Photo: Bokeh / Tomedia. Sailing on the Open Sea.
Jonah is a fascinatingly difficult bloke.
God tells him to go to Nineveh. He gets on a boat going somewhere else. There is a storm, an extremely bad time at sea and a fish. Eventually he goes to the city and delivers the warning.
What we are given in Jonah 3 is certainly brief: a warning that Nineveh will be overthrown in forty days.
And Jonah began to enter into the city a day’s journey, and he cried, and said, Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown.
The people respond. They repent. God shows mercy.
Jonah is furious.
The fish isn’t the end of the problem
It is easy to remember Jonah as the story of a man who ran away, got swallowed and eventually did what he was told. A fairly memorable lesson in obedience.
But chapter 4 keeps going. Jonah explains that he knew God was gracious and merciful. That was why he fled in the first place. He had suspected this might end with Nineveh being spared.
And he prayed unto the LORD, and said, I pray thee, O LORD, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.
I had focused in my notes on how frightening the assignment must have been. And the assignment was confronting. But Jonah’s own explanation forces me to pay attention to something uglier. He doesn’t want these people to receive mercy.
He can recognise God’s character and still be angry when God acts according to it.
I would prefer to find that less relatable.
I am much more enthusiastic about mercy when I need it
I want God to understand my history. I want him to know the things I struggled with, the reasons I reacted badly and the times I was trying even if the result was a mess.
When I look at somebody who has hurt people, it becomes much easier to decide their actions tell me everything I need to know.
That doesn’t mean the harm should be ignored. Nineveh is called to turn from evil and violence. The book takes its wrongdoing seriously. Mercy involves a change that Jonah had gone there to announce, even if he didn’t like the outcome.
The uncomfortable part for me is how quickly a desire for justice can become a desire to watch somebody get what I think they deserve. I can tell myself I am defending what is right while quietly hoping the person never changes enough to complicate my verdict.
Jonah sits outside the city waiting. He has delivered the message. He still wants the ending to go his way.
God keeps dealing with the prophet too
The story finishes with Jonah upset about a plant that had given him shade. God asks him to consider his concern for the plant alongside God’s concern for the people of Nineveh, and even their animals.
That last detail is wonderful. Jonah has narrowed everything to his own grievance, and God is talking about an entire city full of lives.
The book leaves us with God’s question. We aren’t given a neat scene where Jonah apologises, sorts himself out and becomes easy to like.
I don’t get to assume I would have supplied that ending either. I can do what is asked of me while still needing God to deal with the resentment I brought along.
When I pray about somebody I am angry with, I want to make room to ask for their repentance and restoration as well as for the harm to stop. I may not enjoy saying it. But if I believe God can change people, I need to leave open the possibility that he will change someone I have already written off.