Psalm 114; Jonah 1:1-17; 1 Corinthians 15:19-28
Tuesday 21 April - Rev. Jerry Eve
There’s a power struggle going on in our Old and New Testament readings for today. Our psalm – the same delightful one we read yesterday – refers to the twin miracles of the parting of two bodies of water, the Red Sea and the River Jordan. And, in this context, the word, ‘Tremble’, is maybe key for our understanding then of our passages from Jonah and 1 Corinthians.
For these are essentially about the difference between power that is human on the one hand and divine on the other; and the choice we have to make between the two – Adam or Christ? Jonah, to my mind, is a short story, and therefore mythological rather than historical. If you prefer to think of it as the latter, then that is fine as well. It does, however, require us to think of God as capable of keeping a man alive inside a fish for three days. Mind you, Jesus does say that, “with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).
Whichever it is, Jonah – much to his chagrin – instead of escaping to the very ends of the earth, in the opposite direction to that which God wants him to go (and to Spain), finds himself in Nineveh instead, which it’s thought was on the outskirts of modern-day Mosul in northern Iraq. Nineveh was famous in Old Testament times, in the same way as Rome was in New Testament times, for the ‘pacification’ of its vast territories by military might.
Jonah’s reticence in entering into God’s missionary plan for Nineveh was that he understood – in the same way that Paul understood, and yet did enter into it – that God wouldn’t actually deliver the blow to Nineveh that it deserved, but would rather offer them forgiveness instead.
We can find ourselves a little confused at times trying to determine what Paul actually meant, and this passage from 1 Corinthians is typical in the way it uses quite convoluted logic. Please don’t be put off by this. For, my suspicion is that he does this for fear that these letters might have fallen into the hands of Roman officials, who might then construe them as inflammatory and treasonable. He tends, therefore, to obscure what those who would have been completely ‘in the know’ anyway would still have been able to understand.
Elsewhere, Paul can actually be a bit less cautious. And so, in Colossians, for example, we find him writing (see Colossians 2:15) that “on the cross Christ freed himself from the power of the spiritual rulers and authorities” (i.e. Rome) before he then goes on to describe what Christ has done in terms that would have been very familiar. He writes that Christ, “made a public spectacle of them by leading them as captives in his victory procession.” This would have been highly incendiary, and because of that, it’s just one of a number of reasons why some scholars think Colossians was maybe not actually written by Paul, but penned later on when these words wouldn’t have carried so much danger for the bearer, and then attributed to Paul.
And so we can see from these readings – counter-intuitive though it may be – that ‘real’ power has nothing to do with weaponry at all, but springs from a ‘spirit’ of forgiveness, and of sacrifice as well.
Let us pray:
God, it was the Duke of Wellington – he with the traffic cone on his head – who once said that, “nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.” But, when will we ever learn, as Winston Churchill once put it – he who was a Scottish MP – that, “meeting jaw to jaw is better than war,”
Amen.
