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Summary: AI-assisted (Claude) from transcripts

Summary

Hide and Seek

Toddlers love to hide—a blanket draped over the face, a giggle from behind the couch—convinced that what they cannot see, no one else can see either. The book of Jonah tells a strikingly similar story, only the player is a grown prophet, and the One he hopes to evade is the Lord. "Hide and Seek" 7-7-24 opens the prophet's flight not as a quirky detour on the way to a great fish, but as a serious account of a man who tried to slip out God's back door.

The call was clear: "Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and call out against it, for their evil has come up before me" Jonah 1:1-2. Nineveh was the celebrated capital of Assyria—wealthy, populous, intellectually proud—and notoriously violent and depraved. The prophet Nahum would later catalog its bloodshed and sorcery Nahum 3:1-5, and even its own kings died by assassination in their temples 2 Kings 19:36-37. Its sin was not hidden; it was paraded. And yet, hidden or paraded, it stood exposed before a holy and righteous God who alone has the right to judge.

Jonah's response was not fear of the journey or fear of the city. By his own confession, he fled because he knew exactly what God is like: "I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster" Jonah 4:2. He did not want Nineveh to receive mercy, so he ran—not just away from Nineveh, but "from the presence of the LORD" Jonah 1:3. Nineveh lay roughly 550 miles to the northeast; Tarshish lay some 2,500 miles to the west, the farthest known point across the Mediterranean. Called forward into his vocation, Jonah bolted in the opposite direction, then climbed below deck and fell asleep—doubling down on the illusion that distance and darkness could put him out of God's sight.

It could not. "Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?... If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me" Psalm 139:7-10. Nothing is hidden from God—not our deeds, not our words, not the thoughts we managed to keep behind our teeth. For the sinner, that truth can land like terror. We know the dark places our hearts can wander, and the idea of an all-seeing God seems to strike fear at the core.

But Scripture turns the game around. The God from whom we cannot hide is the God who comes looking for us in love. "I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed" Ezekiel 34:16. "The Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost" Luke 19:10. In our sin we cannot find God; in his mercy he finds us. He enters creation, lives a holy life, and carries our sin to the cross, giving up his own life and spirit so that ours might be washed clean. The empty tomb is the proof that the offering was accepted, and that victory is delivered to us in the waters of Baptism.

So the gospel reverses Jonah's geography. We cannot run far enough west to outrun our sin—it follows us, circles back, refuses to be shaken loose by our own efforts. But what we cannot do, God has done: "as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us" Psalm 103:12. Hide-and-seek is, at heart, an elaborate game of peekaboo, and peekaboo teaches a child that what disappears from sight has not ceased to exist. The mature life of faith rests on a similar permanence—greater and unshakable. God is, God sees, God seeks, and God's love and forgiveness in Christ are fixed realities, even when trial or sorrow makes him seem hidden from us. Rather than hiding our sin, we bring it to the foot of the cross, are fed and strengthened by Word and Sacrament among the fellowship of believers, and are sent out as Jonah finally was—called to proclaim repentance and forgiveness in Christ to a world that, like us, can never truly hide from the God who will find them every time.

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