The story about the prophet Jonah, if it is familiar, is probably familiar in broad strokes and mostly for the first half of the story. This is the part where God asks Jonah to do something Jonah isn’t too excited about doing – go to the people of Nineveh, a powerful, foreign city, and warn them about their impending destruction at God’s hand. Jonah doesn’t like this idea, so he runs in the exact opposite direction. When his disobedience is recognized by God, storms start to batter the boat he has hopped onto in order to sail away from his task. His fellow passengers are not excited about this, so they toss him overboard where a big fish comes along and swallows Jonah up.
At this point some of us might mix up the imagery of Pinocchio and Geppetto building a bonfire to get the whale to sneeze them out with that of Jonah crying out in prayer for God’s mercy, but ultimately what happens is that God hears Jonah’s cry, speaks to the fish, and the fish vomits Jonah out onto the dry land. Pleasant, I know. All in all, the general idea of this first part of the story, maybe the most memorable part from our children’s Bibles and story books, is that the prophet turned away from God, got swallowed by a fish, and then was given a second chance. But that’s only the first two chapters of the story.
The next two, which are the final two in this very short book, paint a picture of a prophet with a very short memory. He who was just saved by God’s mercy and compassion, does go in the direction God has pointed him, but, well, he decides, he doesn’t have to like it. In fact, he gets downright mad at God about God’s choice to first warn the Ninevites, giving them a chance to acknowledge their mistakes and ask for forgiveness, and then show them mercy and compassion. The very same mercy and compassion Jonah himself has relied on when he turned from God, he is reticent to offer to the people of Nineveh.
But Jonah goes to Nineveh to reluctantly deliver the message God told him to deliver in the first place, that word of the wickedness of the people has made its way to God and God is not happy, that they are going to be destroyed. He makes his way to the city but, let’s be honest, does the bare minimum when he gets there. One third of the way into the city, not at city center, not in the middle of the people where all can hear, not near the seat of authority or the halls of power, but on the edge of the capital he gives one pathetic cry, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” Not his best effort.
But comically, despite him, despite his reluctance, despite his dragged feet and his half-hearted prophecy, the people believed God. They fasted and prayed and grieved. From the common people of the land to the king of the empire, and even down to the animals in their midst, everyone took Jonah’s message seriously and turned from their evil ways and violence. God saw this. God saw their efforts and changed his mind.
For that Jonah about lost his mind. This, he said, was why he ran away from the job in the first place. He knew God couldn’t resist being gracious, and he just didn’t want to have any part in saving these people from the consequences of their own actions. He would rather die, he said, than be in a world where his enemies are allowed to live.
It is helpful at this point to think about the multiplicity of perspectives that we have in reading a story like this from the ancient world. The layered audiences we have one on top of the other influence how we interpret it. One audience or layer is made up of the characters in this actual story – Jonah, the Ninevites, even God. As we think about the meaning of this text we think about who they are and what their actions and relationships tell us in their world, the setting of the narrative.
The prophet Jonah is mentioned in the book of 2 Kings which places his life and ministry in about the middle of the 8th century before the birth of Jesus. This is a time when the kingdom that had been united under the first kings of Israel – Saul, David, and Solomon – was now divided, with one king who ruled from the northern city of Samaria and the other who ruled the southern kingdom from Jerusalem. Except for this unique foray to Nineveh, the capital of the neighboring Assyrian Empire, Jonah’s ministry took place and was primary addressed to the northern kingdom. He and other prophets in this time and place primarily warned Israel’s kings about idolatry and adopting foreign gods, as well as warning them not to form political alliances with kingdoms outside of God’s covenantal people. Jonah’s call, then to go give the Assyrians a warning about their impending doom, goes against this grain to say the least.
Those details leads us to the next layer of interpretation because while the action of this story takes place in the 8th century before the birth of Jesus, the structure of the language tells us that it wasn’t actually written down in this format for at least another 200 years and probably more like three or four hundred years after the fact. While it was likely have a circulated as a story in the oral tradition, we know that the way a story or history gets written down is always colored by the contemporary events, attitudes, and struggles of its writers. So when we think about this, we should start to ask questions like, “Why was it told this way? What did the original hearers of the story know that the characters in the plot don’t seem to?”
Well, what those hearers knew that Jonah didn’t yet know, was that a mere 50 years after Jonah’s ministry, the Assyrians he had a part in saving completely conquered the northern kingdom of Israel that Jonah came from. These people God tells Jonah to go warn, these people God decides to save and forgive and let live despite the promise of destruction in forty days, are the very people who will later overcome God’s people in battle and take them into an exile from which they never return.
The audience that first received this telling of Jonah’s story knew that their distant kin, fellow Israelites, and whole communities were taken from their land, scattered throughout a foreign empire, and never returned or reunited as God’s people in or out of their homeland again. Jonah’s anger and frustration, his dispute with God, might best be heard as their dispute, their grief, their attempt to reconcile this history.
And then a third layer of interpretation is our own layer. We are about 2,700 years and two continents removed from the setting of the story. We have ancient texts that tell us about the corrupt kings God never wanted to anoint in the first place. We know how the sinfulness of the people weakened their defenses against outside powers and temptations. We see the fuller picture of the southern kingdom returning to the land, struggling to make sense of their experiences of what felt like the absence of God, and their continued battles against outside forces and oppressive empires. And we, too, like them and like Jonah, struggle with how we’re supposed to view and treat those we experience as enemies. We probably even have times when we want to stomp away like Jonah, when we don’t want to tell *those people* about the dangerous path they are going down, how they might be able to avoid their own destruction when their destruction, frankly, might sound OK to us. We might even bemoan, as Jonah did, that very attributes of God we are so grateful to experience are also shared with the people we don’t like – that God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.
And it’s not just that we don’t want good for the people we don’t like. It’s that we can see that sometimes when good is offered to them, they still turn right around and hurt you anyway. We can see that the very people God decided to save from destruction became the people who swept God’s people away into unending exile. We can see that offering compassion, practicing limitless mercy, can be very risky. We have seen and we have been hurt by people who have been shown mercy and that hurt stings. It lasts. It teaches us that when there’s a question of whether or not compassion should be shown toward an individual or group to whom we’re not personally connected or even more so toward those who we see as our enemies, when that compassion costs us and our people something – the question of whether or not we should show them compassion becomes a lot harder. When compassion has a cost we begin to ask like Jonah did, “Is it worth it?”
But God pushes back at Jonah’s anger over the salvation of his enemies, and our anger (or frustration or general grumpiness). Jonah needed that very same salvation and forgiveness himself. Jonah needed the second chance when he sat in the belly of the fish, when he was pouting on the edge of town hoping that God really would go through with the destruction. Jonah needed God’s compassion when his stubbornness had him sweltering in the desert, and he wasn’t too happy when that compassion was removed. Jonah himself didn’t have a good track record of continuing in faithfulness in response to God’s grace. And, if we’re honest, we can probably even admit that we need it too, for there have been times we’ve been the people who have hurt others after having been shown mercy. But God showed him, and shows us, compassion anyway.
God knows that mercy might not always be returned with praise. God knows that forgiveness might be met with gratitude in one moment and then forgotten in the next. God knows that showing compassion can be risky, both when it’s shown to our enemies and to us, but God shows it anyway. May we strive to live lives worthy of the God’s compassion, and when we fall short, because we will fall short, may we receive with gratitude the mercy God risks to show us.
To whom might you need to show risky compassion?