Jonah 3:10-4:11

               When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.              

                           But this was very displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord and said, “O Lord! Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O Lord, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.” And the Lord said, “Is it right for you to be angry?” Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city.

                                       The Lord God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered.  When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”

                                       But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” And he said, “Yes, angry enough to die.” Then the Lord said, “You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night.  And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

First, let me say, if there’s one thing that is clear in this story it’s that Jonah is the real victim.  The Ninevites are pardoned, a plant grows and then is attacked by a worm, the wind blowing, and each of them in their own way is an insult to Jonah: things done to him who did not deserve it.  Do you know how exactly cruel God is to Jonah?  Jonah forgave people who did not deserve it, God rudely messed with his shade foliage and then God has the audacity to repeatedly ask rhetorical questions.  It is clear that if there is a victim in this story it is Jonah, for in the world Jonah lives in he knows it to be true that if something good happens to someone there must be a loss to someone else; if God is kind to wayward people, God must have betrayed the chosen people and if God has not mirrored Jonah’s plans for this world then God has wounded Jonah terribly.  How dare God be merciful, slow to anger, quick to change from punishing, for if it is, to leave Jonah left alone in the sunshine.

Really, the only relief in this series of insults is that the people of Nineveh are described as the most homely, kind of like knuckleheads.  And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who don’t know their right hand from their left and also many animals?  When one of your arguments is that you don’t want to hold the Ninevites’ idiocy against their animals, it is not exactly a ringing endorsement for their repented life.  But for Jonah, he feels each of these insults viscerally, that God’s grace is a personal insult to him and God was very rude not to consider his thoughts on the matter.

I have been trying for the last week not to identify with Jonah because he comes to this passage seeming a little petty, self-centered really, ridiculous, rooting against God’s abundance and kindness of God’s mercy, and it’s not a good look.  I have been trying for the last week no