Preached on the Third Sunday after the Epiphany (Year B), January 21, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
Jonah 3:1-5, 10
Psalm 62:6-14
1 Corinthians 7:29-31
Mark 1:14-20
Jonah and the Whale, by Anonymous 18th century
Everyone knows there is no monster under the bed. Come now, you are sensible: you know that monsters are only a harmless metaphor. Same with demons. People aren’t possessed by demons; we all know that. Our ancient forebears did not know about mental disorders caused by chemical processes in the brain. They didn’t know that everything can be explained, in due course, by sound research and careful study.
The medieval Church, led by shrewd theologians like Thomas Aquinas (who read his Aristotle with understanding), slowly created what we know as the university: a center of study and inquiry that teaches us to trust the ready evidence of our senses. When I worked as a therapist I often reminded myself that all behavior — no matter how awful, strange or exasperating — all behavior makes simple sense. If a couple’s marriage is collapsing around them, their dilemma was caused by ordinary circumstances and events, not mysterious or monstrous forces. If a person seeking therapy is depressed, and another one is anxious, and yet another has anger problems, all three have readily explainable challenges, not demons. They’ll benefit from realistic and skillfully designed therapies.
In short, no, there is no monster under the bed.
So why do we insist on opening a book that assumes the existence of monsters and demons? We read again and again that Jesus exorcizes demons. We read of a person swallowed up by an enormous fish. Holy Communion, the central ritual of our faith, implies something that sounds a lot like grotesque cannibalism. And in our anguished psalms of lament, we sing of dogs and bulls attacking us, and we view our enemies as monsters: in one of our psalms, we want God to throw the children of our enemies against a rock. One doesn’t do that to a human being. That is the fate of a monster.
And so, if we are determined to open this book and to be formed and guided by what we read there, we should understand that even in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, we do believe in monsters. We think about monstrosity, and reflect on it, and worry about it, and grapple terribly with it. We recognize around us, if not literal demons, powerful demonic forces at loose in the world, and even inside ourselves.
I have witnessed rage erupting in persons of faith over the past few months. Righteous, honorable, holy rage! Rage that seems, that feels, that is a response to evil monsters, real or perceived. And I am sorry to say it is usually real, this evil. It is evil to slaughter children: evil to do so in southern Israel on Simchat Torah, but also evil to do so in Gaza City, in hospitals, in buildings holding refugees who have nowhere to go. It is evil to rape people, to step on the necks of people in a street gutter, to incarcerate people in cages along the border, to strip people of their humanity in any of the countless ways our species has invented.
Are we monsters? No. We are made in the image of God, bearing God’s own graceful shining face in God’s creation; and we are made in the likeness of God, called to govern and nurture creation as God would do, as God does do.
But are we monsters? Yes. Each of us is capable of dreadful evil, from a cutting insult to brutal homicide. The monstrous, the demonic: it can rise within us and ravage our neighbors. This is something every human being has in common. My dog Keiko was rescued from a dog-meat market where she witnessed the slaughter of her kind: she is now wary of all humans, and behaves as if we should not casually be trusted. She is quite right.
So let us open our holy book once again and consider all the monsters that lurk there. Generally speaking, our faith tradition approaches monsters in one of two ways: we trivialize and tame them; or we watch as God defeats them in mighty battle.
Jonah’s encounter with the great fish is an example of the trivialization or taming of the monster: the great fish — in Hebrew, the dag gadol — is pointedly not called a sea beast. He is just a fish, albeit a huge one. Then, once he has swallowed up Jonah, in the Hebrew text she becomes a dagah: a feminine fish. Her belly, then, becomes a womb as Jonah is reborn and resent by God to do his mission. This is all vividly bizarre, but also quite lovely. The great fish, no longer a monster, readily obeys God, and helps save wretched Jonah from himself.
In Psalm 104, God creates the sea beast just for fun, so that it can happily frolic in the ocean: this is another example of defanging the monster. When God creates the heavens and the earth, God proclaims everything good, and on the sixth day of creation God says that the animals and creeping things and human beings are very good. Some creatures may be startling, but ultimately everyone submits to God’s wisdom and power. In the end, or in our essence, we are very good.
And today we hear about another monster God defangs and tames: Nineveh, that great city. Nineveh is the capital of the Assyrian Empire, and the Assyrians are evil monsters. Who compares to them, in our day? Oh, we can think of a few examples. The governments in several modern cities would qualify. Do they condone and even encourage the slaughter of children? Then they’re a lot like the Assyrian Empire. But in the story of Jonah, Nineveh immediately repents. The monster surrenders.
But God’s forgiveness of them scandalizes Jonah, who wanted deep in his heart for these monsters to be slaughtered. And why shouldn’t he want this? They are murderers, rapists, terrorists, tyrants. They are evil. But Nineveh goes the way of the great fish: Nineveh sets down the mask of the monster; Nineveh reforms.
But Jonah remains enraged. Still wrestling with his own monster within, Jonah fumes that God was so merciful. Jonah prefers the second way our faith tradition treats monsters: God slays them in battle, remember? God smashes the head of the beast; Mary stands on the moon, crowned with stars, and crushes the head of the serpent. Evil is soundly defeated. We keep that one most problematic psalm in our holy book, Psalm 137, the one that voices an explosion of righteous outrage. We keep these verses in our book:
O daughter Babylon, you devastator!
Happy shall they be who pay you back
what you have done to us!
Happy shall they be who take your little ones
and dash them against the rock!
When the psalmist screams this in fury, I can hear Jonah turning to her and saying, “Girl, same.” And today, all these centuries later, many of us feel this. When one group oppresses another and justice is denied, do we mind if their own children are destroyed? How do we really feel when their villages are attacked? I think we understandably want God to smash the monster; we want Mary to crush its head beneath her heel. That’s the second way our tradition deals with monsters, after all. It’s legitimate. Isn’t it?
Well, Jesus ingeniously finds a third Way, something of a both-and approach. We hail Jesus as the new Jonah who slays the monsters of Sin and Death in his three-day sojourn in the tomb/womb of the fish. And in John’s Gospel we sit down by the sea for breakfast with the risen Jesus, who is cooking a fish on his charcoal fire: he has slain the sea beast, and we eat its flesh in the triumphant Easter dawn. But — the slaughtered sea beast is a fish again! A dag, or a dagah, a humble creature at the center of breakfast on the seashore. And most importantly, at that quiet breakfast, Jesus does not slaughter Peter, the monster who denied him: he repairs his relationship with the repentant Peter.
And Peter and all the others: they are fishermen, not beast-slayers; they mend their fishing nets; they ply their careful trade. Yet at the same time, these mild workers become mighty apostles and martyrs: they perform acts of tremendous courage; they enter the arena — sometimes literally — to battle the monster. And even if the monster tears them to pieces, they praise God’s triumph over evil, because even though we die, God in Christ has smashed Death’s power over us.
It’s a jumble, really, the Way of Jesus that prepares us to either battle or tame the monsters without and within. Sometimes we confront them with the truth, but mercifully: we challenge the monstrous person or the monstrous government to reform, and sometimes they do just that. Other times, we ride to war. And finally, there are times when it is not one or the other, but both: 20th-century Germany was defeated twice in bloody battle, but in the wake of their own evil atrocities, they have become a great fish, conscious of their own capacity to be monstrous, and determined not to repeat their dreadful history.
Jonah sulks in the desert as he contemplates this mess of options, and the maddening persistence of evil in God’s good world. The disciples, in contrast, put down their nets and follow the One who approaches the monster without fear, and attempts to save not just the monster’s victims, but the monster itself.
What would you like to do, as, even now, Jesus pauses by your boat and says, “Follow me”?