Language
is a slippery thing, and Hebrew has always felt especially wily to me, even
more so than English. The way we hear
Jonah’s oracle to the Ninevites (“Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed”),
it sounds like pretty unambiguous bad news to us (for the Ninevites at least). There’s a phrase in Italian, all translators
are traitors (which, fittingly, sounds much better in Italian than in English). The translators here (one of whom was one of
my Hebrew teachers, by the way) have certainly captured in English one of the
meanings the Hebrew can have, the meaning the Ninevites seem to have reacted to. But, the English dries out what is slippery
in the inspired Hebrew, and sucks some of the life out of it. Because, left as it is, we would have an
unfulfilled prophecy. We would have a
prophecy with a specific time limit on it, that didn’t come to pass. We’d be reading about God getting in wrong.
The
Hebrew oracle has more life in it from that.
Firstly, we’ll pick up on more of the puns in this passage if we render
it “forty days more and Nineveh will be overturned.” But, it could also be, “and Nineveh will
overturn itself” or even “and Nineveh will overturn part of itself.” And what do the Ninevites do? Jonah has only gone one day’s walk in this
great city, one third of the way through it, and the people start a popular
uprising against their own sinfulness.
They fast, they put on sackcloth, they repent. When word reaches the king, he ratifies this
popular movement, participates and intensifies it. The whole city turns from sin, overturns
their own violence. So, God turns, turns
away from punishment. The slippery
prophetic word, though understood as bad news, was living and active and
accomplished God’s will of salvation. It
changed lives. It saved lives.
How
much more can Good News do that? After
proclaiming the Gospel, the priest or deacon says quietly “through the words of
the Gospel, may our sins be wiped away” (which, by the way, sounds a lot better
in Latin: per evangelica dicta, deleantur nostra delicta
–
the rhyme, the alliteration, the parallelism…!). Through the Good News that has just been
spoken, may our sins be wiped out! May
our lives be changed; may our lives be saved.
God
has life-saving Good News for us: the Good News that the Kingdom of God is at
hand! Repent, believe and be baptized,
and you can live forever with God! It’s
an urgent good news, so urgent that he told Martha that he’d rather go hungry
than have her miss out on hearing it, for to be truly hospitable is to attend
to your guest’s deepest needs, and a prophet’s deepest need is to proclaim the
news they were sent to bring. Christ
hungered to proclaim the Good News. May
we welcome, turn to it, and be saved by it.
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