Lectionary; Ash Wednesday 2-22-23

 

Lectionary; Ash Wednesday 2-22-23:

Jonah 3:1-4:11; (CJB)

I’ve read the whole story 4 or 5 times now, but it still says the same thing—

 Jonah ran away in the first place because he figured it would be pointless for him to go to Nineveh to warn them, because G*d would just forgive them in the end: “That’s why I tried to get away to Tarshish ahead of time! I knew you were a God who is merciful and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in grace, and that you relent from inflicting punishment.” Then he gets mad because G*d did relent, and says, “Just kill me! Put me out of my misery!” All G*d says is, “Is it right for you to be so angry?” Then Jonah goes off to sulk about G*d wasting his time: “Yonah left the city and found a place east of the city, where he made himself a shelter and sat down under it, in its shade, to see what would happen to the city.”

So, he’s moping out there, apparently just because he thought that if he took all the time and trouble to actually go to Nineveh to warn them that they were going to be destroyed, then God shouldn’t renege. Then G*d makes a gourd grow up to give Jonah shade, which he’s very happy about. Then G*d makes it wither, and Jonah gets pissed all over again, whining, “I would be better off dead than alive.”

¾    Apparently even whiners can be prophets.

¾    Also, G*d ignores Jonah’s self-centered-ness, and just remarks that if Jonah has pity for the gourd, which barely lasted a day, then why shouldn’t G*d have pity for Nineveh, which has 120,000 people “who don’t know their right hand from their left.”

Heb. 12:1-14 (CJB)

“…² looking away to the Initiator and Completer of that trusting, Yeshua — who, in exchange for obtaining the joy set before him, endured execution on a stake as a criminal, scorning the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.”

(“Trusting” is in bold because it’s probably a quote from the Tanakh about ‘trusting faithfulness’— “the righteous will attain life through trusting faithfulness.” [Habakkuk 2:4])

¾    Christ as “Initiator and Completer of Trust”! …I’m always looking for names of G*d.

Luke 18:9-14 (CJB)

“..⁹ Also, to some who were relying on their own righteousness and looking down on everyone else, he told this parable:”

¾    Oh, Facebook, Facebook! You kill the prophets! You stone those who are sent to you! How often I wanted to gather your children, just as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, but you refused! (Irreverently borrowed from Matthew 23:37, but pretty on-point, I think!)

 

I’m sure the lectionary compilers were thinking about ‘repentance’ in choosing the readings for Ash Wednesday, but to me that’s beside the point. “Repent” is a word that’s gotten terribly muddy and weighty due to the steady drip of cultural deposits over time, like limestone forming stalagmites in a cave.

So, I’d rather not talk about “repentance in sackcloth and ashes.”

After all, nobody does that anymore… publicize their sorrow and regret by wearing clothes made of grain-sacks, and dumping ashes on their heads. Instead, we go to church on our lunchbreak and someone politely dabs some special ashes on our foreheads, which we immediately wash off and then go right back to work.

When we grieve, or worry, or are anxious for too long, we are prescribed drugs to make the feelings go away.  There is a prevalent belief that such inconvenient emotions are somehow defective; that they are a sign of illness or abnormality. When I say “inconvenient” I don’t mean to imply that these feelings are trivial or inconsequential to the sufferer, not at all! I mean that these feelings are inconvenient to our “everything is okay” society. We don’t know what to do with them. They feel excessive and somehow embarrassing.

I had to ask myself: In our modern world,  by what signs do we know that someone is genuinely remorseful? How do we tell? I was shocked to realize that we simply don’t have them.  We don’t have any way to tell when it’s proper to accommodate someone’s grief. And, yes, I know that even in times when such signals were understood, people would fake them in complete insincerity. That's not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is a world in which even the most sincere regrets must pass a rigorous test of political correctness before they will be even grudgingly accepted. We are all like Jonah, pissed off because we want people to be punished. Saying sorry isn’t enough. Even if we’re sorry; even if we do make amends— maybe, just maybe, regret can be just ordinary day-to-day stuff for us. 

Instead, maybe this Lent we could decide not to whine like Jonah, or make a big production out of how pissed off we are because G*d won’t punish all the people who deserve it.

 

And what does the Initiator and Completer of Trusting have to say about it?

 

“Is it right for you to be so angry?”