Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. 
Jonah 3:1-10

I hope by now you are thinking ‘what an unusual choice for Remembrance Day.’ We usually take one of Jesus’s parables about service, judgement or the Kingdom of Heaven, or we have an uplifting passage about honour or duty or faith from St.Paul, but when was the last time you heard a preacher use the book of Jonah! It’s one of the smallest books of the Old Testament, sandwiched between Obadiah and Micah and has only forty eight verses in all, and yet it is probably one of the best known stories in the whole of the Old Testament. Jonah and the whale.... And it seemed a good choice to me a couple of weeks ago when I seriously considered running away on holiday to Spain instead of arising and climbing this great pulpit to preach to such a great gathering this morning .... Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee. Get back to work, said God!

Not much is known about Jonah. His name appears once in the Book of Jeremiah, but apart from this story we know nothing else. He is apparently a rather unimportant prophet from somewhere in Israel - but - and here begins all Jonah’s problems - he has a call from God “Arise, go to Nineveh that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” Quite naturally going to Nineveh - that great city - and causing trouble by preaching gloom and doom - repent the end is near and all that - was the very last thing Jonah wanted to do. And so he escapes to the sea port of Joppa - which is the modern day Jaffa on the sea coast just west of Jerusalem - and he sets sail on the first available ship for what was then the ends of the earth - Tarshish somewhere beyond the straits of Gibraltar and into the wide open sea. Jonah was a desperate man, and he would apparantly rather risk droping off the end of the ocean - for I presume Jonah was a flat-earther - than face the angry mobs of Nineveh - and who could blame him!

The story then takes a peculiar twist and Jonah finds himself being thrown overboard somewhere in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea and being swallowed whole and alive by a whale or some other great man-eating fish, in whose stomach he miraculously remains for three days and three nights before being spat out onto the dry land - presumably somewhere off the Lebanese coast near Beirut! 

Once more God calls Jonah “Arise, go unto Nineveh, that great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.” and this time, beaten by circumstances, he goes. And as we heard in the reading the people of Nineveh repent, they put on sack cloth and ashes, they change their sinful behaviour and God changes his mind and does not bring down the fire and brimstone he had promised. Now Jonah naturally feels a bit put out about all that - try to see it from his perspective - he had risked his life by preaching bad news to a rowdy and wicked mob and then he had rather been made a fool of - the deadline had passed and there was no thunder and lightning from the sky, no punishments and divine destruction - not even the smallest of sign that he was speaking any sense at all. - once again you cannot blame him for feeling a bit put out by the whole thing. And so the story ends with Jonah sitting down under a small tree in the scorching heat of the desert feeling very sorry for himself - and God says - and this is the point of the story of Jonah “And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons?”

Well I’m sorry if that all seemed a bit long winded and you are wondering by now what any of this has to do with Remembrance Sunday - but hang on, I promise I will get there. But first I need to point out a few more things about the story of Jonah. 

I hope it doesn’t come as too much of a surprise or shock if I tell you that very few biblical scholars - perhaps no scholars at all - believe that this story ever happened in real life. We do not believe in man-eating whales in the Mediterranean and we do not believe that it is scientifically possible to sit in a fish’s stomach for seventy two hours and then come out again whole. This story is not something which really happened, and nor was it ever meant to be thought of as happening in real life, any more than the wonderful parable of the Good Samaritan ever happened in real life - and yet, like the story of the Good Samaritan, the parable of Jonah is very true in a much deeper sense than mere historical facts. 

And here we get to why I chose it for today, for I believe that this great story of Jonah sent by God to preach repentance to the people of Nineveh, a city in case you didn’t know somewhere near Sadam Hussein’s home town of Tiqrit, on the outskirts of the modern Mosul just north of Bagdad, is very relevant indeed to where we happen to find ourselves this particular Remembrance Day, 2003. And so this morning, as we remember and give thanks for the men and women who have served their country, and have given their lives in war, I want to talk about duty, about transformation and about God. 

Duty is an unpopular word these days. The idea that any of us might be called to do our duty and that doing our duty may mean doing something we do not like, doing something which is dangerous and even risking our lives to do our duty can seem a very long way from modern society. And yet Remembrance Day commemorates the fact that so many service men and women did their duty by answering the call and by serving their country and their people. And this morning, and again on Tuesday at the eleventh hour we will commemorate those who made the ultimate sacrifice in doing their duty - and I hope we will also remember not only those who died in the two world wars, but also in our prayers those of our service men and women who are still risking their lives and doing their duty in Iraq and beyond, and those who have died more recently in the call to establish peace, order and justice.

Jonah, in our story, heard the call and tried to run away from it - that is a very natural response - the call to risk one’s life is hardly an attractive call - and yet the call of duty is one which he had to fulfill whether he liked it or not. But there are dangers - for we all know that back in the Great War of 1914 ordinary German soldiers were also doing their duty, defending their King, their country and their government - hearing the call and responding as a soldier must. The call of duty alone is never an infallible sign of being right - and in the long history of human warfare, right up to this present day’s suicide bombers, the voice of God can be too easily used to claim legitimacy for wicked actions. Jonah, in his story, might have been certain that it was God calling him to preach to the Ninevites, but we have to be very careful indeed before we claim such an authority. Traditionally Christians have turned to the old idea of a Just War - today’s conficts, where pre-emptive strikes are necessary because there can be no second chance - put enormous strain on those old criteria of Just war, but they are criteria we still need, we still need to question, to challenge, to argue before claiming right on our side. The United Nations, like the present day Anglican Communion, might seem to have been strained to breaking point as it struggles with great and complex issues but attempts to retreat into any of the easier options is not a way forward for us or for them. And so ‘legitimate duty.”

But the second great theme of the Jonah story is repentance and transformation. The people of Nineveh - undoubtedly a wicked and sinful city - repent and are changed. This is important, because Jonah’s task, our task is not destruction, or punishment or vengeance, but transformation. The desire of every right thinking person for the troubled and suffering country of Iraq, and all those many other parts of the world where there is conflict and violence, is not destruction but transformation into a just society - part of a just world - where different peoples of different religions, tribes and ways of life can live together in peace and in harmony. But, and here is the second danger - peace and harmony might look different in the Middle East than in London, Washington or Beijing. Jonah had a preconceived idea of what the result of his preaching should be and he was wrong - the dangers for us as we move into highly complicated military peacekeeping actions is to be limited in our vision of what the future might be. God willing in the future Iraq will be a peaceful, just and happy society but it is very unlikely ever to look like the streets of New York or Westminster and nor should it. Like Jonah we need to be prepared for things to look different.

Finally at the heart of the Jonah story there is God. The book of Jonah was not written about a 21st century conflict in Iraq, nor was it written in order to remember the sacrifices and sufferings of the last two great world wars. There was another issue going on in the mind of the author some time around the year 400 before our Common Era. The story of Jonah has another motive, and it is summed up in the last line of the closing chapter... it is summed up in the words of God. “And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons?”

For Nineveh was not just any great city in the minds of the people of Israel. The very mention of the name Nineveh brought fear and anger into their hearts. Years before Nineveh had been the seat of a ruthless and cruel enemy: the Assyrians. They had invaded and destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel and were renowned for their cruelty in war. Just over a hundred years later their successors, the Babylonians, had finished the job even more ruthlessly by destroying every stone of the city of Jerusalem, plundering and demolishing every last brick of the Great Temple of Solomon and executing the entire Royal family men, women and children. Nineveh - and all that that terrible city represented - was not just any city, not just the normal sins of city life. In those days Nineveh was a symbol of evil - perhaps the equivalent of Nazi Berlin for the Jewish people in the 1930s and 40s. And it evoked just as much horror.
“And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons?” Or Berlin, or Bagdad?

The reminder that God is also the God of our enemies, that God cares for them as a part of creation in spite of the evil that they might do, is challenging and perhaps at times offensive. We live in a world which is all too ready to demonise criminals because of the wicked deeds they may have done. It has always been, and it still is hard to hear that even those who do wicked deeds - even our enemies - have a place in the heart of God - that God desires not the death of a sinner, but rather that he or she may turn from wickedness and live. That God grieves for the Israeli civilians murdered in suicide bombings in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and that God grieves for the Palestinians shot and bombed in Jenin and Ramallah. That God grieves for American soldiers shot down in a helicopter and that God grieves for Iraqis crushed under bombed buildings. 

As this morning we commemorate with gratitude those who for our tomorrow gave their today so it is our duty in our generation to keep hold of the vision of a world where swords are turned into ploughshares and where the lion can lie down with the cub on God’s holy mountain. It is our duty to them to offer our lives for the transformation of the world into a new world of peace and justice and harmony, and it is our duty to them to live as one creation under God. Then, and only then, the blood red poppy which now symbolises the sacrifice of young men on a Flanders’ field will become a symbol of the world-wide peace we all so long for. 

The Rev'd Paul Kennington

The Rev’d Paul Kennington