Jonah stands as the great example of human weakness in the chosen
instruments of God's hand.
Take the story--his shrinking from the message given him. We know
not why; but perhaps from faint-hearted fear, or from a sense of his
unworthiness and unfitness for the task. His own words about God as
long-suffering seem to suggest another reason, that he feared to go
with a message of judgment which seemed to him so unlikely to be
executed by the long-suffering God. If so, then what made him
recreant was not so much fear from personal motives as intellectual
perplexity and imperfect comprehension of the ways of God. Then we
hear of his pitiable flight with its absurdity and its wickedness.
Then comes the prayer which shows him to have been right and true at
bottom, and teaches us that what makes a good man is not the absence
of faults, but the presence of love and longing after God. Then we
see the boldness of his mission. Then follows the reaction from that
lofty height, the petulance or whatever else it was with which he
sees the city spared. Even the mildest interpretation cannot acquit
him of much disregard for the poor souls whom he had brought to
repentance, and of dreadful carelessness for the life and happiness
of his fellows.
Now Jonah's behaviour is but a specimen of the vacillations, the
alternations of feeling which beset every man; the loftiest, the
truest, the best. Moses, David, Solomon, Elijah, John the Baptist,
Peter, Luther, Cranmer. And it is full of instruction for us.
Then we turn to the contrast in Christ's perfect obedience and
faithfulness in His prophetic office. In Him is no trace of
shrinking even when the grimness of the Cross weighed most on His
heart. No confusion of mind as to the Father's will, or as to the
union in Him of perfect righteousness and infinite mercy, ever
darkened His clear utterances or cast a shadow over his own soul. He
was never weakened by the collapse that follows on great effort or
strong emotion. He never failed in his mission through lack of pity.
But there is no need to draw out the comparison. We look on all
God's instruments, and see them all full of faults and flaws. Here
is one stainless name, one life in which is no blot, one heart in
which are no envy, no failings--one obedience which never varied. He
says of Himself, 'I do always those things which please Him,' and
we, thinking of all the noblest examples of virtue that the world
has ever seen, and seeing in them all some speck, turn to this whole
and perfect chrysolite and say, Yes! 'a greater than they!'
III. The bearer of a transitory message of repentance to one Gentile
people, and the bearer of an eternal message of grace and love to
the whole earth.
Jonah is remarkable as having had the sphere of his activity wholly
outside Israel.
The nature of his message; a preaching of punishment; a call to
repentance.
The sphere of it--one Gentile city. The effect of it--transitory. We
know what Nineveh became.
Jesus is greater than Jonah or any prophet in this respect, that His
message is to the world, and in this, that what He preaches and
brings far transcends even the loftiest and most spiritual words of
any of them.
His voice is sweetest, tenderest, clearest and fullest of all that
have ever sounded in men's ears. And just because it is so, the
hearing of it brings the most solemn responsibility that was ever
laid on men, and to us still more gravely and truly may it be said
than to those who heard Jesus speak on earth, 'The men of Nineveh
shall rise in judgment with this generation and condemn it.'
'A GREATER THAN SOLOMON'
'A greater than Solomon is here.'--MATT. xii. 42.
It is condescension in Him to compare Himself with any; yet if any
might have been selected, it is that great name. To the Jews Solomon
is an ideal figure, who appealed so strongly to popular imagination
as to become the centre of endless legends; whose dominion was the
very apex of national glory, in recounting whose splendours the
historical books seem to be scarce able to restrain their triumph
and pride.
I. The Man. The story gives us a richly endowed and many-sided
character. It begins with lovely, youthful enthusiasm, with a
profound sense of his own weakness, with earnest longings after
wisdom and guidance. He lived a pure and beautiful youth, and all
his earlier and middle life was adorned with various graces. There
is a certain splendid largeness about the character. He had a rich
variety of gifts: he was statesman, merchant, sage, physicist,
builder, one of the many-sided men whom the old world produced. And
on this we may build a comparison and contrast.
The completeness of Christ's Humanity transcends all other men, even
the most various, and transcends all gathered together. Every type
of excellence is in Him. We cannot say that His character is any one
thing in special, it falls under no classification. It is a pure
white light in which all rays are blended. This all-comprehensiveness
and symmetry of character are remarkably shown in four brief records.
But we have to take into account the dark shadows that fell on
Solomon's later years. He clearly fell away from his early
consecration and noble ideals, and let his sensuous appetites gain
power. He countenanced, if he did not himself practise, idolatry. As
a king he became an arbitrary tyrant, and his love of building led
him to oppress his subjects, and so laid the foundation for the
revolt under Jeroboam which rent the kingdom. So his history is
another illustration of the possible shipwreck of a great character.
It is one more instance of the fall of a 'son of the morning.' We
need not elaborate the contrast with Christ's character. In Him is
no falling from a high ideal, no fading of morning glory into a
cloudy noon or a lurid evening. There is no black streak in that
flawless white marble. Jesus draws the perfect circle, like Giotto's
O, while all other lives show some faltering of hand, and consequent
irregularity of outline. Greater than Solomon, with his over-clouded
glories and his character worsened by self-indulgence, is Jesus,
'the Sun of righteousness,' the perfect round of whose lustrous
light is broken by no spots on the surface, no indentations in the
circumference, nor obscured by any clouds over its face.