The Prejudiced Prophet
The Prejudiced Prophet
On another occasion Jesus referred to himself as “greater than Jonah” (Matthew 12:41 NIV). There are two very important points here. We live in a world of hate and racial prejudice. It has always been so. More than twenty-five hundred years ago Jonah was commissioned by God to take his message of repentance and forgiveness to the Ninevites. The Ninevites were renowned for their cruelty and were feared and hated by all the surrounding peoples, including Jonah and his people. The last people in the world that Jonah would have felt burdened to reach with the love of God were the Ninevites. Just imagine the extent of his prejudice. He did not want to see them even extended an opportunity to receive the love of God. He wanted to see them punished by God and destroyed. Such is the extent of hate that even those called to preach can nurture. God had to do a deep work in Jonah to bring him to the place where he could understand and appreciate God’s love for all mankind, even the most unworthy, and embrace the depth of his forgiveness.
There is a second aspect to Jonah’s resistance. He was preserved from death for three days in the belly of a great fish in a supernatural way by God’s protective power. Under natural circumstances, he would have died. His survival against all odds was a reminder to the people Jesus was talking to that God himself would conquer the grave and restore his Son, who would bring the message of forgiveness and demonstrate, by his resurrection, that he is the Son of God with power.
Jonah was called to love the people whom he hated, and the best expression of his love was to tell them of God’s love for them. That, as Carlyle said, is the “greater miracle” in the story. People often misunderstand what this means. To question how God could ask us to love our enemies is to reduce love to a feeling and ignore the worth that God places on the object of his love. There is no such imperative within naturalism or pantheism.
Some years ago, it was my privilege to give the address at the Annual Prayer Breakfast that marks each new session of the United Nations. I had been asked to speak on “The Search for Absolutes in a Relativistic World” in twenty minutes, and to be cautious in talking about God. So in those few minutes I talked of the four areas in each of our experiences in which we search for absolutes: evil, justice, love, and forgiveness.
Try defining these from a pantheistic worldview, or any other worldview, for that matter. What is evil? How do we come to terms with what it is, as a reality? When you think about it, evil can be defined or understood only in a world where there is a duality and where purpose is clearly identified. How does one define evil in a world of one? As consciousness into which all other appearances merge? In Christian terms, evil is both a condition and an action. Our condition is that our default position is rebellion against God, and our actions are the outcome and demonstration of that rebellion. I have seen evil in the closest of proximities. All one needs to do is visit a war museum to see how much bloodshed humanity is responsible for.
But we have been seduced into thinking that evil is defined only in its cruelest form. That is categorically untrue. Or we think of evil in degrees, as in, how could so much evil be justified? But that again misses the heart of what evil is. How often in my own heart I have sensed desires and machinations that remind me of how vile the human heart can be. The escape doors here—that something is evil only when in its cruelest form or if there is an extreme expression of evil—make the New Spirituality look devoid of reality. Let me give you two examples of this.
When Maharishi Mahesh Yogi passed away, Deepak Chopra wrote an article attempting to defend his not-so-nice side. I will not go into the stories that had circulated about him. Chopra’s article was called “The Three Maharishis.” Why am I not surprised? He seems to love the triads for his explanations. There were three Jesus figures, according to him, so why not three Maharishis? Writing for the Huffington Post on February 6, 2008, after the Maharishi died, Chopra said the following. Read it carefully:
You could be walking down the hallway to his private apartments with the weight of the world on your shoulders and feel your worries drop away with every step, until by the time your hand touched the doorknob, by some magic you felt completely carefree. But if you were around him long enough, the older Maharishi in particular could be nettlesome and self-centered; he could get angry and dismissive. He was quick to assert his authority and yet could turn disarmingly child-like in the blink of an eye.
The Maharishi who was an Indian felt most comfortable around other Indians… He adhered to the vows of poverty and celibacy that belonged to his order of monks, despite the fact that he lived in luxury and amassed considerable wealth for the TM movement… In the end the movement’s money went to preserve the spiritual heritage of India by opening pundit schools and building temples….
For good or ill, these two Maharishis are the only ones that the outside world knew. If you came under the power of his consciousness, however, Maharishi the guru completely overshadowed every other aspect.4
I have to wonder to what extent the mind can deceive itself with word games. Maybe that is part of the mystery of evil. So the darker side is explained away as not the real person, because there are really three of them: the not-so-nice side of him; the public side of him; and oh, when you came under the power of his consciousness, there was the divine and magical side of him. These are brilliant trisections to explain the human heart in its depravity. Actually, Chopra may have accidently blundered into the right. In a strange way there are three Chopras, too, and three of each one of us: There is who the world thinks we are, who we think we are, and who God knows us to be. Maharishi at his core was like all of us, as is Mr. Chopra. Verbal magic will not do here. Evil stalks us and we know it. To play word games is a ploy to escape the obvious.
The more we deny reality, the more mindless our solutions become. The story of Jonah is the story of both the preacher and the audience, if you’ll pardon the pun, in the same boat. It is terrible to be the victim of hate, but it is even worse to be the possessor of it. Jonah simply despised his audience and wanted them to have no share in God’s forgiveness. But through the storm and the story emerges the greatest miracle of all—a transformed heart, fresh with the hope beyond this life. Take a closer look at the implications of this story—love, forgiveness, and hope. This is the sum and substance of the gospel: love, forgiveness, and hope—because of Jesus Christ. He is greater than Jonah.