And he prayed to the LORD and said, "O LORD, is not this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from disaster." -Jonah 4:2 (ESV)Jonah has some gall. Regardless of the fact that God delivered Jonah from a death at sea, rescued him from the digestive tract of a great big fish, and rescued him from God-knows-what awaited him in Tarshish and the remainder of a disobedient life, Jonah is mad at God precisely because God is a rescuer. In the complaint Jonah lodges against God in verse 4:2, he is saying, in essence, "I knew you were merciful, which is exactly why I didn't want to be your prophet!"
It seems strange to be angry at God because He is merciful, especially since this is one of His most attractive characteristics. And even though Jonah doesn't like the Ninevites -- in actuality he despises them -- it's hard to sympathize with his position. If the Ninevites repent, and God shows them mercy, isn't that a good thing?
In fact, that is exactly what happened. Jonah must have presumed this would happen, because his whole gripe with God is that he knew God would show mercy. He knew that God tends to relent from disaster. The whole thing irks him; he was hoping to see Nineveh destroyed, feeling in his heart that really they deserved it.
I would like to point out that we are not at all unlike Jonah. Although we would be quick to agree and proclaim that the Gospel of Jesus is for everyone everywhere, really we harbor the conviction that some people just plain don't deserve it. In our hearts we feel that some people are beyond salvation, and usually all signs point to this possibility. The obvious examples are also the cliches: Adolph Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, and many other terrorists, tyrants and terrible people. We look at these such characters and think exactly what Jonah thought; namely, "How could you be merciful to them?"
The fact is, God loves everybody. And He doesn't love everybody the way that we would, because He actually loves everybody. No one is exempt from the love of God, even if they exempt themselves from His salvation. God can't help but love all people, because it is His nature. He is love, therefore He loves. Not only that, but His love is perfectly egalitarian: it knows no favorites. So God loves everybody, and He loves them all with exactly the same measure of love.
If that doesn't gall you, you're either spiritually enlightened enough to have come to grips with it, or you're lying. It sure galls me. I can throw a stone and hit someone I consider unworthy of His love. Hell, I can look in the mirror and see someone unworthy of His love. And that's the point: none of us are worthy. Jonah wasn't worthy of God's love, and who cares that he was an Israelite, he still wasn't worthy. He was as worthy as the Ninevites, which is to say not at all worthy. But Jonah didn't realize this, just as we so often don't realize.
This is the beauty of the Blood of Jesus, of the Good News of Salvation: it's free and it's for everyone. You see, God's love and mercy do not recognize us for who we think we are, or for what we've done. The Ninevites were no doubt still blemished, still fallible and imperfect, and still prone to sin in the eyes of God, but they must have had repentant hearts, because God showed mercy. It wasn't who the Ninevites were that saved them, it was who God is. And Jonah tells us exactly who God is: gracious, merciful, slow to anger, and relenting from disaster.
But even knowing this, Jonah shows us both his heart and our own. We hate mercy. We can't stand that God is slow to anger, that he relents from disaster. Why we hate mercy is maybe a bit complicated, but summarily we hate it because it functions independent of who we are and what we do. By definition mercy does not rely on whether we are worthy of it; because we are unworthy of the mercy we receive, it can be called mercy. If we were worthy of it, it would be called our due, our wages. It would be earned. And because we can't earn it, because we can't perform to acquire it, our Flesh, our egos, our pride, hate it. We rebel against mercy because it's freely given. But here's a catch to the will of our Flesh: if we freely accept mercy, we rebel against our Flesh, and we are saved.
The beef that Jonah has with God is the same beef that so many have had with God. I don't doubt that a lot of us are annoyed by the thief on the cross who found God's mercy in his final hour. He did nothing for the Lord his whole life, but found himself serendipitously in the presence of the Son of God in his last hour. He repented, and he was shown mercy. To those of us who have spent our lives in pews and prayer, this state of affairs is supremely unfair, because we will cross the threshold of God's presence beside this thief, this man who probably never did a thing God wanted of him prior to his moment of repentance.
But oh, that is the beauty and the glory of salvation. If mercy required a lifetime of proper service of us, none of us would have it. Jonah must have thought he had earned mercy, or else he wouldn't have begrudged the Ninevites their mercy. He was worthy in his mind; the Ninevites were not. Many of us are worthy in our minds, but unfortunately for us, we are not our own salvation. However, we are fortunate that Jesus is worthy, because in God's mind Jesus is us and we are him, and that means that in the mind of God, in the mind that matters, we are made worthy.
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