Jonah began to go into the city, going a day’s walk. And he cried out, ‘Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!’ And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.
When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, removed his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in ashes. Then he had a proclamation made in Nineveh: ‘By the decree of the king and his nobles: No human being or animal, no herd or flock, shall taste anything. They shall not feed, nor shall they drink water. Human beings and animals shall be covered with sackcloth, and they shall cry mightily to God. All shall turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish.’
When God saw what they did, 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.(Jonah 3)
In the story of Jonah it is usually the whale who gets all the attention -- the "whale" or whatever aquatic varietal it was that gave the prophet respite from his travails; the text is altogether disinterested in precision. Indeed, the story seems imminently more fascinated with the Ninevites' change of heart and Jonah's reluctance to invite it. Nineveh, after all, was an evil place -- "wicked" to quote God's own assessment. At an earlier point in my life, I colored in that rather ambiguous description in much the same way I imagined the prodigal son's "dissolute living." Drunken orgies, sex, drugs and rock and roll; a kind of New Orleans Mardi Gras experience 24/7. A Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Whitney Houston and Charlie Sheen sort of paradise.
Older now, and having read beyond the anti-lusting, non-fornicational passages of scripture, I have discovered that what God seems to really find offensive -- evil and wicked, in point of fact -- has less to with personal indulgence and more to do with communal disinterest and disregard. Despite tradition's rather salacious suppositions as to the nature of their "wickedness," the prophet Ezekiel clarified the particularities of Sodom and Gomorrah's offense: "This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy" (16:49).
The prophet Isaiah described true moral piety as letting the oppressed go free, breaking every yoke, sharing one's bread with the hungry, bringing the homeless poor into our own house, clothing the naked and making ourselves present to our own kin (Isaiah 58:5-7). Jesus said much of the same. Despite our cultural fixation on what goes on in our bedrooms, Jesus identified disregard for the homeless, the hungry, the lonely, the thirsty, the naked and the imprisoned as the sure and certain pathway to Hell.
The most likely diagnosis, then, of the sins of Nineveh is that the people there didn't care about each other. Violence, in fact, is the only villainy named -- the ultimate act of putting one's needs ahead of a neighbor. To borrow Isaiah's words, they didn't recognize their kinship. Interesting, then, that community was the instrument of their repentance. When they comprehended their iniquity, the King called his people together and organized a collective act. It was to be a circle of remorse in which everyone -- native, livestock and immigrant -- would be treated as one. Sack cloth, ashes, fasting from food and drink. And witnessing their transformation -- from an "I" to a collectively responsible "we" -- God, too, repented.
It made Jonah mad, of course. Despite the fact that we depend upon second chances for ourselves, we routinely begrudge their extension to others. "They" never seem to deserve them. But given the level of partisan polarization so epidemic in our culture; given the moral, physical, international and economic violence we perpetrate against each other, the Ninevites' capacity to work together sounds almost Herculean. And if they can do it, maybe there is even hope for us.
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