It feels very appropriate that today on the first Sunday of a new call for me here at Saint Mark’s that I have the privilege of exploring these multiple call stories we heard in today’s Scripture. If we’re looking to draw immediate insights into what it means to be a person called by God, as we all are in one way or another, we may be disappointed. After all, there’s not much in common between these stories on the surface, and the endings of these call stories can seem a little depressing.
We begin with Jonah and his call to preach to the Ninevites a message of repentance. Now of course, Jonah’s most famous call story is from his initial refusal to heed God’s call. In the first chapter of this short book, God tells Jonah, “Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me.” But Jonah instead attempts to escape God’s call, landing himself at the bottom of the sea inside of the belly of a large fish. It’s only after three days and three nights in this fish that Jonah finally decides to pray for deliverance. Three days before he would ask for help! Yet God listens to Jonah and delivers him, and immediately reiterates the call to go preach to the Ninevites, which is where our reading picks up today.
So we find Jonah, freshly spewn from the belly of a fish, going to do what God has called upon him to do. He reaches Nineveh, the stronghold of the longtime enemies of the Israelites. The Ninevites, part of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, were the violent bullies of the ancient Mesopotamian world - stopping at nothing to expand their empire. It was considered to be a place of great wickedness, of cruelty and violence, of pagan gods - everything the God of Israel was supposed to stand against.
So no, Jonah doesn’t want to be there. He was, after all, willing to sit in a fish’s belly for three days rather than going there to those people. You might think of it as the equivalent of asking a Ukrainian citizen to go to Moscow to preach a message of repentance to Vladimir Putin. Jonah didn’t want to do that, and not only did he not want the job, he didn’t even think those people deserved to hear God’s word. I’m not sure who those people would be for you, but we all have them. People you avoid like the plague. People you feel are responsible for many of our societal ills – noxious governmental figures and the people who support them. I know I do. Whoever it is for you, it’s human nature to have people to whom you would rather not associate with, much less preach to. After all, if they listened, that might mean we’d have to associate with them. To learn to love them as God’s children. Even if they repented and changed their ways, we probably wouldn’t be satisfied. We’d say it was a show to curry favor. That they must be up to something.
You may remember that Jonah’s story ends in a similar, if depressing way. The Ninevites do, indeed, listen to Jonah. Everyone from the King down to even the animals of Nineveh put on sackcloth and ashes. The King decrees that everyone should stop their violent ways and pray earnestly to God. We have no reason to suppose that this was anything but sincere because God does change his mind and spares the Ninevites.
We don’t hear the conclusion of the story today, but do you remember what Jonah does? He sulks. He sits down under a tree and waits to die because he is so angry at God for being compassionate. He tells God, “I knew you would do this to me. It’s why I tried to run away in the first place.” And we don’t get a happy ending for Jonah. Go read through the Book of Jonah again sometime - it’s very short. We never learn whether Jonah decides it’s better to go talk with the Ninevites who have repented, or whether he loses himself in isolation and self-pity in his refusal to accept God’s unbelievable compassion for Jonah’s enemies.
I once had a family friend who was horrified that I was associating with a person who considered themself to be an atheist. To her this was right up there with communists and anarchists. Fast forward several months to when this person had a change of heart and became open to hearing God’s word and attending church, all surely things which we could celebrate, and do you know what she said? “Well, if you can’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” This is true, y’all. And I don’t think this was a particularly negative woman. She was ordinarily quite kind, and I think most of the time she genuinely wanted to love God. But somehow, she had a little bit of the Jonah complex, and couldn’t let herself accept God’s goodness in this case.
Now if we take a look at our Gospel account, the disciples Jesus calls begin with a more hopeful response than that of Jonah. Jesus comes preaching a message of repentance and calls two sets of brothers who immediately stop what they are doing to follow Jesus. But we know how difficult it became for those men to maintain their willingness to immediately follow God’s call without question. Most of them abandon their Lord, deny him, and lock themselves away in fear after his crucifixion.
Yes, even when we try to follow God’s call like the disciples, we all have a bit of Jonah lurking inside us, don’t we? Restricting our willingness to go where we are truly called. Instilling fear of God’s limitless compassion for others because what if that means that we won’t be able to feel as good about ourselves any more? Infecting us with smugness and self-righteousness when we see sin in others that limits our abilities to live out our Christian vocations in the world.
So, you might ask, where is the Good News in all of this? Are we doomed to be faithless, ineffective disciples no matter how hard we try? No, not at all! There are two main things that give me so much hope for the possibility of living out our Christian vocations in this world.
The first is that we don’t hear the full story of the calling of people who decide to listen to God’s call in these passages. This is not to say that we have nothing to learn from these stories. But I believe that the real Biblical examples of vocation we are supposed to imitate are frequently not lifted up for our consideration. Take, for example, the twelve disciples. Now we know that more than twelve people were following Jesus at any given time. We hear about the twelve who are sent out with a specific purpose, and we are grateful to them for spreading the Good News in the ways they did, but they were not the only ones who were called to follow and serve Jesus. Much much later in this Gospel account, during the crucifixion of Jesus, we hear again about some of the people Jesus called in Galilee back in this first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. But it wasn’t Simon Peter or Andrew or James or John. No, Mark tells us that during the crucifixion of our Lord there were followers of Jesus who stayed with him since his first days preaching in Galilee. They were the women who were watching from a distance. Mark says, “in Galilee these women had followed him and cared for his needs. Many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem were also there.”
From these examples of women disciples, we see that it’s not inevitable that our call stories end in failure to follow through, or an unwillingness to go where God calls us. It’s that these types of disciples don’t always make the news. They are not in positions of power or authority, or trying to walk on water. They are tending to the needs of Jesus wherever they find him in the world, and they don’t have time for dramatic arguments with God, or flashy scenes where they try to demonstrate their faith so that other people will notice how faithful they are. They are simply doing the work that has been given to them to do. So I take great hope in the untold stories of disciples like these, knowing that they are out there fulfilling their vocations in classrooms, or shelters, or hospitals, or any of the countless places where Jesus goes to be with the most vulnerable in our society.
There’s also a second place to find hope in the stories of Jonah and the apostles. Jonah may have tried everything to escape God’s call. He may have been petty and grumpy, and willing to sit down and starve rather than rejoice in the repentance of his enemies. But you know what the result of all that was? An entire city repented of their wickedness. For that brief period of time, an entire city committed to doing what was right in God’s sight. An entire city of God’s creatures was spared from calamity and destruction.
And yes, the disciples may have abandoned and denied Jesus, but still, the message of his resurrection was spread abroad. People were healed and saved, and we are here to continue their work. So I take great comfort and hope in the fact that even when we’re not faithful followers and we fall short of God’s plans for us, still God does amazing work through our worst efforts. That is really good news!
So take hope, friends. Whether you are in a season of fruitful, faithful discipleship like the women from Galilee, or whether you are a grumpy prophet, prone to sulking, God still calls you. And God will use you so that the “whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works” no matter what obstacles you try to throw in God’s way.