NOTES for Jon 4:10-11

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¹⁰Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night:

¹¹And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

God looks at a person, even one wounded by original sin, in a completely different way than a person looks at his own sin. In fact, the word "own" in this case can hardly be understood literally: each of us usually looks at our own sins, if not indulgently, then at least with understanding. This is, of course, by no means always a matter of indulging our own sins, but even when we hate in ourselves some concrete thing that hinders us, in a normal case we still do not go so far as self-hatred.

To hate the sinner who is nearby, together with his sin, is, alas, a completely ordinary thing for us. It has become a bad habit of fallen humanity, one that must be overcome with some effort. And if we are entirely clear that we do not want punishment for our own sinfulness, then with regard to those around us our position is usually far less definite.

Simply put, for ourselves we usually want mercy from God, while for everyone else we want justice without any leniency. And the prophet, as we can see, was by no means an exception to the rule: for the inhabitants of Nineveh he wanted precisely justice, which in this particular case meant just punishment, without any leniency.

Quite unexpectedly for Jonah, God shows mercy precisely to the repentant townspeople. Perhaps the prophet thought that God could have such relationships only with His own people, that only His own people could be forgiven much by Him, again and again averting what should have fallen on their head because of the sins they had committed, including those Assyrian armies that more than once threatened Jerusalem.

In any case, it could hardly have occurred to Jonah to compare God's attitude toward the Jewish people with His attitude toward the Assyrian Empire, its capital, and its inhabitants. After all, that empire was associated for the prophet, as for all his contemporaries, with everything worst in the world at that time, and Nineveh was in his eyes the center of world evil.

For God, as we can see, there is neither an empire nor a center of world evil. For Him there is only a city whose inhabitants repented of their sins and turned to the God about whom Jonah had spoken to them. Perhaps they understood little, but what can one expect from people who, in God's own words, "do not know their right hand from their left"? And God forgives them. After all, they are only people who need to be saved, in any country and in any age.

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For Jon 4:10-11

¹⁰Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night:

¹¹And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

The lesson given by God to His prophet was simple and obvious: the tree which grew in a unexpected way and which also dried in a unexpected way caused a storm of emotions to Jonas. The fate of Nineveh worried much less the prophet. A paradox? Certainly. But why did it become possible? Is it because Jonah does not love God and does not want to serve Him? No: he is ready to do what God will tell him. But only not when it concerns Nineveh: he as several of his fellow countrymen had accounts with Nineveh, this city and the country, of which it was its capital, was at enmity with Judea and brought to it a lot of sorrow. Jonah does not love Nineveh, and even more: he hates it.

This hatred prevents him from achieving the mission given by God. Jonah indeed, tries to run far away from the city where God sends him, not because he is afraid of dying: his behavior during the storm is an obvious proof of that. He does not want to go to Nineveh because he knows: the city, in which God sends the prophet, is not yet condemned, it has chance to salvation. Jonas does not want Nineveh to be saved. He would not even want (at least, at the bottom of the soul) that Ninevites turn to God, that they repent and live: because then, it will be necessary for him if not to accept them as brothers, at least, to stop seeing in them implacable enemies deserving nothing else than death.

One can think so, if his enemies obviously are at the same time also the enemies of God. Then everything is simple and clear, and the relation of the prophet to such enemies had to be and was completely unambiguous. And what if they repent and turn to God? What if God leaves them after such a call to live on earth? Jonah does not want it, it is incomprehensible for him, why God takes so much care of those who have never accepted Him and have never lived according to His law.

The tree which grew fast and so fast dried explained everything to him. It turns out that it is easy to neglect those who have no importance for you. But here is, if somebody or even something begins to play in your own life a completely concrete and more enough an important role, to part from it turns out to be not at all easy. And God with the example of the tree, which is much less important for Him than man, explains to Jonah how much each person on earth is important for Him, even if it is ninevites. By addressing His prophet, God says to him: and for you every person must be important, and you have to do everything so that he turns and lives. Only like that you can be My servant.

For Jon 4:1-11

¹But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.

²And he prayed unto the LORD, and said, I pray thee, O LORD, was not this my saying, when I was yet in my country? Therefore I fled before unto Tarshish: for I knew that thou art a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repentest thee of the evil.

³Therefore now, O LORD, take, I beseech thee, my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live.

⁴Then said the LORD, Doest thou well to be angry?

⁵So Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city.

⁶And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.

⁷But God prepared a worm when the morning rose the next day, and it smote the gourd that it withered.

⁸And it came to pass, when the sun did arise, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat upon the head of Jonah, that he fainted, and wished in himself to die, and said, It is better for me to die than to live.

⁹And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death.

¹⁰Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night:

¹¹And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

“Why did You make me travel so far? Could You not have done everything Yourself? Why did You send me there? You made me do completely pointless work...” Read more

“Why did You make me travel so far? Could You not have done everything Yourself? Why did You send me there? You made me do completely pointless work...” This is the human reaction to one possible turn of events. If everything turns out differently, one leaves the city, watches it perish, and, wagging a finger, says, “I warned them! They should have listened,” or one keeps grumbling: “Why did You send me so far? Even that did not help them; they still did not stop...” But this merely means that we should not take ourselves too seriously. In a number of cases we are simply postmen. The postman who brings a message cannot and should not have his own opinion about the meaning of the letter, because his task is to deliver it, while someone else must read it and take note of it. Nor is it the postman's place to rebuke the Sender. For under postal law it is the Sender who pays for the postman's livelihood.

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NOTES for Jon 4:10-11

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