When God Shows Mercy
What is the worst thing you can think of that a person can do? Something so awful that you just can’t imagine forgiving them. Hurting children, treating people like animals, abusing power, acting with depraved indifference,…get that most horrendous person in mind.
That’s who God called Jonah to prophesy to – the Assyrians. It probably wasn’t audible – when we hear God’s call, it’s usually not something we hear with our ears. It usually comes in the form of a whisper in our thoughts. As people talked about the Assyrians’ oppression, as people worried about whether their village would be the next taken and enslaved in exile…God whispered to Jonah, “You could go and warn them.” At night as he tried to sleep, Jonah tossed and turned worrying about what might come next for his people, for his friends and his family, for him. And over and over again came the thought, “You could go and warn them.” But he didn’t want to. It was dangerous. They were horrid. Jonah ran…ran from the reality of occupation, ran from the unpredictability of life under an indifferent dictator, ran from God calling him to go and stand up and speak out.
Like the Psalmist, Jonah wondered where he could go to get away from God. How far would he have to go to get away from talk of the occupation, to get away from life under authoritarian rule, to get away from God’s whisper, “You could go and warn them.” Jonah runs away down to Joppa, down into the ship, down into the water, down into the whale, and finally, all is quiet. He believes that he has been driven away from in front of God’s eyes, that God no longer sees or is concerned with him. As the waters threaten to overwhelm him, the reeds that the big fish has swallowed wrap around his head, his life ebbs away from him. And he cries out to God. Jonah recalls, “I called out my distress to God and he answered. When I called for help from death’s belly, you listened to my voice. With a voice of thanksgiving I will sacrifice to God, what I have vowed I will fulfill – deliverance belongs to the Lord.” We all know those vows…those promises we make when we are at our end, when we are up against life or death, God help me and I’ll…
God spoke to the fish, and it vomited Jonah onto the dry land. Before he could get the muck off of himself, he heard it again, God’s voice whispering, echoing, “Set off, go to the formidable city of Nineveh and proclaim to it the declaration that I’m going to tell you.” So, he went and spoke, in Hebrew 5 words, in English 8, “Forty days more, and Nineveh will be overthrown!” The Hebrew word for overthrown has 2 meanings: destroyed or transformed.
The message reached the king, and he declared, “Who knows, God may turn and relent and turn from his anger, and we may not perish.” The response was drastic – from the King, the ruler of the Assyrian Empire, to the animals. Place yourself in Nineveh and notice how your senses would be engaged. Look, and see the King – he has taken off his robe, the sign of his authority, and sits not on his throne, but on an ash heap, a sign often of mourning, but also of humility and repentance. Everyone, including the animals, is fasting, tasting nothing, not even wetting their mouths with a sip of water. They are wearing sackcloth made of goat’s hair, course and scratchy against the skin, another symbol of mourning, humility, and repentance. Even the animals are covered in sackcloth, and surely they protested. Throughout the city, you could hear the snorting and grunting and bellowing. And God saw and heard, and relented.
And Jonah is furious. “I knew it. I knew it, God! I knew when the message was that Nineveh would be overthrown that it was possible that instead of destroying them, they would be transformed, and I knew that you were gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast, unconditional love. I’d rather die that live knowing that you have forgiven them and I was part of it. Please, just take my life.”
Jonah had no desire to forgive the Ninevites, and he didn’t want God to forgive them either. They had earned their comeuppance! They deserved to suffer. They deserved to feel the kind of pain they had been inflicting. They deserved to be punished! And instead what they got was justice.
We like the Jonah story pretty well until we get to this point. We can see ourselves in Jonah – running from God’s call and experiencing storms in life, being scooped up and saved, not wanting to go into enemy territory, to speak up and speak out for our people,…
But when we get to this part, the lesson of Jonah is harder. Our enemies might hear our warning and change, and when they do what they will get is not God’s wrath, but God’s mercy, and that’s justice.
Jonah just can’t understand. He goes out and sits where he can see the city but he doesn’t have to be right there, waiting to see what will happen. Human nature is to wish for God to reign down fire on the city! But it’s Jonah who is hot. A plant grows up beside him with leaves that provide shade in the desert sun. He’s very happy about the plant. The next day, at dawn, a worm starts eating the leaves, by the time the sun had risen in the sky, the plant was withering, dying. An east wind starts blowing sand, his skin is burning in the sun and with the sting of wind-blown sand. Jonah is at temper-tantrum angry. I don’t know the words in Hebrew that he was probably spewing, but you know the words in English.
God speaks, the lesson none of us wants to hear, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant? You didn’t do anything to grow this plant. It sprang up overnight and it died overnight. Yet, you are concerned about it. You think I’ve been unfair to it. There are 120,000 people, each one lovingly made in my image by me, in Nineveh, and many animals.”
God teaches Jonah, and us, that God sees us as we were created, even when worms chew at our leaves and we wither and are just a remnant of who we were made to be, in God’s eyes we are still beloved. God looks at us, and the people we would most like to see God’s wrath reign down on, with the same compassion, the same amazing grace is extended to them and to us, God is slow to get angry with us…and them. God’s steadfast love, the Hebrew word is hesed, the same word we translate in the 23rd Psalm, surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life…surely hesed shall follow me all the days of my life. Hesed is impossible to capture in English with one word, loving devotion, kindness, mercy, enduring commitment, deep compassion, covenant loyalty, unconditional benevolence all fall short of describing God’s hesed, God’s care for us – and them.
If we look ahead to the prophet Nahum, we see the temptation of power and corruption once again worm their way into the Ninevites, and again Nineveh is a city of violence and idolatry. God sends Nahum to call them again to repentance, but they do not turn and the city is under siege for three months, surrounded by the Babylonians, and as the Assyrian empire falls, it is burned and razed.
The book of Jonah, though, closes 150 years earlier as the Ninevites do heed God’s warning and turn in repentance. God asks a question that Jonah doesn’t answer, and we have to answer for ourselves, “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?” As horrible and worm-eaten as humanity can become – God sends warning, calls for change, and when there’s humility and repentance, God has mercy. When God shows mercy, God’s justice is not punishment or retribution but rehabilitation and transformation.
We come to this table for that transformation. We are all worm-eaten and far from the person God dreamed we would be. And so we come in humility, with repentance, ready to change, and we welcome every other person from all times and all places – who comes in humility, with repentance, ready to change – to come and sit beside us, because no matter who they are or what they’ve done, God, like the father in the story of the prodigal son, stands waiting, waiting to greet us and hoping to greet them with mercy.