Our Knots, God’s Mercy: Yet Not What I want, But What you Want
March 30, 2025
The Fourth Sunday of Lent
Jonah 4:1-11
By Pastor Mike
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This story began with God telling the prophet Jonah to travel to Nineveh, a powerful city in the militant Assyrian Empire, and preach against it. As we’ve seen, Jonah ran away from this command; instead of going East, he went West, seeking passage on a ship bound for the faraway city of Tarshish. Sometimes we run from the right thing to do, the thing we sense that God has put in front of us. Sometimes, faced with a call, we grow afraid, and we try to quietly slip away.
At first, fear seemed like a logical explanation for Jonah’s resistance to God’ call. Israelites and Ninevites were enemies, simple as that. Jonah might be threatened, accosted, or worse, should he leave the comfort of his own land and go rub shoulders with the enemy.
But the final moments of this great story reveal that Jonah had a more complicated motive than fear. He knew in his gut that doing the right thing, in this case, would not feel good to him, would not leave him feeling satisfied, happy, or secure. Should he go to Nineveh and speak God’s words, he would lose control of the narrative and the outcome; it would be between this people and the Lord. ‘Ninevites given the chance to receive mercy? You’ve got to be kidding me!’
You see, the right thing in God’s eyes was the wrong thing in Jonah’s eyes. He was less afraid of the Ninevites’ violence toward himself, and more afraid of God’s kindness toward them.
In light of their sorrow and repentance, God did relent from punishing the Ninevites. And, oh, this made Jonah’s blood boil. “Jonah was greatly displeased and became furious” – that’s how chapter 4 begins. And we finally understand the deeper, darker reason why Jonah had never wanted to come to Nineveh at all.
“Please, Lord, isn’t this what I said while I was still in my own country? That’s why I fled toward Tarshish in the first place. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and one who relents from sending disaster” (4:2).
Jonah is angry at God for being who God is. Jonah hurls God’s essential back at God as an insult. Ugh, of course even here you’d be this way – gracious and compassionate, loving and relenting. And here’s the thing about these words. They are a direct quotation of earlier scripture; they are some of the most precious words an ancient Hebrew would know.
These words about God’s character were first spoken by God himself to Moses on Mount Sinai. After freeing the Israelite people from slavery in Egypt, God made a covenant with them at Mount Sinai, binding himself to them and promising to always protect and provide for them so long as they adhered to the Divine way of justice and love.
According to Exodus 34, “the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there with [Moses] and proclaimed his name, the Lord. And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin” (vv. 6-7).
God was telling Moses and the people very directly what the Divine character, the Divine heart, is like. And what a beautiful heart – patient, forgiving, loyal, longsuffering, and kind. And this Holy self-disclosure was cherished, written upon the heart of the people, and restated again and again in later stories and prayers.
Like Psalm 103: “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. He will not always accuse, nor will he keep his anger forever. He does not deal with us according to our sins nor repay us according to our iniquities” (vv. 8-10).
Or from the prophet Joel: “Yet even now, says the Lord, return to me with all your heart. …Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment” (2:12-13).
That God is like this was no secret, no mystery.
Jonah knew that he served a God with this heart. And when first called to Nineveh, Jonah put the pieces together theologically in an instant. Bringing the words of this kind of God to this kind of people would be a risk: God might be who he is and actually show them mercy. And that would unsettle the easy narrative in Jonah’s mind about who the people are that God likes and chooses, and who the people are that God dislikes and rejects. God’s compassion might extend to Nineveh. Which is to say: God’s compassion might leap the walls around Jonah’s own compassion, and lead him to a reckoning with his own smallness of heart.
Jonah ran the theologically equation correctly, and his heart could not see it as good news. Jonah was disgusted that he has been called to demonstrate the limitless, borderless, unbounded goodness of God by coming to these people and witnessing their transformation.
Poor Jonah. Poor Jonah – he wrings his hands and plods out of the city to pout about God’s graciousness under the shade of a rickety hut.
Jonah shows us the danger of evaluating God’s kindness according to our own standards and assumptions. When this happens, doing the right thing can leave us feeling angry and baffled. God’s goodness can feel offensive. God’s forgiveness can seem like a downright scandal.
There is a reason that God says through the prophet Isaiah, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9).
And it’s here that I want to remind us of some of the Gospel stories we’ve heard read in worship alongside Jonah these past four weeks. Truth is, the span of God’s mercy was not any easier for people who walked and talked with Jesus to swallow.
In one passage from Luke’s Gospel, a religious expert comes to Jesus asking him what he needs to do to gain eternal life. Jesus flips the question around and asks the man, “Well, based on your training, what do you think?” And the man answers dutifully, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus says, “That’s right, very good.” But the man, well, he wants to know exactly how much of that neighborly stuff he needs to do to be on the right side of the line. So he asks Jesus a clarifying question: “And who is my neighbor?”
Jesus answers this by telling a story about a man who walks down the road and gets robbed and beaten and left for dead. And as he’s lying there in agony, two of the “right kind of people” – leaders in government and religion – walk down the road and pass him by. But then a third man – definitely the wrong kind of person, being a foreign, unclean Samaritan – stops and saves the man’s life. “Which of these three,” Jesus asks the scholar in front of him, “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.”
Jesus radically redefined the bounds of neighborliness. You’re not a neighbor to someone else primarily because you share a point of view, a philosophy, an ethnicity, a hobby, or even a city block with them. You’re a neighbor when you enter into another person’s need, when you share their suffering and their joy as if they were your own.
Being a neighbor is not something you are; it’s something you do.
Later in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells a different story about a man who had two sons. The older son was loyal and responsible, but the younger son was a mess. He took his inheritance early and went and squandered half his father’s estate in hedonistic living in a far country. When he loses everything and is reduced to rags, he comes home, expecting to be given the cold shoulder and treated like a household slave. Instead, the father, seeing him from a distance, runs to him and embraces him. The father throws a party to celebrate his son’s homecoming.
When the older brother comes in from the fields and hears about it, he gets bitterly angry – envious. He’s always been there, after all; he’s always done right without an expectation of reward. And now this – for him?
“Then the father said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours. But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found.’” (Luke 15:31-32). The older brother had taken the love of his father so for granted that he had lost touch with the joy of it. And so he feels stingy about sharing it when the moment comes to share it.
And then we have our story from today, the parable Jesus tells in Matthew 20 about the day laborers. The guys who got hired at the end of the day and worked only an hour got paid the same amount as the guys who got hired at the beginning of the day and worked clear through it.
“And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us…’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; …I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’” (Matthew 20:11-16).
We can draw lines around our neighborliness. They’re in; they’re out.
We can feel that appreciating someone else threatens our own position.
We can balk at God’s generosity to the newcomer, to the latecomer.
We can make ourselves the measure of God’s mercy, and that is when our heart hardens.
And sometimes – well, sometimes these resistances begin at home, in the church itself.
We, friends, can get stingy and fussy about who we are really obligated to as neighbors. We can miss the joy of someone coming home again into the love of God because, well, we’ve always been here, we’ve never left, and who do they think they are and why all this fuss about them? In the church, we’re not always above saying, ‘Hey I’ve been here the longest. I’ve put in more time than all y’all combined. Where’s my gold star, my bit of extra favor?’ Or: ‘Hey, I’ve been here a decade, why is that person who just walked through the door getting the attention and appreciation that I deserve.’
Oh yes, we can do these things, too. We can become “greatly displeased” just like Jonah – and those toxins make it very difficult to witness to the all-encompassing love of God.
But friends, we serve a God who sent Jonah to offer grace to his enemies.
And we serve a God of Gethsemane.
We serve Jesus Christ, the one who knelt down in the garden on the night before he died and prayed to God that the cup of suffering might pass from him. He didn’t want to do it. Not like that. He was in agony, knowing how difficult it would be to do the thing God had put in front of him to do. But he also prayed, “Yet not my will, but yours be done” (Luke 22:42). And having surrendered to the flow of God’s love, Jesus made of his death and risen life a redemptive sacrifice, a loss that gained everything, a self-gift that received the world in return.
What it would be like, I wonder, if there was a group of people who decided that no matter how distasteful the call to love was at first, no matter how much it grated against their sensibilities, they would nevertheless pray to God, “Yet not my will, but yours be done.”
Oh, what would it be like – if there was a people – who would do the right thing and magnify God’s love even though it might cost them their stories about the good and the bad, the worthy and the unworthy.
You go and take care of your ailing parents. You stick by them as they slowly decline. You sort through their stuff and tackle the mountain of paperwork. It’s hard and it costs and it will wear you out, but it’s the Jesus thing to do. You take time off from work that you worked hard to earn and all of sudden you are confronted with an urgent need or even a mundane call to service that God puts in front of you, and doing it would be hard and costly, and it may even make you impatient, but it’s the Jesus thing to do. Or you come into some money, and you already have far more than you need for yourself, and you choose to share it with someone who may not deserve it, who may not ever be able to pay you back for it, but who desperately needs the help. It costs but it’s the Jesus thing to do.
You feel God tugging on your heart to get to know your next-door neighbor, But God, you do know, don’t you, that they’ve got a Trump sign in their yard? You know they’ve got a Kamala sign? They’ve got that yellow flag with the snake. They’ve got that rainbow flag flying. But you push through the discomfort and check in anyhow because a neighbor is made by the messy sharing of life, not by the ease of ideology. It’s a hard thing and it costs some real comfort and cultural currency, but it’s the Jesus thing to do.
And I could go on:
You open your home to someone who needs a place to land and recover for a while. You let go of an old grudge. You agree to help the congregation with something behind the scenes. You watch someone’s kids when you’d rather be watching TV. You listen to your spouse’s concern and decide you will go with her or him to counseling and work to salvage, even strengthen, your marriage. Your neighborhood changes so you start learning another language. You stay up an extra hour to write the letter.
We want these actions to align with our preferences. We want them to feel good and easy and to fill us with energy and confirm our standing in the world. And because we make ourselves the measure, so much Gospel work gets left on the table.
Oh, but if we would but let the Spirit of the Lord – the compassionate one, the gracious and forgiving one, the one who is slow to anger and who relents from punishment – if we would but let that Spirit live in us, then we would stop asking, What’s in it for me? and we’d start moving towards the wounded on the streets, towards the runaways coming home, toward our co-laborers in the good work – even, and hardest, as Jonah learned – toward our enemies.
Brothers and sisters, God will ask us to love people we don’t think it’s right to love, serve people we don’t feel are worthy of our service. God will ask us to embrace and celebrate people beyond any worldly calculation. God will ask us to the right thing even when we are greatly displeased by it. But a church that lets God crash through the borders of its concern? A church that can get angry with the demands of God’s compassion and still say at the end of the day, Yet not what I want, but what you want? Well, that’s a church that God can use to usher in the joy and the abundance of the Kingdom.
May it be here. May it be us. In the name of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.