Last week, I went on a bike ride with a friend. I studied the maps beforehand and chose the starting point. There were a number of places where my companion wasn’t sure where we were supposed to go. But I would say, “I got this - I know the route. We cross this intersection, turn left, and take that side path.” Most the time, my friend trusted me. Once or twice, he would say, “Are you sure?” We came down the Mississippi River trail in Champlin and I knew we should turn right at 49th street and cross over highway 94. Except that there wasn’t any way to do that. So we got a little lost, and it took a little while to find our way back to our cars.
What I want to focus on about that is the three feelings I had at different points. One is how nice it is to be trusted - to say “I got this” and the person believes you. Then there’s the annoyance when they don’t trust you. I’m sure everyone here has experienced that feeling of having things under control, but someone doesn’t believe that you do. Often, that doubting person is your own wife or husband or family member. Have you had that experience? Were there times when you said something to your spouse or family member and they didn’t believe you - until they ask someone else, who tells them the same thing, and then they believe them?
The third feeling is the embarrassment when you say “I’ve got this,” but it turns out you don’t. You were actually wrong. Or perhaps you just couldn’t control the situation. A few weeks ago my family went up north for vacation, and I stayed behind for a few days to be at church. My daughter brought her cat over to my house to watch for a few days, and in the confusion of loading up the cars, someone left a door open. By the time I noticed, the cat was long gone. I eventually spotted her hiding under the bushes in front of our window. Me and that cat stared at each other for a long time, but I couldn’t coax her closer. The next morning, there she was under the thick bush again, so I put out a food dish and she came and nibbled on it. She was finally within reach, so I thought “I got this,” and grabbed a paw. When I say “I got this,” all I “got” was a scratch on my arm. The cat got away. Someone else caught her the next day.
But let’s go back to that second feeling: the one where you do know what you’re doing, you do have it under control, but people don’t believe you -- even your closest loved ones. Why don’t they? Well, the third factor helps explain the second one: someone you think you’ve got it but you don’t. You think you know the truth, but you don’t--and because they live with you, they can recognize that. They know you are not omniscient and omnipotent. You are not God.
But take a second and imagine what it’s like to be God. To have a grand plan for the entire universe, to be all-knowing and all-powerful, and to reassure your people, “I’ve got this.” And they don’t believe you. Billions of people on the earth with one thing in common: when God says “I’ve got this,” they are not so sure. Some openly doubt; some give lip service but are still uneasy and nervous. Intellectually they may say “I know that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, and everything is part of a divine plan” - but emotionally, that doesn’t stop them from worrying. Even the people who love you most still have trouble fully trusting you. God has been in this situation since the dawn of creation.
Let’s look at one person in particular: Jonah.
Jonah’s Story
The book of Jonah is only two and a half pages long, but is one of the most well-known stories in the Bible. I used to read it to my children all the time when they were little. And this may be blasphemous, but one reason I loved to tell the story to my children was because it is funny. At least, the way I would tell it. The book of Jonah is a comedy. But it’s also a bit of a mystery.
What is the comedy? It begins with God telling Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh, one of the biggest cities in the world at that time, and tell them to repent. The way I would tell it to my kids, Jonah would ask, “Which way is Nineveh?” And then he would bolt in the opposite direction like a cartoon figure, running as fast as he can. To put it another way, God tells Jonah about His plan, and Jonah’s reaction is: “No, I don’t think so. That’s not a good plan.” When I said it was a mystery, the thing that’s hardest for me to discern is Jonah’s motivation. Was he cowardly? Did he have good reason to run away? Regardless of what he was thinking, one thing is clear: He did not trust God’s plan, so he got on a ship and fled as far away as he could.
And God in essence said, “You will stick to my plan.” A great storm arose, and the sailors tried to figure out what caused it, and when they threw lots, it showed that Jonah was the cause - and Jonah already knew this. (It even says that Jonah had told the sailors in advance that he was running away from God). And to me, the most touching part of the story is when the sailors realize that they should throw Jonah into the sea, but they don’t want him to die. He’s a stranger to them, but they fight hard to protect his life. That is beautiful - but it also shows a lack of trust in God’s plan, so everyone in the story is saying to God, “I don’t think you have this.”
But that of course is when he is swallowed by the great fish, and spends three days in the belly of the fish, where Jonah can do nothing but pray. The fish deposits him at the shores of Nineveh, Jonah tells the city to repent, and an astonishing thing happens: they listen! They all repent, and the city is spared. This makes Jonah the most successful prophet in the Old Testament: many of the prophets spent their lives in frustration because no one would listen to them, but Jonah got results.
Still Jonah is very unhappy. How does he feel after experiencing the greatest success of his life? Astonishingly, he is miserable. In the early part of the book of Jonah, when he runs away from his mission, we don’t know his motivation. Now at least he explains why he is angry: ‘That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.’ In other words, Jonah did not like God’s plan - apparently because it was merciful and loving. This does not make Jonah look good. And he has a strong emotional reaction: he wishes he were dead. “Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
So Jonah does something that, to me, seems even more childish than his attempt to run away from God: he goes outside the city, finds a good vantage point, and hopes that God will change his mind and pour fire and brimstone down on the city. “I hope I get to see some fireworks!” But no, it never comes.
Instead, Jonah becomes obsessed with his own comfort. He’s sitting there in the hot sun, and God makes a vine grow up to provide some shade. In Chapter 4, verse 6, it says “Jonah was very happy about the plant.” I point that out because it is the only time in the entire book of Jonah when he is happy. But it is short-lived, because God sends a worm to eat that vine, so now he is back to being in the blazing sun. And Jonah goes back to his previous reaction: wishing he were dead. Twice he asks God to take away his life. Jonah has a problem with emotional control.
The book of Jonah ends with God pointing out that Jonah is more concerned with a vine than with a city of 120,000 people. We can presume that Jonah gets the point, but we don’t hear his final reaction. It is difficult for me to have much respect for Jonah. And yet, in Matthew 12, there is a discussion about Jonah. The Pharisees are confronting Jesus, and they ask him for a sign that he truly is the Christ. And Jesus draws a comparison between the three days that Jonah was inside the belly of the fish and the three days Jesus will be in the sepulchre. And then he says, “The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here.”
That strikes me as a curious comparison: Jonah was reluctant, and miserable, really only did one thing - he delivered the message to the city of Nineveh to repent. But Jesus is calling him “great.”
The Lesson from Jonah
What is the lesson to be drawn from this short book? I’ve been focusing on the phrase “I’ve got this.” And one obvious lesson is that when Jonah was acting alone, he never did well. He never liked God’s plan - even after it succeeded - but his own plans were not very good. Jonah was so much trouble that it makes you wonder why God chose him to perform this vital task. Couldn’t God have delivered the message directly to the people of Nineveh? No, that is not God’s way - time and again, he relies on a flawed human being to carry out his plans. Moses the murderer; Jacob the cheater; David the adulterer. We humans are part of the plan.
So we have a curious conundrum: God is the all-knowing and all-powerful, and He really does “have this” - He has the master plan, even if we humans don’t trust Him and don’t recognize it. Yet He hands the reins over to us to do part of the work. If we think our own plan is better, He will correct us and steer us back to the divine plan. But we are still part of it.
It makes me think of a father who is repairing a washing machine, and he has a child who wants to help. Some fathers will give that child a fake task to perform, to give them the illusion that they are helping - hold this wrench against this bolt that does nothing. But this is more like the father giving the child a real task: a simple and easy one, but that bolt really does need to be held in place with the wrench. And while the child is doing that, the father is doing 99% of the work. Likewise, in our spiritual development, God asks us to work on a few evils within ourselves while he is quietly doing most of the work. So, if that is the lesson, then we can go back to the phrase “I’ve got this” and see the flaw: it’s not that humans can never say they have control over a situation or know what to do. The flaw is the pronoun, “I” vs. “we”: the honest answer should be “We’ve got this.”
But I keep going back to the story of Jonah and how much of it is devoted to emotional reactions. It may be an odd parallel, but it takes me back to my adolescence, when I was learning musical instruments. The thing is, I was self-taught. I took two years of piano lessons, but on the instruments I play most now (acoustic guitar and bass guitar), no one ever gave me any lessons at all. But I was an arrogant youth, and I picked up one instrument after another and said, “I’ve got this: I can master this instrument.” I bought a drum set, I owned a flute, I had an electric guitar. It was exhilarating, to feel like I could play any instrument. Sometimes I would go see another band play - perhaps an amateur band playing in their driveway, and I would think “I could play that… probably better than they could.” Sometimes I would get in jam sessions with other musicians, and I’d think, “I’m the best musician in the room.”
But then I would go to a concert, and see a true master on stage, and would get discouraged. I would go home and think, “I will never play like that - I should give up right now.” It was an awful feeling, and not too far off from Jonah in his worst moments. And I had many discussions with my brother Jonathan, who is a much better musician than I am, and he would feel that same discouragement when he saw someone truly skilled. And we came to an insight about that:
When we saw musicians play and we felt “I can do that” - it felt good, but it did nothing for our musical development. It left us with the feeling that we were as good as we’d ever need to be. But when we saw the great musicians, and felt that crushing discouragement, it made us go home and actually practice. It made us try to figure out how to be better. And that explains an expression they use in jazz: “Your goal should be to be the worst musician in the room.” It feels great to be the best musician in the room, of course, but it doesn’t propel you forward. Being the worst musician in the room feels bad, but that’s how you get better.
So that, I think, is the true lesson from the book of Jonah. In terms of actual results, he was the greatest prophet in the Old Testament. He was miserable about it, he resisted it, and he kept going back to saying “I’d be better off dead.” But he was great. Sometimes it is when we feel the worst that we are making the most progress. That is when great things happen. And during those dark moments, if God says, “I’ve got this,” it’s time to listen.