On Friday afternoon, a mob attached Akisyon a Yesu Presbyterian Clinic, breaking screens and windows in my office and in the maternity room, where Ruth, one of our midwives, was preparing to deliver a baby. The proximate cause of this break-in was the arrest of a suspect in a criminal case that was filed with the police two weeks ago, by me.
That case was filed as criminal trespassing against a man who entered property for which the Mission has a valid legal land title, and evicting people who have valid rental agreements with the Mission from their homes.
From Friday afternoon, it was a flurry of phone calls back and forth with police, district officials, and lawyers culminating on Saturday with a community meeting with leaders in the district in which for four and a half hours, a firehose of lies was poured forth by people who could swear by God’s name that they were speaking the truth.
Sunday was a blessedly restful day of worship and fellowship where we were providentially allowed to forget the manifold troubles in which we are embroiled. We were reminded that the notion that our salvation exempts us from challenges and persecutions in this life is not only foreign to Christian theology, but also plainly contradicted by the life of Christ.
The Lord’s providence is truly remarkable. Last week, Chegem Mark was taking us, during staff devotions, through Jonah, ending on Friday morning with chapter 3. In all the commotion of the weekend, I had completely forgotten that we would be in Jonah 4 until Chegem started reading it this morning during staff devotions. (AYPC is closed to the public, but we held a staff meeting today to discuss the situation)
For my money, Jonah is perhaps the most remarkable prophet in the Old Testament. The story is narratively limpid, but Jonah the man is full of internal convolutions and contradictions that make him positively jump off the page, especially in these difficult days on the Mission. Jonah is the only prophet who is also a foreign missionary. The other prophets while they may have prophesied for or against other nations, largely operated within and for the benefit of the people of Israel. Not only is Jonah a foreign missionary, he is an unwilling foreign missionary who, when called to a particular place, turns and runs in the opposite direction. And despite this unwillingness, I humbly submit that Jonah is the most successful foreign missionary of whom we know, not only in sheer numbers, but on percentages, and this despite the fact that he never sought to convert anyone.
In the story, virtually everyone he comes in contact with cannot help but falling to their knees in repentance and faith, despite that he does not lead them in this way or even desire this outcome. The sailors on the ship bound for Tarshish on tossing Jonah overboard and seeing the sea calmed, immediately offer sacrifice and take vows to the Lord. In chapter 3, Jonah spends three days moving up and down in Nineveh. The entire content of his sermon is “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” No Gospel, no hope that disaster might be averted. From this decidedly paltry message, God converts the entire city. If you’re keeping tally, that’s more than 120,000 people, and every single person that Jonah has encountered in the course of the story.
Picking up here before commenting on chapter 4, Chegem drew on Matthew 12 to ask us (AYPC staff is a mixed crowd of unbelievers and believers) if the Ninevites could repent—everyone to a man—after hearing Jonah’s message, what does it say about our corner of Karamoja that after more than twenty-five years of full-orbed Gospel preaching, most are still unrepentant? Sharpening the point, he brought in the Saturday meeting, where so many lying speeches were made by those claiming to be God’s people. The repentant Ninevites, he said, will rise up at the last day and judge the people of Alamacar who have had the Gospel faithfully preached to them for many years and yet have not turned from their wickedness. It is not those who claim membership in the community who will be saved, but those who cry out in sorrow over their sin.
Jonah is such a neatly packaged story: After learning his lesson the hard way, the prophet reluctantly does what God tells him to do, and in the end, to tie the bow, we read, “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it.” Drop the curtain there.
But wait, there’s more. Chapter 4 opens, “But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.” Is this not surely the strangest narrative turn in all of Scripture? On first blush, one might take away the idea that Jonah is afraid of the Ninevites. Certainly, all the other “-ites” in the Bible have caused trouble for God’s people. Maybe Jonah fears for his own safety, or for his people over what may happen if he preaches the message he has received. But no, Jonah does not want to preach in Nineveh because he knows that God is rich in mercy and will spare them. What Jonah fears above all is their repentance. From there, the bizarre denouement of the story takes on a theodicean aspect, with God explaining his ways to Jonah, calling into question not only Jonah’s view of Nineveh, but his flawed theology of God’s justice.
What are we to make of this text as it applies to foreign missions, and especially the present moment we are facing in Karamoja? Chegem, speaking to an audience freshly angry over the attack on the health facility, the slander they are facing in the community, and the persistent wickedness that forms the background noise to their day-to-day lives, reminded us of the pity God has for the unbeliever. Paul, in Romans 1, elucidates the descent into sin that darkens our moral understanding. Yet, only a few paragraphs later, Paul can say that while we were enemies—given over in our depravity to our sin— God reconciled us to himself. We see this divine pity at work already in God’s mercy on Nineveh.
In my comments following devotions, I reminded the staff (and myself along the way) that it is all-too-easy when faced with such unrelenting evil to share Jonah’s perverse desire to watch the fire fall. Nevertheless,I told them, given our circumstances, we should probably be praying much more boldly for God to destroy the wicked. It is something the Psalmist was not shy about, and if lightning strikes a man in the middle of mocking God, we should shout “Hallelujah!” But we should also be ready for God to answer such pleas in unlooked-for ways. God did shatter the wicked, or at any rate the wickedness, in Nineveh. The city, as it had been, was indeed overthrown. When we stand face-to-face with our villainous local leaders in Alamacar, we do well to remember that the Lord did destroy the enemy of his church on the Damascus road.
The words are easy to write; they are easy to say. God give us the grace to believe.