There are days

There are days
when I am not a pilgrim,
when my feet are stuck in rutted land
and my hand
is empty of another's
by the choice
of a distanced and
wasting heart.

There are days
when the choice that's made
is made
without fear, without care,
without joy;
into despair's wilful, guilt-driven
destruction.

And to say that
betrayal is met
still by unquenched love
and hungered, stubborn grace
is no easy belief,
no callous relief,
no feigned grief.

It is simply true,
beyond all tears,
beyond all years,

beyond all doubt.

Being loved...sort of

Harold (8): Daddy, I love you, you're the best man in all the world.

Iola (4): No he isn't; Ben is - he lifts me up by my feet!

Three Lessons from Jonah

1. The refusal to do mission brings calamity upon us and our neighbours. The church cannot expect to live in a comfortable relationship with God whilst ignoring his agenda for mission. Jonah quite deliberately turned his back on the Lord’s call and headed west. But the Lord’s heart for both Jonah and mission is such that he cannot allow Jonah to just go his way. And so he goes after him, bringing a storm upon the ship, endangering not only Jonah’s life but those of the sailors too.

If we refuse to follow God’s agenda for mission, we will know his discipline and our neighbours may well be caught in the crossfire as the church struggles to come to terms with what God is doing. Is some of the distress that we see around us not simply a wake-up call to the church to greater urgency in mission but also the by-product of our failure to do so? It’s a sobering thought.

2. The LORD God will do whatever is necessary to engage his people in mission. One of the most sobering aspects of this scene is the way the sailors and the captain show more spiritual awareness than Jonah. He is happy to sleep through the storm and has to be goaded into prayer. And when he finally owns his sin and tells them to throw him overboard, they initially refuse and only do so at last with the greatest reluctance.

The Lord shames his prophet through the compassion and spiritual awareness of pagans and then saves him from death by a giant fish. How unusual his ways can be! But such is his commitment to mission that he will do whatever is necessary to awaken his people, shaming us by the compassion of others, getting our attention by unusual circumstances. Do we hear his voice or are we asleep in the light?

3. It is possible to do mission successfully yet without genuine compassion. Is Jonah a hero by the end of the book, the repentant runaway who now preaches with passion and compassion? I think not. Yes, he goes to Nineveh, obeying the word of the Lord, but his heart isn’t in it. That is more than obvious from his reaction to the way the Ninevites respond to the message. Here is a servant who is angry with his Master; here is a messenger who finds the message repugnant. And his reaction to the death of the vine shows that he is self-centred to the point of wilful obstinacy.

We are perhaps more like Jonah than we care to concede. His story shows how perverse our hearts can be and how gracious our God is. Despite his people’s disdain and reluctance, he will ensure his mission succeeds, with or without our hearts’ consent. The only loser in this story is Jonah himself. He is the villain of the piece. To know that the LORD is “a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” and not to rejoice in it, and even to oppose it, is the sign of a very sick heart.

The telling history of Jonah closes, as Jesus’ parable of the lost son does, with a question that searches both Jonah and the hearer. Does Jonah have a right to be angry? Will he go on excluding himself from a true enjoyment of the amazing grace of God? The Ninevites turned, the younger brother turned, people today are turning. Does that delight our hearts? Do we preach and yet refuse to party? Is our commitment to mission more than skin deep? Is our obedience grudging or grateful?

Looking towards heaven

It's what Jesus did, as he began to pray in John 17, having concluded his long discussion with his disciples. But why look up? Doesn't he know God doesn't really live in the sky? Wow, how primitive can you get.

But this is the Son of God. His grasp of the reality of God so far exceeds our miniature glimpses it isn't even worthy of a comparison. So what's really going on here?

Perhaps what we're seeing here is the significance of posture as symbol. By his posture, Jesus is symbolising, in his upward look, the reality that God is transcendent and reigns supreme; it is also a look of unfeigned trust (cf. Ps. 123). And his posture not only conveys that to the watching disciples, it also helps Jesus to express it.

Posture in prayer is clearly not everything but perhaps we can say that it is not insignificant – Jesus himself teaches that in his example here. After all, we are not simply spiritual beings; we were created as physical creatures and need to express ourselves in an integrated way – heart and hands, so to speak.

Jesus raises his eyes – something the tax collector in the temple would not do, because of his felt sense of shame. Only Jesus can by rights look upward into the face of God without any hint of shame, without a shred of arrogance. But here he models the reality for all who are right with God in him – there is no longer any need to hide our faces but, knowing the mercy of God, we can look upward into the face of our Creator and call him ‘Father’, we can look upward and seek his glory.

Apart from

the obvious instances where Jesus speaks about Jonah, the example of the OT prophet seems to cast its shadow in other ways across Jesus' ministry.

Take the elder brother in Luke 15 - his mean-spirited response to the return of his brother is very much akin to Jonah's response to the repentance of Nineveh. And, just as the book of Jonah ends with the Creator's question, so too the parable ends with the Father's question.

And then there's the small matter of sleeping through a storm (Jonah 1:4ff; Mark 4:35ff). One slept in open defiance of his God, the other in secure trust in his Father and in glad submission to his calling.

Wonder if this same pattern emerges anywhere else?

Sometimes...

reformation is just not enough, not in time.

Josiah was eight years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem thirty-one years. His mother's name was Jedidah daughter of Adaiah; she was from Bozkath. He did what was right in the eyes of the LORD and followed completely the ways of his father David, not turning aside to the right or to the left. (2 Kings 22:1f; TNIV)

Nevertheless, the LORD did not turn away from the heat of his fierce anger, which burned against Judah because of all that Manasseh had done to arouse his anger. So the LORD said, "I will remove Judah also from my presence as I removed Israel, and I will reject Jerusalem, the city I chose, and this temple, about which I said, 'There shall my Name be.' (2 Kings 23:26f; TNIV)

The only hope is sheer grace.

In the first instance...

I've read blogs but never thought I'd ever bother to get around to writing one. So what's changed? Not much, which might mean this is an experiment doomed to failure. I guess we'll see.