Our Knots, God’s Mercy: The Overturning (Jonah 3:1-10)
Our Knots, God’s Mercy: The Overturning
March 23, 2025
Jonah 3:1-10
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The third chapter of Jonah begins in the same way that the first chapter began. God’s word comes to the prophet, calling him to get up and go to the great city of Nineveh in the heart of the ruthless Assyrian Empire. The first time Jonah received this command from God, he ran away. He boarded a boat bound for the faraway city of Tarshish. He ran away only to be caught in a storm, thrown overboard by his shipmates, and swallowed by a great fish. Jonah survived inside the fish for three days and three nights before he finally prayed for deliverance and was vomited out onto dry ground.
So here we go, take two: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time” (3:1). And… this time Jonah listens. He travels east on a long journey inland until he reaches the city. He walks a day’s journey into it – surrounding by people he considers vile, brutish, unworthy of God’s concern – and he begins to preach: “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!”
It’s not exactly a message to win you friends among your enemies, not exactly something wise to say while traveling alone in a hostile place. A declaration of doom. But they were the words God gave him. ‘Forty days more and – katastrephō!’ says the ancient Greek translation of this Hebrew story. Catastrophe. Nineveh is bound for a sudden, radical overturning.
When God spoke to Jonah the first time – before the voyage and the storm and the fish – God told him that the Ninevites “wickedness has come up before me” (1:2). That’s important to remember. Nineveh was not a good place. It was a place where economic injustices, social oppressions, and outright violence were the norm.
The cries of the people suffering within these realities have reached God’s ears and gained God’s attention, just as, long before, the cries of the Israelites enslaved in Egypt had reached God’s ears and prompted God to act. And even though God had to deal with Jonah’s fickleness up until now, God has had the city’s wickedness and violence in view the whole time. God has not forgotten the cries of its poor.
These strong terms for the city’s behavior are appropriate; we hear as much from the king of Nineveh’s own mouth. He orders everyone in the city to “turn from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands” (3:8). That first phrase – ‘evil ways’ – means something like a wicked disposition and the unethical direction. The second phrase – ‘the violence that is in their hands’ – suggests that each person is accountable for the destructive acts that they cling to, when they might otherwise curb and control them.[1]
Wickedness and violence – ra’ and chamas in the Hebrew – are precisely the words that show up in the Noah story, found in the book of Genesis, when God decides to destroy the earth with a flood. Genesis 6:5 says, “The Lord saw that the wickedness” – the ra’ – “of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually” (6:5). And Genesis 6:11 says, “Now the earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence” – with chamas.
And the overwhelming presence of peoples’ pain stirred up a strong emotional response in God: “And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” – Genesis 6:6. In the case of Noah, God followed through with judgement, saving only Noah and his family and breeding pairs of every animal. But in the Jonah story, God turns away from the planned punishment because the people of Nineveh respond to Jonah’s preaching.
All of which is to say: It is significant that God speaks to Jonah a second time. It’s easy for us to focus in on Jonah, to analyze what’s going on in his heart and mind and wonder about what he’s learning from all these experiences. But I think God’s persistence here is less for Jonah’s sake and more for the sake of those who are oppressed in the great city of Nineveh. God needs Jonah’s cooperation precisely because God wants to confront the root causes of that immense pain. Remember, Nineveh was a powerful city in a ruthless, militaristic empire. Neighbors were not treating each other well, and it is more than likely that slaves, foreigners, women, and children were bearing the brunt of systemic injustice and outbursts of aggression.
And God wouldn’t let it go on. God is responsive to our mistreatment of others. God is responsive to our suffering. God feels fierce anger about it all. So God sent a truthteller – Jonah – to Nineveh to force a reckoning by stating the obvious: you cannot keep going this direction without catastrophic consequence.
For a moment, let’s ask ourselves whose cries God is attuned to in our own community – be that our block, our city, our state, or our country. The cries of the hungry, the unhoused and displaced, the incarcerated. The cries of women who are trafficked, children who are neglected, the elderly who are forgotten. The cries of species whose homes have been reduced to a barely livable acreage. The cries of Idahoan women now living maternity care deserts, of Idahoan parents raising children in childcare deserts. The cries of children still separated from their parents at our country’s southern border – to be clear, a policy practiced by both parties in the past 10 years.
God is attuned to the suffering, and God raises up truthtellers: people who will tell us – who are telling us, ‘You cannot keep going this direction as a person or as a community with catastrophic consequence.’
We’ve seen that God is responsive to unjust suffering. God is also responsive to a change of heart, a change of direction. That’s what’s on display most in this third chapter of Jonah. The people who have practiced wickedness and violence decide to put an end to it! It’s not how it has to be – praise God! The Ninevites grieve and fast and put on scratchy clothes to show that they are sorry. And what begins organically in the streets with neighbor telling neighbor to put the violence down eventually reaches the attention of their king, and he – shockingly – gets on board. He tells the whole city to double-down on changing their ways. He’s so enthusiastic that he even orders the animals to join in the community’s turning. Donkeys and sheep and cattle wearing sackcloth and fasting and crying out to God.
And we see God’s response to this in verse 10: “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them, and he did not do it.”
God changed God’s mind. God did not do what God said God would do. Because God saw that they had made a concerted effort to turn from one way of life, founded on the domination and exploitation of each other, to a new way of life founded on forgiveness, repair, and justice.
There was, at the end of the day, a great “overturning” in Nineveh. But it was not the violent overturning of brick and mortar. It was the overturning of a community’s heart and way of life. Jonah told the truth about violence, and the people who heard his words took them to heart.
All you can do is tell the truth:
If you live under the boot of Nineveh, you cry out honestly to God and trust that God hears you. If you’re Jonah, you speak the words that God gives you to speak in an ungodly place and an ungodly time. If you’re the Ninevites at large, and you suddenly see how far off the mark you are, you change course and you urge your neighbors to do the same.
All you can do is tell the truth. What comes after that belongs to God. Remember, this story was written after the Israelites returned from exile in Assyria and Babylon. The storytellers set it in the past in order to hold up a mirror to God’s people. ‘This could have been us,’ the storytellers are suggesting. ‘We could have listened to our prophets. We could have fed the hungry, housed the houseless, cared for the stranger. We could have called one another onto a better path and made a communal turn. But we didn’t, and the catastrophe came. Never again. Let’s do better this time.’
“And the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast, and everyone, great and small, put on sackcloth.”
I’m compelled by this vision of a community realizing that is doing harm to its members and then doing something about it, spurring others to do the same. Justice starts at home, in the neighborhood, and the work of turning is for all of us, no matter our age or the skills and influence we think we have or lack.
In Lent, we focus our attention on a God who attuned himself so completely with the sufferings of creation that the depth of his listening and the immediacy of his feelings pulled him from eternity into time, from invisible divinity into visible flesh – drew him into the very matrix of our agony. In Jesus of Nazareth, God joined us in our mess. On the cross, Jesus united himself with those who suffer unjustly. And all along the way, he spoke to us about a better way to live, calling us to love our enemies, to show mercy to those in need of mercy, and to make peace.
What might it look like for you and me to be so moved by our neighbors’ pain that we might follow Jonah and Jesus as they enter in, draw close to it, tell the truth about it, and share about a better way?
Sometimes, to experience the gospel as good news, we first have to experience it as bad news. We have to look in the mirror and take the logs out of our own eyes. We have to cut off the hand that causes us to sin. We have to go and sell all our possessions and give the proceeds to the poor. We have to see and feel and name our brokenness for what it really is, and then we have to do the hard work of relinquishing our way. We have to turn. It feels like bad news at first because it’s uncomfortable and costly and exposes our complicity in what is not right. But then we suddenly realize that this turning – itself a kind of death, a dying to the selfish ego – is the gateway to resurrection life, for us and for others.
God is near to you, the truthtellers say. Mercy is near to you. Love is near to you. A life-changing, world-overturning kindness is available to you. Deep peace, unbreakable hope, restored dreams – they are not far from you. You can have them if you are willing to turn from doing harm. You can experience them if you are willing to take judgment out of your own hands and place it in the hands of God, and then pick up the cross as a way of life. God is near to you as you listen to the point of joining, and love in both words and action.
Will we – members and friends of First United Methodist Church – will we believe God? Will we consent to the overturning of our hearts for the sake of love?
In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.
[1] See Susan Inditch, Jonah: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2023), 96.