January 21, 2024, God Changed His Mind, Jonah 3 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ January 21, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

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I’m pretty sure the story of Jesus calling Peter and Andrew and James and John was one of my kids’ all-time favorite Bible stories. Our Sunday School teacher, Abby Peck, who was the wife of one of our elders, and the sweetest lady you can imagine, used to bring a special quilt and some little toy fishing poles and magnetic fishes, and they got to play fishing while Mrs. Peck taught them all about being fishers of men: telling your friends about Jesus, inviting them to church. It’s a very compelling story, even for us less playful grownups. Can you imagine just going about your business – ringing people up at a cash register, or kneeling up on a roof replacing shingles, or sitting in an office balancing the books – doing whatever it is you do – and all of a sudden, Jesus comes by and tells you to drop everything and follow him; just walk away right in the middle of things, leave it unfinished. Peter and Andrew and James and John did that – they left the job undone; they left their father short-handed; they walked away from everything they had ever known, and they followed Jesus. It’s a story about our human response to God’s call. It’s about obedience – and also courage and faith and humility.

We’ve all grown up with a lot of teaching about obedience. We know that being a Christian means that we’re supposed to respond to God. We’re supposed to obey the Ten Commandments. We’re supposed to do what we know God wants us to do: to go to church, to send in our tithe check, to read the Bible, to pray for people who are sick or in trouble. Right now, Lent is coming up, and Lent presents us with a very specific call to repentance, which means to change course; to turn out of the ways we’ve slipped into that have moved us away from God, and to re-route ourselves into the way that brings us closer to him: the way of love, and grace, and truth. Maybe Jesus doesn’t walk right into our workplaces, but he calls to us. We don’t always respond to all these calls, but we know we’re supposed to, and if we don’t, we generally respond by feeling guilty, at least.

But today we hear something a little different. We read about the prophet, Jonah; God sent him to the great city of Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian Empire – and the Assyrians were no friends to Israel. Jonah was supposed to walk the length and breadth of that great and wicked city and tell them they were in big trouble. They were under the condemnation of God, and he was going to smite them good. And the Ninevites did probably the last thing anyone would have expected; they listened to Jonah, and they repented of their sins. From the king in his palace, all the way down to the cows and donkeys in the streets they all fasted; they all sat in ashes and sackcloth. They repented; the whole city responded to God’s call. And here’s the really surprising part: “When God saw what they did,” we read today, “how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.”

We know we’re supposed to be obedient. We know we’re supposed to respond to God’s call. But we don’t think too much, I don’t think, about God responding to us. When he saw that the people of that city had repented of their sins, we read, God changed his mind. He had promised destruction, but because of their repentance he changed his mind and he didn’t do any of the terrible things he had said he would do. God responded to the pleading of the Assyrians.

It’s not the only time we see God responding. Way back in the book of Exodus, chapter 32, while Moses is up on the mountain receiving the tablets of the Law from God, Moses’ brother Aaron and the people decide to make a golden idol in the shape of a calf. They’re dancing around and worshiping the calf when Moses comes back down the mountain, and God says, basically, “I can’t deal with these people. Stand back, Moses, while I wipe them off the face of the earth, and we’ll start over. You can be the patriarch this time.” But Moses, God’s chosen man, in his humility, and in his love for the people, calls God to be merciful, to relent of his well-deserved judgment on them, to spare their lives. And God responds to the call of Moses. We read, “The Lord relented of the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.” Moses called for God to be merciful. And God responded to the call of Moses.

One of the things we know about God is that he doesn’t change. The writer of the letter to the Hebrews tells us that Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever. Through the prophet Malachi God declares, “I, the Lord, do not change.” James, the brother of our Lord, writes, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” In Psalm 102, the psalmist writes, “The heavens and the earth will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end.”

We know, and it is one of the comforts of our faith, that God is the one and only thing we can count on. He doesn’t grow old; he doesn’t grow weary; he doesn’t run out of patience; he is the solid rock on which we make our stand in the most turbulent of times. But it is just as important for us to know that God isn’t deaf and dumb and immovable like an idol made out of rock. When we pray to God he hears us. When we call to God he responds. And when we cry out to God for mercy, he is faithful and just to have mercy on us, to forgive us our sins, even to change his mind and relent from the punishment we so justly deserve.

Because, when the Bible says that God is unchangeable, it isn’t saying that God never changes his mind. It isn’t saying – and sometimes I think we really need to hear this – it isn’t telling us that prayer is like beating our fists bloody against an immovable object. What it is saying is that God never changes His character. And that is much better news. God is Gods-self, yesterday and today, and forever. And God is always and eternally a God of mercy. That’s why he chose a man like Moses to lead his people. It’s why he sent his Son into the world.

Over and over again, to Moses, to Jonah, in the psalms, and in the prophets, God proclaims his character: “The Lord, merciful and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness.” It’s like God’s tag line. And that means that he hears you when you cry to him. And that means that he’s not only the God who calls us, and issues commands for us, and expects us to obey him. He is also the God who responds to us when we call to him.

Remember the story Jesus once told about the unjust judge and the widow who wouldn’t quit coming to him with her demand for justice? In the story, the judge is finally worn down by the woman’s persistence and she gets her justice. But the point of the story is not that we can wear God down too, if we can just hang in there and storm the gates of heaven long enough. The whole point of the story is that God is NOT like that unjust judge. The point of the story is that even if a wicked, heartless judge will respond to the cry of a poor widow, HOW MUCH MORE can we be sure that God, who is merciful, God who is love itself, God who is our Father, will respond to our cries. The point of the story is that we can pray to God with hope and expectation, knowing that he hears us, knowing, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that his heart will be moved, that his mind might even be changed, by the cry of his children, whether they are Assyrians or Israelites – or even us.