Dear Friends
Greetings again in the Name of Christ as we join online for this act of Sunday worship.
Our order of service is as follows:
1. Welcome, announcements and opening prayer (Video)
2. Hymn - I am so glad (Audio)
3. Children's Song - Wide Wide as the Ocean (Video)
4. Children's video - From Youtube
5. Reading from the Book of Jonah (Video)
6. Sermon (Audio)
7. Prayers of Intercession (Video)
8. Closing Hymn - There's a Wideness in God's Mercy (Brian's tune)
OR Alternative Traditional Tune
9. The Story of Jonah as told by a little girl (Youtube link)
10. Sermon Text
Greetings again in the Name of Christ as we join online for this act of Sunday worship.
Our order of service is as follows:
1. Welcome, announcements and opening prayer (Video)
2. Hymn - I am so glad (Audio)
3. Children's Song - Wide Wide as the Ocean (Video)
4. Children's video - From Youtube
5. Reading from the Book of Jonah (Video)
6. Sermon (Audio)
7. Prayers of Intercession (Video)
8. Closing Hymn - There's a Wideness in God's Mercy (Brian's tune)
OR Alternative Traditional Tune
9. The Story of Jonah as told by a little girl (Youtube link)
10. Sermon Text
HYMN - I Am So Glad That Jesus Love Me.
I am so glad that our Father in heaven
Tells of His love in the Book He has given;
Wonderful things in the Bible I see
This is the dearest, that Jesus loves me.
CHORUS
I am so glad that Jesus loves me,
Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me;
I am so glad that Jesus loves me,
Jesus loves even me.
Though I forget Him and wander away,
Still He doth love me whenever I stray;
Back to His dear loving arms would I flee,
When I remember that Jesus loves me.
Oh, if there’s only one song I can sing,
When in His beauty I see the great King,
This shall my song in eternity be:
“Oh, what a wonder that Jesus loves me.”
If one should ask of me ‘How can I tell?’
Glory to Jesus I know very well.
God’s Holy Spirit with mine doth agree
Constantly witnessing Jesus loves me.
Tells of His love in the Book He has given;
Wonderful things in the Bible I see
This is the dearest, that Jesus loves me.
CHORUS
I am so glad that Jesus loves me,
Jesus loves me, Jesus loves me;
I am so glad that Jesus loves me,
Jesus loves even me.
Though I forget Him and wander away,
Still He doth love me whenever I stray;
Back to His dear loving arms would I flee,
When I remember that Jesus loves me.
Oh, if there’s only one song I can sing,
When in His beauty I see the great King,
This shall my song in eternity be:
“Oh, what a wonder that Jesus loves me.”
If one should ask of me ‘How can I tell?’
Glory to Jesus I know very well.
God’s Holy Spirit with mine doth agree
Constantly witnessing Jesus loves me.
Children's Song - Wide Wide as the Ocean
READING - From the Book of Jonah
SERMON - Who is your Nineveh?
Prayers of Thanksgiving and Intercession
HYMN - There's a Wideness in God's Mercy
There’s wideness in God’s mercy
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
Like the wideness of the sea
There’s a kindness in God’s justice
Which is more than liberty
There’s a welcome enough for thousands
In the Kingdom of God’s of grace
There is room for every nation
Every person, every race
Chorus:
For the Love of God is broader
Than the measure of our minds
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind
Is most wonderfully kind
But we make God’s love too narrow
By false limits of our own
And we magnify his strictness
With a zeal he will not own
Chorus:
For the Love of God is broader
Than the measure of our minds
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind
Is most wonderfully kind
If our love were but more simple
We should take him at his word
And our lives would be illumined
By the Presence of the Lord
Chorus x2
For the Love of God is broader
Than the measure of our minds
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind
Is most wonderfully kind
BRIDGE:
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
Like the wideness of the sea
There’s a kindness in God’s justice
Which is more than liberty
Chorus
For the Love of God is broader
Than the measure of our minds
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind
Is most wonderfully kind
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
Like the wideness of the sea
There’s a kindness in God’s justice
Which is more than liberty
There’s a welcome enough for thousands
In the Kingdom of God’s of grace
There is room for every nation
Every person, every race
Chorus:
For the Love of God is broader
Than the measure of our minds
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind
Is most wonderfully kind
But we make God’s love too narrow
By false limits of our own
And we magnify his strictness
With a zeal he will not own
Chorus:
For the Love of God is broader
Than the measure of our minds
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind
Is most wonderfully kind
If our love were but more simple
We should take him at his word
And our lives would be illumined
By the Presence of the Lord
Chorus x2
For the Love of God is broader
Than the measure of our minds
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind
Is most wonderfully kind
BRIDGE:
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
Like the wideness of the sea
There’s a kindness in God’s justice
Which is more than liberty
Chorus
For the Love of God is broader
Than the measure of our minds
And the heart of the Eternal
Is most wonderfully kind
Is most wonderfully kind
The Story of Jonah - As Told By a Little Girl (From Youtube)
SERMON TEXT
Jonah 1:1-3 ; 3:1-10; 4:1-3
Where is Your Ninevah?
Just before my trip to South Africa, I had begun to read a book by US author Rev. Michael Dowd entitled “Thank God for Evolution”. In the book he does the work of integrating the Christian faith with an evolutionary perspective on history.
He believes that evolution rather than being a threat to our faith in God can in fact deepen and enrich our faith.
Early on in the book he says that the process of evolution in human beings has seen, over time, a general increase in the human hearts capacity for compassion. In the earliest phases of our human journey, he writes that the boundaries of the human heart were determined by clan. Later these boundaries were expanded to include a tribe made up of a number of clans. Later as humanity developed further the boundaries of the human heart were expanded to include people from various tribes making up a nation. And in more recent history it has seen the ability of human beings to begin to identify a common humanity beyond our national identities. What we are also beginning to see is a growth in fellow feeling across species as well, with human beings having an increasing sense of compassion towards animals with movements against cruelty. This has not been a completely linear journey. There have clearly been steps forward and steps backward. But this has been the general trajectory over time with the evolutionary growth of humanity.
And this theme is what the book of Jonah is all about. Most often when we think of the story of Jonah, the emphasis is on a man being swallowed by a whale, and surviving to tell the tale, a detail in the story that just defies all our modern scientific understanding. And so the story of Jonah for some Christians has become a test of faith of whether you believe such a miracle can happen or not and by implication whether you believe in the Bible or not.
But what if the Jonah story was never meant to be interpreted in this way at all?
What if the book of Jonah was always meant to be read as a satirical parable challenging it’s first readers to consider the wideness of God’s mercy and compassion for their enemies? What questions would we ask of the story then? And maybe, what questions might the story of Jonah begin to ask of us?
One of the most important questions to ask when interpreting the Bible is the question of context. When was the book of Jonah written? Who were it’s first hearers? What did it mean to them?
To answer that question scholars say that it would have been written after the Jewish exile in Babylon.
The people of Israel had returned from exile to the city of Jerusalem. They were listening to the preaching of Ezra and Nehemiah with both Ezra and Nehemiah have taking on a strong stance against anyone who is not a pure Jew. They have forced Jewish men to send away their foreign wives as well as their children born from those wives. This was a period of harsh narrow nationalism where foreigners were regarded as pagans, falling outside of the embrace of God’s grace and favour.
In this context, one inspired, prophetic Jewish story-teller tells a story, a satirical parable, to remind the people of Israel that God’s mercy is for all people, not just the Jews or Israelites.
Just as a newspaper cartoonist uses satire, comedy and exaggeration to make people think deeply about whats going on, so the story of Jonah likewise uses satire and humour to get under the armour of his listeners to challenge them with the wide-embracing love, mercy and compassion of God.
First of all, the name Jonah is significant, meaning “dove” or “pigeon”. In the story of Noah and the Ark, the dove symbolised peace on earth because of the olive branch it brought back to the ark to indicate the end of God’s wrath over humankind and his Creation. And so, the book of Jonah opens with God calling Jonah to live up to his name, and to be an instrument of God’s peace and forgiveness, delivering an olive branch so to speak, to the city of Nineveh.
What is the significance of the City of Nineveh? From a Jewish perspective, the City of Nineveh was an evil city, the capital of the ancient, hated, powerful and ruthless Assyrian Empire. For the ancient Israelites, the Assyrian Empire had once invaded the Northern Kingdom of Israel and had virtually obliterated 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel, deporting the captives all over their empire and stripping them of their identity. This was a cruel and ruthless empire. In the minds of the Hebrews, this was an ancient enemy, a detested, evil city that they believed deserved God’s judgement and destruction.
And so God call’s on Jonah, whose name symbolises the end of God’s wrath, to go to the capital city of his people’s ancient enemy to preach to them.
How does Jonah respond? Jonah runs in the opposite direction. He wants to have nothing to do with what God is calling him to do. Why does he run in the opposite direction? Because he knows who God is. He says, “I know who you are, you are a God of mercy. I am not going to be part of a plan where you come to the people of Nineveh and express your mercy through me.” Jonah is refusing to be used as an instrument of God’s peace and compassion to his people’s ancient enemies. He is refusing to live up to his own name.
And so Jonah runs in the opposite direction. Where God calls him to go East to Nineveh, he begins to travel West to Tarshish, a city in ancient Spain. Perhaps the idea of lying on the sunny beaches of Spain appealed to him more than going to the detested city of his ancient enemies.
In the next scene, Jonah is on a boat sailing to Tarshish, and a great storm arises. Alan Storey says that wherever you have the cold winds of narrow nationalism and exclucivism being met by the warm winds of God’s universal love and compassion, a perfect storm is going to erupt.
The satire in the story is revealed in the boat, when the pagan sailors, who are supposedly godless and far from God, are depicted down on their knees, praying to God, while Jonah, the one called to be God’s servant is depicted sleeping below deck. The author of this story is driving home the point that God is a God of all nations and all people, unlike the preaching of Ezra and Nehemiah who suggested that somehow God was only interested in the true people of Israel.
Jonah rouses himself from sleep, comes above deck, and as Tim Mackie puts it, he begins to spout forth a whole lot of religious mumbo jumbo about his God being the God who made the heavens and the earth and the oceans. He owns up and admits that the storm is his fault because he has been disobedient to the God of heaven and earth, but, rather than turn around and do what God has asked of him, to go and be an instrument of peace to his ancient enemies, Jonah would rather commit suicide, telling the sailors to throw him overboard. The sailors are reluctant to do so. They don’t want his blood on their hands, but in the end he persuades them and over he goes, into the stormy waters.
But God has not given up on this disobedient rebellious messenger. Jonah gets swallowed by a large fish. Interesting, in the story there is no reference to a whale, just a large fish. Psychologically speaking, I find this detail of the story interesting. A psychology of the brain will tell you that we all have a reptilian brain, the amygdala, the small central core of our brain that we share with reptiles. It is the part of our brain that is activated by fear and responds with either fight or flight. In Jonah’s case his response is one of flight. It is quite symbolic. His narrow nationalistic exclusivism, filled with a fundamental fear, has made him psychologically regress. Being swallowed by a fish is symbolic of him being consumed by his reptilian brain. In a complimentary way, Alan Storey suggests that Jonah being swallowed by the fish is symbolic of Jonah becoming swallowed by his narrow minded nationalism. And so in the story, Jonah ends up on the bottom of the ocean in the belly of a great fish.
Now water in ancient Jewish mythology was often symbolic of chaos and evil. As Alan Storey suggests, the history of the world reminds us again and again that narrow-minded and narrow-hearted nationalism and hatred will take you into the depths of chaos and evil. It was the story of Nazi Germany and Facist Italy, or Rwanda and it is the story of every nation that has walked down this road.
But in the all-embracing love and compassion of God, Jonah is not abandoned in these watery depths. The evolutionary impulse that God has placed in humanity, and all of life, is to grow and expand ourselves. We cannot remain in our places of narrowness and regression forever.
In the belly of the great fish, Jonah utters a prayer. As Tim Mackie says, Jonah never technically repents, but he does thank God for not abandoning him and promises to obey from this point on.
And so the fish spits Jonah out onto the shore of Nineveh. God has not given up on Jonah, but neither has God given up on extending his mercy to the people of Nineveh. There are things we cannot avoid in life, and when we try to avoid life’s challenges, they come back to us. God’s challenge to Jonah in the story comes back to him a second time.
This time Jonah gives in. But a bit like a rebellious teenager, Jonah drags his feet as he walks into Nineveh. And once inside Nineveh, Jonah put’s absolutely no effort into this task given him by God. He preaches the worst sermon ever. Just five words in the Hebrew text. “Forty days and Nineveh will be over-turned”. No nice warm introduction. No three point sermon with a rousing conclusion. Just five Hebrew words… Jonah is finally obedient to God, but he gives the bare minimum. He makes no mention of what Nineveh has done wrong or what they should do in response. There is no mention of God, and no mention of who is going to over-turn them.
Jonah gives them the bare-minimum perhaps in the hopes that they will simply ignore him and they will not respond to the invitation of God’s mercy.
But if Jonah was hoping that nobody would listen to him, he is mistaken. No sooner has he delivered his bare-minimum five word sermon, we read that the whole city of Nineveh is cut to the heart, from the king on his throne, right down to the very bottom of society, everyone dresses in sack-cloth and ashes, even the cows and animals. It is part of the satire of the story, that even the animals repent at the preaching of Jonah.
In addition, yet again, these evil pagans from Nineveh show themselves to be more responsive and more faithful to God than God’s servant Jonah.
Jonah in the meanwhile has retreated to a hill over-looking the city where he can sulk. Perhaps he is watching and waiting in anticipation, still hoping that he is going to see a Sodom and Gomorrah moment where God’s fire and brimstone are rained down upon them.
And while he is waiting and watching, a strange little sub-plot begins to unfold. The sun is growing hot, and so the God character in the story makes a vine grow up over Jonah to provide shade for him which makes Jonah very happy. The next day as this sub-plot unfolds, a worm begins to eat away at the roots of the vine, and the vine dies along with Jonah’s shade. Jonah is in a foul mood. He hold’s God responsible for it all. Jonah is so fuming mad about everything that has happened that he just wants to die.
God’s response to Jonah begins to pack home the punch of the whole story. God responds saying to Jonah that his priorities are all wrong. He cares more for this plant that has died that a whole city of people whom God loves and cares for.
What's the point of the story? Is it that God can do miraculous things like saving someone by having them swallowed up by a great fish and then spat up on the shore?
Or is the story meant to be a mirror that we hold up to our own faces? Challenging our own narrow-heartedness that would regard some people as being outside of God’s grace and mercy irredeemable and only worthy of destruction, when God sees them as God’s children whom God would wish to save. It is a story that remind us of the wide-embracing love of God, that includes and embraces even our enemies.
The story leaves us with some questions: Who or what is your Nineveh? They place or the person, or the people that are your hated enemies that you see as being outside of the embrace of God’s concern and mercy? The people or person that we don't want to extend mercy to? The person or the people that we would rejoice over if they had a downfall, or if they were no-more? What would it mean for you to be an instrument of God’s grace and mercy to your Nineveh? An ex-spouse? A person who betrayed or cheated you in? Another nationality? People of another religion? Who or what is your Nineveh?
Lastly, what does it mean for you that in the story, that the God-character continues to love and care for Jonah, despite all his anger, rebelliousness and lack of faithfulness?
Jonah 1:1-3 ; 3:1-10; 4:1-3
Where is Your Ninevah?
Just before my trip to South Africa, I had begun to read a book by US author Rev. Michael Dowd entitled “Thank God for Evolution”. In the book he does the work of integrating the Christian faith with an evolutionary perspective on history.
He believes that evolution rather than being a threat to our faith in God can in fact deepen and enrich our faith.
Early on in the book he says that the process of evolution in human beings has seen, over time, a general increase in the human hearts capacity for compassion. In the earliest phases of our human journey, he writes that the boundaries of the human heart were determined by clan. Later these boundaries were expanded to include a tribe made up of a number of clans. Later as humanity developed further the boundaries of the human heart were expanded to include people from various tribes making up a nation. And in more recent history it has seen the ability of human beings to begin to identify a common humanity beyond our national identities. What we are also beginning to see is a growth in fellow feeling across species as well, with human beings having an increasing sense of compassion towards animals with movements against cruelty. This has not been a completely linear journey. There have clearly been steps forward and steps backward. But this has been the general trajectory over time with the evolutionary growth of humanity.
And this theme is what the book of Jonah is all about. Most often when we think of the story of Jonah, the emphasis is on a man being swallowed by a whale, and surviving to tell the tale, a detail in the story that just defies all our modern scientific understanding. And so the story of Jonah for some Christians has become a test of faith of whether you believe such a miracle can happen or not and by implication whether you believe in the Bible or not.
But what if the Jonah story was never meant to be interpreted in this way at all?
What if the book of Jonah was always meant to be read as a satirical parable challenging it’s first readers to consider the wideness of God’s mercy and compassion for their enemies? What questions would we ask of the story then? And maybe, what questions might the story of Jonah begin to ask of us?
One of the most important questions to ask when interpreting the Bible is the question of context. When was the book of Jonah written? Who were it’s first hearers? What did it mean to them?
To answer that question scholars say that it would have been written after the Jewish exile in Babylon.
The people of Israel had returned from exile to the city of Jerusalem. They were listening to the preaching of Ezra and Nehemiah with both Ezra and Nehemiah have taking on a strong stance against anyone who is not a pure Jew. They have forced Jewish men to send away their foreign wives as well as their children born from those wives. This was a period of harsh narrow nationalism where foreigners were regarded as pagans, falling outside of the embrace of God’s grace and favour.
In this context, one inspired, prophetic Jewish story-teller tells a story, a satirical parable, to remind the people of Israel that God’s mercy is for all people, not just the Jews or Israelites.
Just as a newspaper cartoonist uses satire, comedy and exaggeration to make people think deeply about whats going on, so the story of Jonah likewise uses satire and humour to get under the armour of his listeners to challenge them with the wide-embracing love, mercy and compassion of God.
First of all, the name Jonah is significant, meaning “dove” or “pigeon”. In the story of Noah and the Ark, the dove symbolised peace on earth because of the olive branch it brought back to the ark to indicate the end of God’s wrath over humankind and his Creation. And so, the book of Jonah opens with God calling Jonah to live up to his name, and to be an instrument of God’s peace and forgiveness, delivering an olive branch so to speak, to the city of Nineveh.
What is the significance of the City of Nineveh? From a Jewish perspective, the City of Nineveh was an evil city, the capital of the ancient, hated, powerful and ruthless Assyrian Empire. For the ancient Israelites, the Assyrian Empire had once invaded the Northern Kingdom of Israel and had virtually obliterated 10 of the 12 tribes of Israel, deporting the captives all over their empire and stripping them of their identity. This was a cruel and ruthless empire. In the minds of the Hebrews, this was an ancient enemy, a detested, evil city that they believed deserved God’s judgement and destruction.
And so God call’s on Jonah, whose name symbolises the end of God’s wrath, to go to the capital city of his people’s ancient enemy to preach to them.
How does Jonah respond? Jonah runs in the opposite direction. He wants to have nothing to do with what God is calling him to do. Why does he run in the opposite direction? Because he knows who God is. He says, “I know who you are, you are a God of mercy. I am not going to be part of a plan where you come to the people of Nineveh and express your mercy through me.” Jonah is refusing to be used as an instrument of God’s peace and compassion to his people’s ancient enemies. He is refusing to live up to his own name.
And so Jonah runs in the opposite direction. Where God calls him to go East to Nineveh, he begins to travel West to Tarshish, a city in ancient Spain. Perhaps the idea of lying on the sunny beaches of Spain appealed to him more than going to the detested city of his ancient enemies.
In the next scene, Jonah is on a boat sailing to Tarshish, and a great storm arises. Alan Storey says that wherever you have the cold winds of narrow nationalism and exclucivism being met by the warm winds of God’s universal love and compassion, a perfect storm is going to erupt.
The satire in the story is revealed in the boat, when the pagan sailors, who are supposedly godless and far from God, are depicted down on their knees, praying to God, while Jonah, the one called to be God’s servant is depicted sleeping below deck. The author of this story is driving home the point that God is a God of all nations and all people, unlike the preaching of Ezra and Nehemiah who suggested that somehow God was only interested in the true people of Israel.
Jonah rouses himself from sleep, comes above deck, and as Tim Mackie puts it, he begins to spout forth a whole lot of religious mumbo jumbo about his God being the God who made the heavens and the earth and the oceans. He owns up and admits that the storm is his fault because he has been disobedient to the God of heaven and earth, but, rather than turn around and do what God has asked of him, to go and be an instrument of peace to his ancient enemies, Jonah would rather commit suicide, telling the sailors to throw him overboard. The sailors are reluctant to do so. They don’t want his blood on their hands, but in the end he persuades them and over he goes, into the stormy waters.
But God has not given up on this disobedient rebellious messenger. Jonah gets swallowed by a large fish. Interesting, in the story there is no reference to a whale, just a large fish. Psychologically speaking, I find this detail of the story interesting. A psychology of the brain will tell you that we all have a reptilian brain, the amygdala, the small central core of our brain that we share with reptiles. It is the part of our brain that is activated by fear and responds with either fight or flight. In Jonah’s case his response is one of flight. It is quite symbolic. His narrow nationalistic exclusivism, filled with a fundamental fear, has made him psychologically regress. Being swallowed by a fish is symbolic of him being consumed by his reptilian brain. In a complimentary way, Alan Storey suggests that Jonah being swallowed by the fish is symbolic of Jonah becoming swallowed by his narrow minded nationalism. And so in the story, Jonah ends up on the bottom of the ocean in the belly of a great fish.
Now water in ancient Jewish mythology was often symbolic of chaos and evil. As Alan Storey suggests, the history of the world reminds us again and again that narrow-minded and narrow-hearted nationalism and hatred will take you into the depths of chaos and evil. It was the story of Nazi Germany and Facist Italy, or Rwanda and it is the story of every nation that has walked down this road.
But in the all-embracing love and compassion of God, Jonah is not abandoned in these watery depths. The evolutionary impulse that God has placed in humanity, and all of life, is to grow and expand ourselves. We cannot remain in our places of narrowness and regression forever.
In the belly of the great fish, Jonah utters a prayer. As Tim Mackie says, Jonah never technically repents, but he does thank God for not abandoning him and promises to obey from this point on.
And so the fish spits Jonah out onto the shore of Nineveh. God has not given up on Jonah, but neither has God given up on extending his mercy to the people of Nineveh. There are things we cannot avoid in life, and when we try to avoid life’s challenges, they come back to us. God’s challenge to Jonah in the story comes back to him a second time.
This time Jonah gives in. But a bit like a rebellious teenager, Jonah drags his feet as he walks into Nineveh. And once inside Nineveh, Jonah put’s absolutely no effort into this task given him by God. He preaches the worst sermon ever. Just five words in the Hebrew text. “Forty days and Nineveh will be over-turned”. No nice warm introduction. No three point sermon with a rousing conclusion. Just five Hebrew words… Jonah is finally obedient to God, but he gives the bare minimum. He makes no mention of what Nineveh has done wrong or what they should do in response. There is no mention of God, and no mention of who is going to over-turn them.
Jonah gives them the bare-minimum perhaps in the hopes that they will simply ignore him and they will not respond to the invitation of God’s mercy.
But if Jonah was hoping that nobody would listen to him, he is mistaken. No sooner has he delivered his bare-minimum five word sermon, we read that the whole city of Nineveh is cut to the heart, from the king on his throne, right down to the very bottom of society, everyone dresses in sack-cloth and ashes, even the cows and animals. It is part of the satire of the story, that even the animals repent at the preaching of Jonah.
In addition, yet again, these evil pagans from Nineveh show themselves to be more responsive and more faithful to God than God’s servant Jonah.
Jonah in the meanwhile has retreated to a hill over-looking the city where he can sulk. Perhaps he is watching and waiting in anticipation, still hoping that he is going to see a Sodom and Gomorrah moment where God’s fire and brimstone are rained down upon them.
And while he is waiting and watching, a strange little sub-plot begins to unfold. The sun is growing hot, and so the God character in the story makes a vine grow up over Jonah to provide shade for him which makes Jonah very happy. The next day as this sub-plot unfolds, a worm begins to eat away at the roots of the vine, and the vine dies along with Jonah’s shade. Jonah is in a foul mood. He hold’s God responsible for it all. Jonah is so fuming mad about everything that has happened that he just wants to die.
God’s response to Jonah begins to pack home the punch of the whole story. God responds saying to Jonah that his priorities are all wrong. He cares more for this plant that has died that a whole city of people whom God loves and cares for.
What's the point of the story? Is it that God can do miraculous things like saving someone by having them swallowed up by a great fish and then spat up on the shore?
Or is the story meant to be a mirror that we hold up to our own faces? Challenging our own narrow-heartedness that would regard some people as being outside of God’s grace and mercy irredeemable and only worthy of destruction, when God sees them as God’s children whom God would wish to save. It is a story that remind us of the wide-embracing love of God, that includes and embraces even our enemies.
The story leaves us with some questions: Who or what is your Nineveh? They place or the person, or the people that are your hated enemies that you see as being outside of the embrace of God’s concern and mercy? The people or person that we don't want to extend mercy to? The person or the people that we would rejoice over if they had a downfall, or if they were no-more? What would it mean for you to be an instrument of God’s grace and mercy to your Nineveh? An ex-spouse? A person who betrayed or cheated you in? Another nationality? People of another religion? Who or what is your Nineveh?
Lastly, what does it mean for you that in the story, that the God-character continues to love and care for Jonah, despite all his anger, rebelliousness and lack of faithfulness?
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