Our Knots, God’s Mercy (Jonah 1:1-16)
Around 1000 BCE, the twelve tribes of Israel were consolidated into a stable, prosperous monarchy under their first three kings: Saul, David, and Solomon. But unity did not last, and within a couple generations their kingdom was torn in two by warring factions. There was the northern Kingdom of Israel and a southern Kingdom of Judah. Neighbors, kin, and enemies all at once, the Hebrews coexisted uneasily for several centuries, banding together if it was politically advantageous, but more often than not menacing and betraying each other.
God raised up prophets to call the people back to faith, back to justice. But as time went on, both north and south drifted further and further from God’s purpose. In 722 BCE, the Assyrian Empire – ruthless and greedy – invaded and destroyed the northern kingdom, carrying many of its people into exile. In 586 BCE, the Babylonian Empire, which had conquered and absorbed the Assyrians, did the same to the southern kingdom, burning Jerusalem to the ground and dispersing the Judahites into faraway lands.
A little over forty years later, it was the Persian’s turn to dominate the world. Their king, Cyrus the Great, took a more lenient position toward the Jews and allowed them to return to their homeland and rebuild Jerusalem, which they did under Ezra and Nehemiah.
They came back a changed people – changed by their suffering, changed by their exposure to other peoples and other places, having done their best to heed the prophet Jeremiah’s words: “But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare” (Jeremiah 29:7).
They came back telling stories – stories of their ancestors and of their God. Some of these stories were old, some were new. All the stories were shaped or reshaped in light of their exilic experiences of loss, hope, and rubbing shoulders each day with new kinds of people.
Jonah was one of those stories.[1] Jonah is a story set in the time before the exile, in the days of the divided kingdom when Assyria was growing in power and beginning to terrorize Israel. Nineveh – “that great city” – was a prominent and powerful city in this foreign empire.
For the story’s main character, the post-exilic Israelites chose Jonah’s son of Amittai. He had been a real prophet during the reign of Jeroboam II in the northern kingdom. According to the Book of 2 Kings, Jeroboam led a nationalist revival by seizing land from his estranged siblings in the south and keeping foreign powers at bay. He was a ruler obsessed with borders – expanding them, defending them, monitoring them. 2 Kings 14:25 says that his border policies unfolded “in accordance with the word of the Lord, the God of Israel, spoken through his servant Jonah son of Amittai, the prophet from Gath Hepher.” Jonah had been a red-blooded Hebrew whose prophetic ministry aided and abetted this ruler zealous for national security.
What if, the new storytellers asked themselves, what if we told a story about God calling Jonah to minister to his enemies? This was a scandalous proposition. As the well-known American pastor Timothy Keller once wrote, “Up until then prophets had been sent only to God’s people. …It was even more shocking that the God of Israel would want to warn Nineveh. …The original readers of the book of Jonah would have remembered him as intensely patriotic, a highly partisan nationalist. And they would have been amazed that God would send a man like that to preach to the very people he most feared and hated.”[2]
And why would a story like that be important for the new storytellers to tell, as they labored among the rubble and ash of their once glorious kingdom?
It was important because they had been scattered throughout the known world and they had learned that it was possible for them to live among people different from them. Strange customs, yes, strange languages and strange gods. But at the end of the day: people. Some of the Israelites had taken to heart the fact that God’s presence and compassion was not confined to the borders of their ancestral home but could reach them – and others – hundreds and thousands of miles away from it.
They had begun to see that God was not concerned only about one nation or one people, but about them all. So, if the cries of the poor and oppressed were to rise up in an Assyrian city, God would care about that, and God would demand change and offer forgiveness just as God would do at home in Jerusalem. Perhaps God loved and was at work in the whole world. Perhaps God’s people should think twice before judging their neighbors as unworthy, unchosen, and beyond the scope of God’s concern.
So, we can’t say with certainty that the historical Jonah ever traveled outside his beloved borders or ever looked a foreign “enemy” in the eyes and saw them as a person, as a human being who was as much the object of God’s attention and concern as he himself was. But the Jonah of the story – well, he did, and he learned some things from it. Jewish scholar H. L. Ginsberg says that the theme of Jonah is “a lesson of divine forgiveness.”[3] And though Jonah’s not happy about it, it’s clear that the storytellers behind this tale valued what commentator Susan Niditch calls “cosmopolitanism and empathy.”[4]
I was reading this week about the administration’s order that government agencies must scrub their social media accounts, websites, and databases of photos and stories that highlight the historic contributions of women and people of color to our country. The Department of Defense is caught up in this, and the stories of many veterans are on the verge of deletion.[5] It is always a problem for a country – or a church – when the story becomes too simple, when it is hacked away at and recast as something monolithic and “pure.” Ideological violence always paves the way for physical violence. It is always a blow to our humanity when we insist that there is only one story that can rightly be told. The better stories are the complex ones, the ones that can hold contradictions in productive tension. I don’t think that what we need right now are fewer stories but some new ones that help us to be better and kinder and braver than we have been.
Jonah begins with the prophet running away from the bigger, riskier story that God has called him into, a story that involves the possibility of mercy for his enemies. Jonah flees “from before the Lord.” The literally wording there in the Hebrew is that Jonah fled from the face of the Lord. God won’t, or can’t, look God in the eye, so to speak, at this moment. How can you call me to go to them? I thought I knew you. I’d rather disappear forever. Jonah runs away, finds a ship in the coastal city of Joppa, pays the fair, and embarks for Tarshish, an exotic city at the farthest edge of the known world.
So, God hurls a storm upon the sea that threatens to destroy the ship. The sea is a place where strangers converge, and the men on this boat are from all over the world. They cry out, each to their own god, to be saved from the storm. Jonah, meanwhile, has gone down below deck and fallen asleep.
He does not seem concerned about his fate or the fate of his shipmates. Susan Niditch calls his sleep “an escapist slumber.”[6] The ancient Greek translation of this story says that Jonah was lying there snoring.[7] The captain of the ship shakes him awake, scolds him and commands him to call upon his God, which Jonah does not do. As they grow more desperate, the crew hurls their cargo overboard and then they cast lots to see if the storm is a divine punishment for a wrong traceable to someone on board. Jonah is found out, and he tells them that he is the cause of their peril. They need to throw him overboard.
Do they? Need to do that? If Jonah had stood up right then and taken responsibility for his actions; if he had prayed a prayer of genuine sorrow and pledged to go to Nineveh, might the storm have stopped? We’re not given the chance to find out. Jonah is bound to the idea of a God of punishment, not a God of mercy. He thinks he must die.
“Lift me and hurl me into the sea,” he tells them – and they, out of compassion for him, do not want to do this. They try even harder to row to shore so that they can keep him alive, but the power of the storm grows. At last, with no other way to save themselves, they pray that God will not hold against them what they are about to do, and they toss Jonah into the sea. The storm ceases, the water grows still. These men from different cultures and languages make a sacrifice of thanksgiving to Jonah’s God, make vows to praise him in the future, and are delivered.
“We beseech you, Yahweh, please let us not perish for the life of this man, and do not set against us innocent blood” (Jonah 1:14). That was their prayer before hurling Jonah overboard, but we know that Jonah wasn’t innocent. They knew he wasn’t innocent. Yet they were willing to see beyond his mistake – his fear and resistance and disobedience – to his essence, to his life and his blood, which runs red like theirs.
This is precisely the kind of sympathetic seeing that Jonah denied them at first when he fell asleep down in the ship. The kind of sight, too, that he denied Nineveh, when he ran away from God’s call.
Jonah, before his unwilling sojourn to Nineveh, was like the priest and the Levite in Jesus’ parable, who would not stop to help their wounded neighbor on the side of the road. You could say that Jonah becomes like the Good Samaritan in the end, crossing over to help his ideological enemy. But the story leaves open the question of whether Jonah has a real change of heart. Perhaps it is truer to say that Jonah was the bruised one, that his personhood had been diminished and robbed, and that his nationalist passion and his professional religiosity had walked on by leaving him helpless. Perhaps it took the humanity of his enemies – these foreigners who did everything in their power to help each other and him – to restore him to life.
Tim Keller writes, “God sent his prophet to point the pagans toward himself. Yet now it is the pagans pointing the prophet toward God. …God shows [Jonah] here that he is the God of all people and Jonah needs to see himself as being part of the whole human community, not only a member of a faith community. …His private faith is of no public good.”[8]
Is our private faith of public good?
Do we see ourselves only as part of a faith community, or as a part of the whole human community?
Is there one right story and we’re living in it, or are we concerned about the wider story in which all our individual stories are threaded?
Does God’s heart for the world stop at the borders of our affections and allegiances, or do our hearts need to be broken and cracked open to hold the whole world?
These are the questions that Jonah raises. Sometimes we can be so knotted up in our prejudices, but these do not serve us when crises come that affect the whole social fabric, the whole worldwide climate. There is a line in a novel that says, “It would have to be the troublesome act of humanity, or nothing.”[9] That was true for the mariners, true for the Good Samaritan, true eventually, perhaps, for Jonah.
May it be true for us as well.
In the name of God, the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] “[T]his is Late Biblical prose, a kind of Hebrew not written till after the return from the Babylonian exile in the fifth century BCE.” Robert Alter, Strong as Death is Love (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2015), 135.
[2] Timothy Keller, Rediscovering Jonah: The Secret of God’s Mercy (New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 10-12.
[3] H. L. Ginsberg in The Five Megilloth and Jonah (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2008), 115.
[4] Susan Niditch, Jonah: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 41.
[5] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/nx-s1-5321003/pentagon-images-flagged-removal-dei-purge-trump. Accessed March 8, 2025.
[6] Susan Niditch, Jonah: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 40.
[7] That is, the Greek Septuagint (LXX).
[8] Timothy Keller, Rediscovering Jonah: The Secret of God’s Mercy (New York: Penguin Books, 2018), 34, 37, 38.
[9] Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire (New York: Picador, 2003), 206.