Jonah 1:1-17; 3:1-10 [4:1-11], Jonah and God’s Mercy

Sunday, November 10, 2024
12:00 AM 11:59 PM 00:00 23:59

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Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today

“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?’”

— Jonah 4:3-4

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NL Daily Devotion for Sunday, November 10, 2024

by Dr. Miles Hopgood, Clergy Stuff

Main Idea: The story of Jonah’s ministry exposes our selective taste for mercy and challenges why we believe in “forgiveness for me but not for thee.”

The adage “You should quit while you’re ahead” is nowhere better applied than to Jonah. If we stopped the story of his ministry at Chapter 3, he would easily go down as the most successful prophet in history. While Abraham is off failing to drum up even ten righteous people to spare Sodom, Jonah has even the animals of Nineveh fasting and donning sack cloth. Talk about success!

And yet somehow, Jonah is not merely disappointed but dismayed by this result. “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning,” Jonah cries, “for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.” This last-minute revelation of Jonah’s heart redefines the story. This book isn’t about the successful call for Nineveh to repentance but the failed conversion of the one person who really needed it: Jonah. Every step of the way Jonah is fleeing the mercy of God, incurring God’s wrath in the process only to receive the mercy he so desperately wants to see the Ninevites denied.

Jonah celebrates his own salvation but resents God’s extension of the same mercy to Nineveh. His hypocrisy calls out our own when it comes to the mercy of God. We love that God is merciful… at least as far as we are concerned. At our best, we might be grateful that God has mercy toward those we love—so long as they have done us no personal wrong—but that’s about where it ends. We love the mercy of God, but like Jonah, we don’t like where it takes us: straight to the doors of the ones we don’t think deserve it, forcing us to confront the reality that God truly is abounding in steadfast love for all, calling into question the selectivity of our own love.

You do not deserve the mercy of God, and you will never preach to someone who does. The mercy of God is only ever a gift, and as it turns out, that gift is a Greek one. Like the wooden horse given to Troy, we realize only too late that in receiving the mercy of God, the fortress of righteousness we’ve built in ourselves from which to judge and condemn others has been felled in the night. Even when we flee it, God’s mercy is relenting in its pursuit of us, resting only when it has dragged us like Jonah to the door of the one we refuse to love in order to show us that God’s mercy is for them too. If you struggle like Jonah, hear a final good word: Jonah’s contempt for Nineveh does not stop God from working through him, and even after the work for Nineveh is done, stays with Jonah and continues to work on him, hoping to bring him around to God’s way of doing things. God will continue to work through you and your people no matter how you struggle, and will stay until the work in you is done.

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