The
word of the Lord came to Jonah, saying: "Set out for the great city of
Nineveh, and announce to it the message that I will tell you." So Jonah
made ready and went to Nineveh, according to the Lord's bidding. Now Nineveh
was an enormously large city; it took three days to go through it. Jonah began
his journey through the city, and had gone but a single day's walk announcing, "Forty
days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed, " when the people of Nineveh
believed God; they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on
sackcloth.
The Book of
Jonah
The
story of Jonah is often dismissed as a children’s tale about a man being
swallowed by a whale. Those who take the
story slightly more seriously see it as a warning to obey the will of God.
The
story is pretty simple: God commands Jonah
to preach to the Ninevites (the imposing enemy of the Israelites) to mend their
ways or be destroyed. Jonah doesn’t want
to go and, instead of heading inland to Nineveh, runs for the coast and gets on
a boat. God is piqued and tosses vessel
around in a storm. Jonah reveals to his
shipmates that the storm is God’s wrath and they throw him overboard. Jonah is swallowed by a fish.
But
this amounts to only a small fraction of the story – both in terms of ink and
in terms of importance. Jonah is
eventually spit up on the shore and he goes to Nineveh to demand their repentance.
Much to his chagrin, they instantly do exactly
as asked and God accepts their contrition.
Only
here does the real story begin. Jonah is
enraged by the Ninevites’ repentance and demands that God destroy the city
anyway. God is disarmingly perplexed and
asks, “Do you do well to be angry?” Jonah
doesn’t care and persists in his anger no matter how hypocritical or silly God
makes him look.
This
is a recurrent theme in Scripture. God doesn’t
distinguish between the good and the bad, the worthy or the unworthy – we do –
and we demand that He do too. But He makes
the rain fall on the good and the bad alike. Multiple parables have this as its
theme: The Prodigal Son, the Workers in the Vineyard, and another almost universally
misinterpreted passage: The Beatitudes.
If we do not have free will and if God is
aware of this and interested in being fair-minded He cannot possibly reward
good behavior and punish bad. That God doesn’t
reward good behavior and punish bad is a central and recurrent theme, but we don’t
want to see it - no matter how hypocritical or silly it makes us look.
Image: Pieter Lastman - Jonah and the Whale (1621)
