“He prayed to the Lord, “O Lord, is this not what I said while I was still in my own country? This is why I fled at first toward Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, repenting of punishment.”
Jonah 4:2 (NAB)
To me, Jonah is one of the most bizarre men in the Bible. He is mentioned in the Christian Bible, Hebrew bible and the Muslim Koran as the preacher of Nineveh, in what is modern day Iraq. Whether every detail in the story is or isn’t historically true, the Apostle Paul said that all scripture is profitable for teaching, reproof and correction.
(2 Timothy 3:16)
There is something we can all learn through inspired scripture, especially the story of Jonah.
Jonah had a very impulsive and melodramatic personality. He had strong opinions, and didn’t think that certain groups of people were worthy of God’s mercy. God told Jonah to go preach to the people living in Nineveh, the capital city of the Assyrian kingdom, at the time. Instead, Jonah boarded a ship going in the opposite direction, because he couldn’t bear the thought of God showing mercy to the gentiles.
A bad storm arose, and the ship was in extreme danger of sinking. The men on board were superstitious and decided to cast lots to find out who is responsible for bringing this curse upon them, and the lot landed on Jonah. They approached him, asking who he is and what his business was on that ship. He told them that he was a Hebrew who was fleeing from where God wanted him to go.
Jonah then offered himself to be cast into the sea. The men refused at first, but after praying that Jonah’s God would not hold it against them, they finally threw Jonah overboard, and the storm immediately stopped and all was calm.
A whale swallowed Jonah and he was in its belly for three days, before being spit out, on the shores of Nineveh. (If this sounds fictional, there recently was a kayaker in Chile who was swallowed by a humpback whale and then spit back out into the water. He survived, unharmed and a video was taken by the man’s father, which was shown on the news in February of this year.)
Anyway, Jonah finally did what he was told to do, and preached to the people of Nineveh. They humbly responded, repented and believed in the God that Jonah preached about. The entire city converted, and yet Jonah was angry. He thought God was too kind and merciful to “those”people. Jonah believed that mercy should be exclusive, for his own people, and not for unworthy gentiles or foreigners.
I don’t know anyone as extreme as Jonah, but I can relate to once having a bias towards the generation of young people in their teens and twenties, until something changed me. In my mind, they were labeled as shallow, confused and unmotivated. Two years ago, a documentary was made by the producer of the Chosen movie series, gathering a group of young people in their teens and twenties, who were randomly selected to binge watch the Chosen for the first time. They came from different backgrounds, and from all over the country, knowing nothing about what they were about to watch.
It was a total eye opening experience for me, to see how receptive they were to Jesus, while watching the movie series. It was also sad to learn how dysfunctional their young lives were. One young man spent his childhood raised by parents who were in a religious cult. Another went back and forth from foster homes to jails. One person was abused in a church at a very young age, and another teenager was simply left to grow up alone, after both his parents died suddenly. They all grew up with hardships out of their control, not in faith filled homes, which led to their skewed and false impression of Jesus, Christianity and the church.
The Chosen series revealed the love of Jesus to them for the first time. As I listened to their stories, and how their hearts opened, and what Jesus now meant to them, it opened a new place in my heart towards young people. It changed my previous tendency to prejudge that entire age group, just as Jonah prejudged the entire population of Nineveh.
It’s so typically human to forget that people are individuals, not to be viewed as an entire group, race, religion, political party or any other category.
That age group was my Nineveh, in a sense, but those young people taught me to see each person as individuals, without attaching my labels to them. Maybe people would be more open to God’s mercy and love if everyone made a conscious effort to avoid being like Jonah and more like Jesus, in the world.
Lord, help us to recognize our own Nineveh, remove any bias and give us compassion towards all people, so that we can go where you send us and share your truth in love. Amen
