Jonah 3:10-4:11
10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.
1 But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? 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. 3 Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
4 But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
5 Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. 6 Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. 7 But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”
9 But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”
“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”
10 But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. 11 And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”
Love for Our Community
Many of you know that I spent much of this last week in Ottawa. On the way back home, I ran into a member of Parliament in the airport; we were waiting for the same plane. Can you guess what we talked about? Politics.
Even more than the policies that he mentioned and the insights into why certain things have been said and done recently, I think what stuck out to me the most was the underlying attitude that both he and I and anyone else who chimed in had. Can you guess what those attitudes were? I’ll make it easy on you; I’ll just give you two options. Do you think our attitudes about politics were generally positive or negative? They were generally negative.
It didn’t really matter whether he was a member of the NDP, UCP, ABC or EFG party. Among members of every party and people with any perspective, there is always some level of dissatisfaction with something that someone else has said or done. That is the way it has always been and that is the way it will always be, whether the issue is education, immigration, inflation, sexual orientation, or all of the above. It doesn’t matter; we have this incredible knack for dissatisfaction.
That was a sad realization to make at 11:00pm as we were waiting for a 4-hour flight back to Edmonton. What made me sadder still, though, was seeing the impact that that dissatisfaction had on the relationships of the people who were part of that conversation or the subject of it. There were unkind things said about other members of Parliament, and I felt my blood pressure rising as we got into controversial topics. I had to go and take a couple of deep breaths and loosen my shoulders when we were done.
And I get it. We react strongly because we care deeply. Albertans care deeply about the health of our province and the way governmental policies seem to be harming it… in exactly the same way that people from other provinces feel protective and possessive about their homes and livelihoods. You could say that we feel and act this way because we love our communities – and that would be true – but in all three passages that we read from God’s Word today, we see God define love for community entirely differently.
I’d like to focus on Jonah today. He was a man who loved his community and cared deeply about it. We didn’t read this but in 2 Kings 14 we find out that Jonah came from a city called Gath-Hepher, about 2 miles from where Jesus grew up in Nazareth in Galilee. Jonah was a Jew and proud of it. So proud, in fact, that when God came to him one day and instructed him to go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it,[1] Jonah decided to run away instead.
You see, Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria, which, at the time, was the sworn enemy of Jonah’s Israel. Not only that, Assyria was an ascending world power that posed a clear and present danger particularly to people from the north, like Jonah. To put that into context, imagine that you were a Ukrainian from Kharkiv in 2021 and God came to you with a special mission to preach the Gospel in Moscow. How would you have felt about that? Probably not very good. “I’ll go to Germany, Lord. Send me across the Atlantic to Canada. Send me anywhere but there.” That’s how Jonah felt.
And we can understand whatever fear may have filled Jonah’s heart as he chartered a boat to the western coast of Spain instead. But what’s fascinating is to hear from Jonah himself why he ran away and didn’t want to preach the Gospel in Nineveh. It was the first few verses of our text for today:
When God saw… how the [Ninevites] turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.
But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I know that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.”[2]
Did you catch what Jonah said about why he didn’t want to go to Nineveh? It wasn’t that he was afraid for his life. It was that he was afraid that God would be gracious and compassionate to the Ninevites. Jonah was afraid that God would spare them, because what Jonah wanted was to see his enemies get destroyed. You even get the sense that that’s what Jonah was waiting to see when he went out and sat down at a place east of the city. He was waiting for fireworks. He was secretly hoping that the Ninevites’ faith was fake so that God could rain fire and brimstone down from heaven to wipe their wicked city off the face of the map.
Do you ever secretly wish for fire and brimstone to rain down on your enemies? Do you derive a guilty pleasure from seeing your opponents fail? Do you intentionally avoid that house on your street with that one flag hanging in the window because you don’t even want to have a casual conversation with someone whose entire worldview is so drastically than yours? Then you and Jonah have something in common – a lack of love for your community.
Jesus taught us who our neighbour is in our Gospel for today with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The people whom God tells us to love are not just our family and friends. Our neighbours are not just those who are nice to us or who agree with us. Our neighbours include the ones who call the peace officer on us for not mowing our lawn to their satisfaction. Your neighbours include the ones who blow their leaves across the street and into your yard. Your neighbours include the ones who bullied you in school, who cut you off in traffic, who voted opposite you in the last election. They are the ones we’ve been commanded to love, but whom we so often fail to love and whose downfall we may even pray for, whose forgiveness and salvation we begrudge, just like Jonah did.
It’s not a good look, for Jonah or for us. But look at the gentle way that God rebukes his reluctant prophet. First he provided a leafy plant to give Jonah shade during the heat of the day. It was a miracle! Plants don’t grow that much over night. But then, the next morning, God performed another miracle by providing a worm to chew through the plant so that it withered and died.
By providing a worm and a plant, God was proving a point to Jonah. Jonah had gotten so invested in that plant – that he did plant or tend or water – that when he saw it die, he wanted to die. God cared much more about the people of Nineveh than Jonah ever could about this inanimate object that he had met the day before, and God shows grace to those he loves.
He sent Jonah to preach to that wicked city, because God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. His wish is that they turn from their wicked ways and live. And God got his wish! The people repented, so God relented on his threat to destroy them. This was a miraculous victory for the Gospel. Jonah should have been happy – if not sincerely happy for the salvation of their salvations, at the very least selfishly happy that these new believers were not going to invade Jonah’s hometown any time soon because they had found God and morality and grace and compassion.
But the people of Nineveh were not the only ones who got a second chance that day. Jonah did too. God even shows grace to his people – to us – when we’re not willing to reflect his love to others. Again, look at how gentle God is with Jonah. He doesn’t yell at him. He doesn’t punish him. He teaches him a lesson in love – that God loves the lost, just as much as loves the found, and that God’s own people need his love just as much as everyone else.
God is still teaching you that lesson. He is opening your eyes to the truth that your community needs your love, just like you need his. I think we can all think of situations when we have pouted like Jonah did and resented God’s patience with others, and forgotten that that’s how God treated us. He didn’t send a prophet to us – although we are blessed with the prophets’ words and pastors to preach them. God sent someone better; he sent his Son, Jesus – not to sit on a hill outside of town and watch as God rained down our punishment from heaven, but to step in and to take our place and the punishment we deserved so that we could be spared. God intervened for you and showed grace to you, so that you could know that he forgives you and will not bring about the destruction he threatened, but so that you can know that you will spend eternity with him in heaven.
And that’s the same love with which God views everyone around you – the lady who calls the RCMP on you for not mowing your lawn, the guy who blows his leaves across the street and into your yard, the bully who made your life miserable in school, and the activist down the street who spends all their time campaigning for things that go directly against your conscience and collective wisdom.
The book of Jonah ends with this haunting question:
“And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left?”[3]
I ask you a similar one: Should we not also be concerned about our city – about all those people whose politics frustrate us and whose actions may even injure us, because they need Jesus, just like we do? The only difference is that we have him. They don’t. So let’s bring Jesus and his love to our community. Put aside whatever petty differences threaten to separate you from your neighbour and focus on the love that God demonstrated equally to all through his Son on the cross. God give you strength and patience and hope and love, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
[1] Jonah 1:1
[2] Jonah 3:10-4:2
[3] Jonah 4:11
