophecy fails there is a classic pysch book When Prophecy Fails that discusses this question from a scientific psychological view. I know that is not what your post is about at all, but its interesting stuff and related in any case.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails
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As a person ceaselessly interested in human behavior, I appreciate the comment greginak. I will add the book to my list. Just anticipating the reading makes me nostaligic for the days and nights spent studying for my undergraduate degree in psychology.Report
I would just like to push back against a common dichotomy that is often found in both Christian and non-Christian circles regarding the Old Testament and the New.
The dichotomy:
Old Testament God equals a harsh, judgmental, and severe
New Testament God equals love, peace, and grace
I think it is wrong to use this dichotomy because as a follower of Christ myself it is all one story to me.
Is there a lot of judgement found in the old testament? Yes, of course. But think about the amount of time covered in the old testament. It is easy to focus on the judgement because that is what catches the eye but when you consider the amount of time involved you also catch a glimpse of God’s patience as well.
For instance, you look at when Joshua was leading Israel into Canaan and you see God’s command to eliminate the people. What is often not discussed is that the people that existed in Canaan had been living there for at least 400 years (the time that Israel had been slaves in Egypt). That was 400 years that God has suspended judgement against the Canaanites for their sin. Then the implication was that even after the Canaanites had heard at least 40 years earlier the judgement against Egypt then Israel was allowed to come in and possess their land.
Then you could look at the endless succession of both good and bad kings that Judah and Israel had and I can’t help but see that God repeatedly suspends judgement until finally he has had enough and allows first Israel and then Judah to be conquered.
I would recommend that you read an article that has been influential on my thinking on this entitled Reconciling the God of Love with the God of Genocide found in the September/October issue of Relevant Magazine. Relevant has yet to publish the article as a stand alone article to read online but the author has posted two different ways to read it here: https://biblical.edu/index.php/upcoming-events-at-biblical-seminary/60-latest-news-items/376-reconciling-the-god-of-love-with-the-god-of-genocide-Report
The Old Testament is indeed large enough to paint a picture of every kind of God imaginable, including God the pedant, as seen in Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy – i.e. the Pentateuch without stories and stuff.Report
Yeah, a man could never be eaten by a fish – unless it wanted to
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Whoops, the link didn’t make it.Report
Total sidenote, I LOVE Hugh Laurie.Report
Ugh… too bad you only read part of Jonah, because what happens NEXT is the real meat of the story.Report
I’m with Alex on this one, you need to read what’s next. Keep your eye on the relationship between God and Jonah (they named the book after him) – that’s the story. (We’re not given the story of every citizen of Ninevah.)
With respect to your distaste for end times preaching, let’s not let every krank/charlatan distract from reality. All preaching has an element of doom and gloom involved (in the long run we’re all dead). Either we recognize our need and accept Jonah’s message or we laugh at him.
Which is why I tend to think the “forty days or else” has more to do with Jonah. It’s not a necessary condition for Ninevah to be saved. It is required to deal with Jonah.Report
All preaching has an element of doom and gloom involved (in the long run we’re all dead).
Hah. See I Corinthians 7:29-31.Report
What Alex said.Report
Let me second, third, fourth, or whatever this. The ending’s quite something. But don’t forget the beginning, too — because we’re basically told from the get-go that God’s going to forgive Nineveh. That’s why Jonah tries to escape and gets swallowed by that great big fish — because God’s a big softie and Jonah’s going to look like a fool when Nineveh isn’t reduced to smoldering ruins of doom and death. And he wants no part of this “forgiveness” BS.
Until…Report
I’m sorry for you that this is the passage from Jonah that you had to read.
The meaningful part, for me, comes in Chapter 4.
Jonah was really afraid when he was called upon to be a prophet, because most prophets met with an untimely end. He tried to out-run his fate, but it caught up with him. He went to Nineveh, expecting to be strung up, and instead they listened to him.
In Chapter 4, Jonah is sitting outside of the city, ticked off at what all he had to go through, and nothing happened. God makes a little tree grow to give Jonah some shade. Then he sends a worm to kill the tree. Jonah gets ticked again. Then the really good exchange comes:
And God said to Jonah, “Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?” And he said, “I do well to be angry, even unto death.” Then said the Lord, “Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?”
To me, that’s the good part.Report
“and also much cattle?”
God of the pastorilists, indeed.
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I am told that the phrase “persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand” is quite literal, and refers to small children.
Nineveh was quite a big place; took Jonah three days to walk from one side of it to the other.Report
I believe that “cattle” is a reference to wealth.Report
Typically, yes, it’s got some connection of the kind — but in Jonah, just after the bit with the tiny tree, the many cattle are creatures that God would have cause to care about at least as much as Jonah cared about his gourd (they’re not people, but they’re a “higher” kind of life than a small plant).Report
I agree with Alex Knapp. The focus of the story is not the forestalled destruction of Nineveh, but Jonah’s reaction to God’s mercy on the city.
I think you have disposition of Nineveh correct. It is not a sympathetic place. It’s supposed to be the type of place that we see in old westerns, before the gunslinger hero comes in and “cleans the place up.” We’re supposed to cheer when the bad guys get their due. No amount of repentance can save them from karmic justice. In fact, we feel cheated when a “bad guy” makes a last minute appeal to mercy and gets away scott free. It’s not fair.
From the premise of an omniscient God, rather than an open theism that you (understandably) find attractive, God spares Nineveh because He knew they would repent when faced with the news of divine justice, not because the news of immanent destruction caused them to repent. From Jonah’s point of view, however, he knew that Nineveh deserved justice and destruction. So when his message is the instrument of Nineveh’s salvation, he is understandably upset. How could God spare such an evil place from the punishment it so rightly deserved based on a hasty and rather convenient change of heart?
However, later in the story, Jonah is upset when God takes from him something (a shade-providing plant) that Jonah had done nothing to deserve, and which God himself had provided. God then makes a relevant point: How could you be upset at Me for taking away such a small mercy from you, and yet also be upset at Me for providing a much larger mercy to the city of Nineveh?
In regards to the apocalyptic judgement scenario, you are absolutely right. There is no extrinsic evidence that such a level of physical destruction has happened to human society in direct causal relation to their behavior in apposite to some divine moral code, despite prophetic prediction to the contrary. (Note, for comparison, the claims of radical religious sects who claim that certain natural phenomena occur for such reasons.) I believe the value of apocalyptic judgement narratives lies not in their predictive power, but in their modeling of human moral expectations. ( I happen to be completely agnostic towards Biblical eschatology.) We expect, in a universe dominated by a morally uni-polar theistic entity, to have a certain amount of retributive justice meted out against those entities which act against the divine moral code. When this doesn’t happen, many people tend to make two broad assumptions. 1) Atheists take it as evidence against a god. (Why don’t bad things happen to bad people?) 2) Many theists take it as a sign of delayed judgement. Both these ignore a third possibility: Mercy.
In the end, I think the point of the story of Jonah is contrasting how the attributes of Justice and Mercy often conflict in the human mind. On one level, we want people to get their comeuppance for the bad things they’ve done. On another, we know that if our actions are judged on the standard of some infinitely perfect moral standard, we are screwed. So we fudge when our butts are on the line, but are strict when its anyone else. Jonah shows that, from the perspective of an infinite moral being, such double standards are intolerable. What I find comforting about the story of Jonah is that, even in the Old testament, God is erring on the side Mercy rather than Justice.Report
My take on Jonah is a bit different. The story of Jonah is part of the haftorah portion of the afternoon Yom Kippur service. In the Jewish tradition, it is a story of redemption and forgiveness, and part of the holiday’s theme that through true repentance and “turning” an individual can redeem themselves in the eyes of the community and G-d. The message I’ve always taken away from the Nineveh story is that no matter what you’ve done, it’s never too late to find your way back to G-d, to make amendment to G-d, your family, and your community. The G-d of the Israelites is both a G-d of mercy and a G-d of justice.Report
True enough, Michelle. Jonah’s New Testament twin is the story of the Prodigal Son – who like Ninevah returns and is redeemed/restored. In the same way, Jonah is the prodigal’s older brother struggling with the father’s acceptance of his slacker sibling.
The emphasis in each story is different, but all the same major elements are there.Report
Mr. Kelly,
Your cynicism will continue to taint your views as long as you want it to. You yourself admit that this story is different than many in the Old Testament BECAUSE there is no smiting. So, in your mind, can the Bible win? What will you say if asked to contemplate Soddom and Gomorrah? Now the fury of God pours down so severely that even Lot’s wife is destroyed for simply looking back against God’s command.
I do not see how dissecting each story and giving a potential Tod (with a capital “T”) alternative version is constructive for anyone…particularly you.
Let me ask you this…if there were no intelligent design then what happened? The Big Bang Theory, while an entertaining sitcom, states that from nothing came everything stuffed into a dot the size of the head of a pin. Suppose that’s how it came to pass…who created the dot? Who created space-time? Search yourself for that answer and it may open your mind to something bigger than you will accept at this moment.
TRReport
Mr. Kelly’s “cynicism” (or, more accurately, rational skepticism) is a fundamental premise of his inquiry into the matter of the Christian religion. You can no more challenge him to surrender it than you can ask a man to appreciate a sunset with his eyes closed.
Further, Mr. Kelly’s inquiry into this matter shows a far more developed sense of intellectual curiosity and openness than many theists or atheists show. He deserves engagement on his own terms rather than the contemptuous insistence that he adopt Christian or theistic premises.Report
My point is not that Mr. Kelly must accept anything blindly. My point is that if he goes into this pursuit from a decided stance of “if I can’t shoot holes in your story then I can’t accept it at face value” he will never be ‘convinced’.
My entry point to belief was creation so I suggested starting from the beginning.Report
This is a misunderstanding of his posture. He’s undertaken a sincere search.
Protip: attacking someone is not reasonably likely to result in persuading that person to agree with you.Report
I hope my reply did not come across as a “attack”. It certainly wasn’t meant to be. What I hope to convey is that Mr. Kelly admits that much of the Old Testament depicts supernatural punishment from God. In the same breath he then equates the mercy depicted here with false doomsday predictions of pseudo recent years. In essence God can’t win. If He smites then he is the vengeful God that Mr. Kelly finds undeserving of Godship. If He shows mercy then He is an alarmist false prophet.
I applaud Mr. Kelly’s pursuit, but I believe he must do more to leave his preconceptions behind if he is to truly open himself to this great a belief.
TRReport
If the beginning of the universe without a deity is a mystery to you, how is it that the existence of that deity without a proto-deity is not also a mystery? How do you avoid the infinite regress.
Given a dense, consistent theory of the universe after the first fraction of second that is well supported by evidence, I am content to say of that first fraction of a second, ‘I dunno. Maybe we’ll know tomorrow.”
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Mr. Casey,
I have thought about this a great deal. My conclusion is that “eternal God” means more than “forever”. In the Old Testament God refers to himself as “I Am”. My reaction to this is that God (YHWH) simply is, was and will be. My observations are limited to the confines of three spacial dimensions and space-time. Infinity is beyond my grasp but I believe the answer lies there. We, the created, had a beginning. The Creator did not. I wish I knew more specifics and hope to one day.
TRReport
If a god can exist without being created, why not allow that the universe can exist without being created? After all the Big Bang is merely a point beyond which we can’t see because the Bang itself erases all evidence of what happened before.
The laws of physics already state that matter-energy cannot be created or destroyed so we already have reasons to think the stuff composing the universe was in some sense always here.Report
The obvious answer to this is “who knows?” .
My personal response would be that the laws of physics apply to what we can observe, which is finite. That which is eternal (my God) is infinite and is beyond my finite abilities to quantify.
So to me it boils down to this: God can exist because He IS eternity/infinity. The Universe WAS created as evidenced by the fact that it is finite and measureable.
As I said, I mentioned this as an entry point to belief in a creator. I’m not trying to hammer down the details because that’s simply an impossible task.
TRReport
I recommend Fred Clark’s take on Jonah.Report
Read The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine PagelsReport
Is this endeavour on hiatus, Tod, or am I just missing some more recent posts. Either way, I hope to read some more about your journey, soon.Report
It was indeed on a two week hiatus due to family travel; it will start up again this weekend. Thanks for noticing!Report
Cool. I hope it is/was a good trip.Report