The Point of It All

From the shade of his leafy hut, the prophet morosely and absent-mindedly snacked on a handful of dates as he took in his hateful westward view, in which the great pagan city Nineveh, for a moment delivered from disaster, sat front and center. When we left Jonah last week, his preaching had – much to his displeasure – resulted in a reformation of Nineveh's whole way of life, and he'd realized that the LORD had opted to mercifully spare them as a result – a decision that not only threatened Jonah's own reputation, not only diluted Israel's privileges under the covenant by sharing them with others, but even spelled doom for Israel's future and made hay of any hope of living in a fair world where long-standing habits have real consequences. And so Jonah was furious, looked on divine mercy as a great evil, and fumed a complaint at the LORD for being the same God he'd described himself as so long ago to Moses. And where Moses had interceded and laid his life on the line to win mercy for Israel because of those words, now Jonah wanted to lay his life on the line to win judgment for Nineveh in defiance against those same words that were the foundation of his very own existence.

For just that reason, Jonah had cut the LORD off in mid-conversation. Questioned by God about his hotly burning anger, Jonah had silently walked east from the city and sat down on the ground to watch Nineveh. Jonah intended to coerce the LORD into making a choice: either Nineveh dies, or Jonah dies. Jonah knew the LORD had already shown mercy and compassion to Nineveh; he wanted the LORD to change his mind, to take back the mercy, to pour out wrath instead. Maybe it'd happen because Nineveh would quickly revert to their old ways, and the LORD would promptly reactivate his threat and act right away. Or maybe it'd happen because, no matter what Nineveh did, the LORD would rather keep his prophet than some foreign city. Whatever the reason, Jonah aimed to move the LORD to take back mercy and pour out judgment on the city instead.

And to that end, when Jonah picked his spot east of Nineveh, where he could imagine far-off Israel distantly in the background behind the hateful city, Jonah built himself a shelter – and not just any shelter, but a hut or booth called in Hebrew a sukkah, the kind they had to live for seven days every autumn as part of the Feast of Booths. It was how Moses and their ancestors had lived at times in the desert, and they went back to them each year as a reminder of how the LORD had protected them. Indeed, after Jonah's day, a later prophet named Isaiah would set out a hope that, when Jerusalem was finally cleansed of sin, the LORD would restore his desert presence of cloud by day and fire by night, and so “there will be a booth” – or sukkah – “for shade by day from the heat and for a refuge and a shelter from the storm and rain” (Isaiah 4:6). It was just such a booth that Jonah built for shade by day from the heat – even though a sukkah by definition has to leave some gaps in the palm-leaf ceiling to see the sun and stars through. In building it, Jonah was silently calling on the LORD to protect him – just as he protected Moses in the desert, which is how Jonah still sees himself. Besides, the feast when they built these booths was a harvest festival – and it was high time to put the sickle in Nineveh, if you asked Jonah.

So Jonah has issued an ultimatum. He's cut the prayer lines to the LORD. And the LORD is looking down from heaven at this sad, bitter prophet, the very opposite of the heroes he's trying to emulate. Jonah's no Moses. And Jonah's no Elijah. For although Elijah once sat down under a tree in the desert and prayed for death, Elijah did so in the face of persecution and weakness and was readily restored (1 Kings 19:4). Jonah needs to see that he's no Moses, and he's no Elijah – that instead, he's a lot more like the city he so quickly condemns. Perhaps a demonstration is in order, to illustrate a powerful lesson.

The next thing we're told is that “the LORD God appointed a qiqayon and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be shade for his head, to deliver him from his evil” (Jonah 4:6). Just like in Genesis 2, when we read how “the LORD God” made a garden grow in Eden, now “the LORD God” makes a plant grow right over Jonah and his flimsy little hut. And the kind of plant – well, the book calls it a qiqayon, that's its name. And people have had lots of guesses what a qiqayon is. In the early church, we even hear of riots breaking out in churches over different guesses for this plant! So please, let's stay calm as I hazard a guess that it's the castor bean plant. And where its name in Hebrew points us back to where the LORD delivered Jonah by having him vomited out by the great fish, now God delivers Jonah again by assigning him a castor bean plant – and even back then, castor oil was a popular laxative. Anybody wonder if the LORD's hinting something about Jonah's attitude?

I hope none of your parents fed you a spoonful of castor oil as punishment or medicine when you were kids. But Jonah needs a dose of something. And so God, kindly and maybe a bit sarcastically, appoints this plant and makes it grow up overnight over Jonah and his hut. With its big leaves and rapid growth, it compensates for any gaps in Jonah's roof – especially as his palm leaves dry out – and gives Jonah's head some much-needed shade. That way, God gave the plant to deliver Jonah from his evil – meaning, at one level, his misery in the heat. But at another level, the plant's goal is to deliver Jonah from the evil in his heart.

Okay, so now Jonah is under some extra shade. And Jonah is thrilled! Jonah is so happy! We read that “Jonah rejoiced with great joy for the qiqayon” (Jonah 4:6). As greatly miserable as Jonah was over God's mercy for Nineveh, that's the extent to which Jonah's celebrating this plant. He's never seen anything so beautiful as this one plant! He wonders if maybe the plant is a sign, a sign that God so regards his life that he's made a choice of Jonah over Nineveh. But regardless, Jonah feels so much more comfortable under this nice plant. And so from the deepest anger and depression, Jonah turns on a dime to ecstatic glee. Jonah feels emotions, and he feels them intensely and shallowly, with barely any ability to self-regulate. And you know what that reminds me of? The years I worked at a daycare, with a class full of Kindergartners, first-graders, and second-graders. Some of them actually seemed more mature than Jonah, come to think of it. And this whole story makes a lot more sense if God is looking down at Jonah and seeing him as a spoiled child in need of a basic lesson about life.

Jonah, this overgrown toddler of a man, is immensely content with the leafy plant shading him and his hut from the heat outside, even though Jonah had just the day before been filled with a greater heat of unrighteous anger on the inside. And so a day goes by, in which Jonah watches Nineveh to his west, but in luxurious comfort and confident presumption. But the lesson is not done. For while Jonah might be delivered from the physical evil of misery, he isn't delivered from the inner evil of his immaturity and pride. Something else must be done.

And so the next verse says, “And God appointed a worm as morning dawned the next day, and it attacked the qiqayon so that it dried up” (Jonah 4:7). Just as the plant had grown up in a night, now a hungry worm came to chew through its stem, and when Jonah wakes up, he's going to find that the mercy of the plant sheltering him has been withdrawn. And it's all thanks to a simple worm – a symbol of death, since ancient Hebrew didn't have different words for a fruit grub and a maggot. First, God had given Jonah this plant, a merciful shade and a vivid symbol of life. Now, God's sent a symbol of death to take it away as quickly as it came. It's sobering.

But what's all this getting at? Well, here's another clue, and bear with me here. All throughout the book so far, the author has been very careful about what names he gives to God. When God is interacting with Jonah, God has always been referred to as 'LORD,' in all-caps (as our English Bibles print it). That's his covenant name, the name he revealed and explained to Moses from the burning bush. So everywhere the book is talking about how Jonah and God interact, it uses the name 'LORD.' But everywhere the book talks about God relating to non-Israelites, like the sailors on the ship or the people of Nineveh? There, God isn't referred to as 'LORD' but as 'God,' a more general name, like in Genesis 1 when God was creating the whole world and not focusing in on any one part of it. And this is a consistent pattern throughout the whole book! Except... here, God is dealing with Jonah, and the author calls him 'God,' not 'LORD.' Why? Because Jonah is being treated to a taste of what it's like to be a Ninevite – and not just a Ninevite, but a Ninevite in the kind of world Jonah wishes this were.

See, what does Jonah want? He wants Nineveh, which has received mercy, to have that mercy taken away. So God puts Jonah in Nineveh's shoes. Jonah gets mercy: a plant that shades his head and delivers him from evil. And then Jonah sees that mercy abruptly die, just as he wants to see Nineveh's mercy abruptly die. God is giving Jonah a chance to understand how somebody in Nineveh would feel if God acts like Jonah wants him to. The mercy has now been eaten up by the deadly little worm.

But Jonah barely has any time to grieve the loss of protection before he begins to suffer from it. The next words we read, we hear that “it came to pass that, when the sun arose, God appointed a cutting east wind” (Jonah 4:8) – from the east, just as day begins, God assigns the east wind to sweep in from the desert. It's dry, hot, full of desert sand. This is no pleasant wind. With the plant cut off from its roots, this wind will make the leaves fall right off. If there's still anything left to the hut's roof, this wind is cutting enough to blow the leaves away. Coming from the east, it comes from behind Jonah – it hits him before it ever gets to Nineveh's city walls.

In Exodus, it's this same “east wind” that God sends to part the sea for Moses (Exodus 14:21). But the point is that Jonah is no Moses. This same east wind is the one the LORD uses throughout the Old Testament as a tool of judgment. Jonah's young friend Hosea compares Assyria to the east wind that blows against Israel (Hosea 12:1). Hosea hears the LORD saying: “Compassion is hidden from my eyes. Though he may flourish among his brothers, the east wind – the wind of the LORD – shall come, rising from the desert, and his fountain shall dry up, his spring shall be parched, it shall strip his treasury of every precious thing” (Hosea 13:14-15).

Before Nineveh could become the east wind (as Hosea predicted it would), Jonah wanted Nineveh to be blown down by the east wind. And Jonah is getting a taste of what it's like to live in Jonah's world. So then, as Jonah feels this dry east wind cutting into him, “the sun attacked Jonah's head so that he wilted, and he asked his soul to die” (Jonah 4:8). Jonah thinks he's Moses, he thinks he's Elijah. Well, Elijah called down fire on soldiers who came to arrest him (2 Kings 1:9-12). That's what Jonah wishes he could to to Nineveh. So Jonah gets a taste of the heat of the sun becoming a fire from heaven. And the fiery sun attacking Jonah's head returns him to misery, and now that Jonah's so uncomfortable, he wants to quit on life.

Now, Jonah could've escaped by walking back into the city, knocking on any Ninevite's door, and asking for refuge. But Jonah, faced with discomfort, is angry enough to die. Jonah's anger is looking a lot less principled and a lot more petty in the bright light of the sun. So Jonah repeats to himself what he'd said earlier to the LORD: “It is better for me to die than for me to live” (Jonah 4:8). And that marks the perfect place for God to try to resume the conversation that Jonah had cut off earlier. God asks Jonah, “Is it good for you to be angry about the qiqayon?” Jonah says yes: “It is good for me to be angry, even to death!” (Jonah 4:9). Jonah got attached to that plant; it's unfair for the plant to die so soon, so suddenly! Jonah doesn't want to live in a world where God gives life and yanks it away so soon, where God's mercy can dry up and die for no reason!

And now God has Jonah right where he wants him. And so, for the first time since this object lesson began, the author refers to God as “LORD” again – Jonah is stepping back out of Nineveh's shoes, and the LORD wants to give him a different perspective on what just happened. Now Jonah has to understand, not just how it would feel to be Nineveh in Jonah's world, but how it would feel to be the LORD in Jonah's world. And just as Jonah launched this debate with a 39-word speech in Hebrew, and kept matching the LORD word-for-word, it's the LORD's turn to balance the scales by wrapping things up in thirty-nine words.

Here's what the LORD says, as he drives his point home: “You've had compassion for the plant, for which you didn't work, nor did you make it great, which as a son of a night came to be and which as a son of a night died” (Jonah 4:10). It's as if the LORD's telling him: “Jonah, just look how emotionally invested you got in that plant. Take a good look at your intense feelings about the plant and what happened to it. And then look at the facts. It was a plant. Its life spanned a single day, from the mystery of one night to the mystery of the next night – sprouting and growing up out of nowhere by my grace, and dying out of nowhere by my judgment. And you had no role in its life. You couldn't be proud, you had no responsibility for it. You put no work or effort into its creation. It grew so great with zero input from you, Jonah. And yet you're upset – you're thinking that, if you'd been in my shoes, you would've loved it and spared it. Oh, that's what you think! But would you really?”

For now the LORD questions him. If that's how Jonah felt about the plant, how must the LORD feel about Nineveh? All that, Jonah, “and I shouldn't have compassion on Nineveh, the great city, in which are more than twelve myriads of humans who don't know between their right hand and their left hand – and beasts aplenty?” (Jonah 4:11). What's the LORD saying? “Nineveh is as great among cities as the qiqayon was among plants. Is it a faceless monster to you, Jonah? Not to me! My Israel (which I showed mercy again and again) had twelve tribes, but Nineveh is more than twelve ten-thousands of human lives. And where your Israel receives my patience when they sin against what they know, these people in Nineveh never had the advantage of being instructed by Moses and the prophets, to teach them left from right. Morally, they're little more than children – and are you, Jonah, any less childish? As if that weren't enough, didn't you hear their bulls and horses and sheep mooing and neighing and bleating their mournful prayers to my name? Can you even count them all, Jonah? And yet each one, even the feeblest little lamb, is a higher and more precious form of life than that plant over which you've spilled your hot, salty tears and your hot, salty words. Aren't they a pitiful sight? Jonah, you've shown that you're capable of emotionally investing in and compassionately pitying a simple plant that you didn't make, didn't grow great, and didn't know for more than a day of hopes and dreams. So how can you begrudge me my right, as the Author and Lover of life, to pityingly spare this city I've known and grown?”

And on that question, the book's credits roll. We're left with silence, with a void. Because it's up to us to hear the LORD's words and speak for Jonah now. Jonah's opening complaint, the two halves of their exchange, and now the LORD's clinching question – each allotted the same number of words to make their case – are finished. And with the LORD and Jonah having both spoken their piece, the author invites us to judge for ourselves. Will Jonah continue to resist? Does Jonah have a comeback? Or does God's analogy expose Jonah's heart wide open – and is Jonah, at last, delivered from the evil of pride that lurks there? Can Jonah now grow up? Elijah heard the LORD's double question and returned, renewed, to make disciples. Now Jonah has heard the LORD's double question, and is faced with the choice: Will the Prophet Jonah make of it what the Prophet Elijah did?

As for the Ninevites, Jonah was probably right about one thing: their repentance wouldn't last. But even so, the threat Jonah had cried out in her streets wouldn't immediately reactivate. God really had spared Nineveh, had given Nineveh a reprieve rooted in sincere compassion. And so God had somewhat reset the clock. For God had purposes for Nineveh. Less than forty years after this story draws to its close, armies are going to march out from Nineveh and wipe Israel off the map, blowing in like the east wind. Nineveh's reprieve will last for generations. But not forever. Nearly a century and a half after Jonah, in 612 BC, finally Nineveh's reversion to evil would catch up to her, and not all the excuses of ignorance and the beauties of life would stop judgment.

And yet Nineveh's story isn't done there, either. For over six centuries after Nineveh's destruction, God sent his Son into the world – an act of far greater compassion than his temporary sparing of Nineveh. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” (John 3:17). Jesus Christ laid down his life as an act of compassion, and as he hung on that cross, the face of every man, woman, and child in this great city surely passed through his mind. Like a plant cut down at the prime of its greenness, Jesus died. But he rose from the dead to flourish again, and be a shade to deliver all the world from evil, if only we gather under him. He sent out his twelve apostles to the world's myriads to invite them under Christ's compassionate shade, and as this good news was relayed from land to land, it reached the sons and daughters of Assyria. Within a few generations at most, the gospel had begun to root itself in the ruins of Nineveh. Nineveh became a seat of a bishop, a successor carrying out the apostles' mission in that place. For in the wake of judgment centuries before, the LORD's compassion persisted in pursuing the city. He was simply “patient toward them, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

When the winds of judgment were blowing in, Jonah could point to the direction they came from. Jonah was of the opinion he had God all figured out, had analyzed the balance of mercy and judgment. But Jonah couldn't guess he'd learn how Nineveh felt. Jonah couldn't guess he'd learn how God felt. And Jonah definitely couldn't see the gospel coming. For when Jesus ascended into heaven, he poured down his Holy Spirit in the sight of a crowd that included Jews descended from the Israelites carried back to Nineveh (Acts 2:9). And this Spirit “blows where it wishes,” Jesus said, “and you hear its sound, but you don't know where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8). The Spirit is a wind who preserves his mystery. But the Spirit descended to fulfill the words of Joel that God would “pour out my Spirit on all flesh” (Acts 2:17; cf. Joel 2:29). And now the mysterious, merciful Spirit of God blows in us, flourishes in us. We, far more than Jonah, have been given the “mind of Christ” to appreciate the LORD's compassion (1 Corinthians 2:16), and so to be truer heirs of Moses and Elijah in our day and age as we gather to Christ (Mark 9:4). And so to the God who spares us and makes us grow up great in grace be all glory and honor; and may his Spirit blow us to see with his pitying eye and entrust to his wisdom each creature he has made – each human face and name, and all those beasts aplenty. Amen.