God relents. Nineveh is spared. And Jonah is furious.

The story of Jonah is not necessarily one to be read as literal history, but as an exploration of loyalty, compassion, and the boundaries of human and divine action and forgiveness.

This Sunday finds us at the end of Jonah’s story. Not with triumph, but with a prophet sitting outside the city, sulking under a hastily grown plant, while the people he was sent to warn go about their ordinary lives, but having taken to heart the prophet’s message about the need to change their ways and honour God.

How dare they! How dare God!

The anger we recognise

Jonah’s prayer (or conversation with God) in chapter 4 is wonderfully honest. I love the way that the Old Testament allows, even encourages us, to be real with God about all our feelings, not just the nice stuff. Being angry and upset with God is absolutely fine, and God is not offended by our honest emotions.

Jonah tells God this is exactly why he tried to run away in the first place. He knew God was “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”, and he could not bear the thought of that love being given to Nineveh, the great enemy of Israel. We hate them! They’re awful! They deserve punishment! Why would I do anything to help them?

There is something deeply human here. We are often quite content to receive mercy ourselves. We become far less comfortable when it is offered to people we think deserve punishment. As far as he sees it, Jonah would rather die than live in a world where God’s compassion extends to his enemies. Hyperbole? Maybe. Real human emotion? Definitely.

The plant, the worm, and the question

God’s response is not a lecture. It is an experience. A lived story for Jonah, so that we can hear and see ourselves in that story.

He causes a plant to grow over Jonah, giving him shade and comfort. Jonah is “exceedingly glad” about this plant. Then God sends a worm to attack it, and a scorching east wind, until the plant withers and Jonah is once again miserable, angry enough to die.

Then comes the killer question that cuts through the whole story:

“You pity the plant, for which you did not labour, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should not I pity Nineveh, that great city…?”

God’s compassion is wider than Jonah’s. It is wider than ours. 

So what about us?

This story is very like Jesus’ parables. It make for a great tale, but if you listen with any degree of care and attention, it’s not very comfortable. It’s easy to sit in the role of Jonah’s correctors. We shake our heads at his narrowness. But then we realise, we are also Nineveh. And we are also Jonah himself.

The people of Nineveh were not morally superior. They were violent, oppressive, and deeply flawed. That’s why Jonah was sent to warn them to change their ways, or disaster would befall them. Yet when they turned from their evil way, God was able to avert the disaster that would have befallen them. A more modern phrasing would be that actions have consequences. They listened to the warning.

And Jonah wasn’t exactly an obedient Godly man. When God asked him to go to Nineveh, he immediately fled in the opposite direction, and put a lot of people in danger of their lives! When he acknowledged that he was wrong, owned up, and accepted what had to be done, he was saved – swallowed by a whale and spit up on the beach just by Nineveh, where he should have gone in the first place, if he had had the courage and compassion…

Courage to face our anger? Courage to follow compassion?

If we’re honest, many of us carry our own versions of Jonah’s anger. We may not call it that. We call it justice, or principle, or righteous indignation. But underneath it is often a reluctance to see certain people, certain communities, certain nations, included in the circle of God’s mercy. Please note I am not saying anything goes! But I am suggesting that nothing is beyond God’s compassion and mercy.

And the plant in our lives might be anything we cling to for comfort while remaining indifferent to the fate of others: our political certainty, our theological neatness, our sense of being on the right side. God is not against our comfort. He is against our comfort becoming more important to us than the lives of all the other people he loves.

The God of small things, who holds the whole world

Like the Gospel story where Jesus asks blind Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?”, God does not simply override Jonah. He engages him. He gives him space to speak his anger, then invites him into a larger vision. That is how God often works with us. Not by crushing our smaller loyalties, but by drawing us into a wider compassion.

The book of Jonah ends with a question, not a resolution. We are left with God’s final words hanging in the air: “And should not I pity Nineveh…?”

Perhaps that is the point. The story does not tell us whether Jonah ever came to share God’s heart for the city. Like so many of Jesus’ parables, it leaves that question open for us. 

Rev. Talisker

Photo by Dave McDermott on Unsplash