16th Sunday after Trinity
READING: Jonah 3:10–end of chapter 4
Do We Really Want God to Be Merciful and Forgiving ?
I wonder if there are some people and situations that we find it easier to pray for than others.
There are people whose suffering moves us. People whose mistakes we understand. People we are quite ready to forgive.
And then there are others…..
People who have hurt us. People who, in our opinion , have behaved badly. People whose actions have caused real damage. Perhaps people who seem to have got away with things that, in our eyes, they should have paid for.
And what if God is merciful and forgiving to them too?
That is Jonah’s problem in the reading we have just heard.
We probably know the story of Jonah and the great fish from childhood stories ….but the part we sometimes miss is that Jonah doesn’t actually want Nineveh to be saved. Nineveh represents the enemy: the great Assyrian city associated with an empire whose violence had devastated Israel.
So Jonah eventually goes to Nineveh and preaches his warning. And something extraordinary happens.
The people listen.
They repent. They turn around. God sees their change of heart and chooses not to destroy them.
And Jonah is furious.
He tells God exactly why:
“I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.”
It is almost as though Jonah is saying, “I knew you’d do this. I knew you’d let them off.”
And perhaps Jonah exposes something uncomfortable in us…something very close to the bone.
Do we actually want God to be merciful and forgiving when the people receiving mercy are those we think deserve punishment?
Of course wrongdoing matters. Harm needs to be acknowledged. Justice and accountability matter. Forgiveness should never become an excuse for covering up what has happened or silencing those who have been hurt.
But Nineveh does something important.
Nineveh turns around.
Repentance, in the biblical sense, is not simply feeling guilty. It means changing direction. Recognising that the road we are travelling is destructive and choosing another way.
That makes repentance an extraordinarily hopeful word.
It says the past does not have to have the final word.
People can change.
Communities can change.
Churches can change.
Nations can change.
We can change.
There is a song made famous by Michael Jackson called Man in the Mirror.
Released in 1988, it was written by Glen Ballard and Siedah Garrett and became one of Jackson’s best-known songs about personal and social change.
At its heart is a very simple idea:
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror.”
If we want the world to change, the song suggests, perhaps we begin by looking at ourselves.
I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change
Jonah spends a lot of time looking at Nineveh. He knows exactly what is wrong with them. He knows what they have done. He knows what they deserve.
But God keeps turning the mirror back towards Jonah.
What is happening in your heart, Jonah?
Why does the possibility of someone else receiving mercy and forgiveness make you so angry?
Why are you so certain that they can never become different?
And perhaps those are questions for us too.
Saints like St Francis became very aware of this . Francis discovered that conversion was not primarily about changing everybody else. It began when his own way of seeing changed. The people he had feared or avoided, like people who were lepers , became sisters and brothers. The world began to look different because his heart was becoming different.
Jonah, meanwhile , sits outside the city of Nineveh, angry that God has spared it.
God gives him a bush for shade. Jonah becomes very attached to it. Then the bush dies, and Jonah is devastated.
And God asks him, essentially: If you can care this much about a bush, why shouldn’t I care about a whole city full of people?
And then the story ends.
We never discover whether Jonah changes his mind… if he has understood God’s actions
Perhaps because the question has passed from Jonah to us.
Who are our Ninevites?
Who have we stopped believing can change?
Whom have we reduced to the worst thing they have ever done?
Whose failure do we secretly want God to remember?
There is another song which takes us somewhere deeper. This time it is an old hymn, written in the nineteenth century by Frederick William Faber:
“There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea.”
It is a beautiful image.
We make mercy and forgiveness narrow.
God makes it wide.
We draw boundaries.
God keeps crossing them.
We decide who belongs inside and who belongs outside.
God keeps making the circle wider.
We remember what someone has done.
God continues to imagine what they might yet become.
That does not mean pretending harm has not happened. Mercy is not the opposite of justice. Forgiveness does not remove the need for accountability, truth or repair.
But Christian hope refuses to believe that anyone should be imprisoned for ever within their worst moment.
Perhaps that is what repentance really means: there can be another road.
For Nineveh.
For Jonah.
For the people we struggle to forgive.
And for ourselves.
Perhaps these two very different songs belong together.
Man in the Mirror asks us to look at ourselves and wonder what needs to change.
There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy reminds us why change is possible at all: because we live within a mercy larger than our failures, our judgements and our carefully drawn boundaries.
The wideness of God’s mercy reaches Nineveh.
It reaches Jonah, sitting angrily beneath his dying bush.
It reaches the people we find hardest to love.
And, thankfully, it reaches us.
So I wonder:
if God’s mercy really is wider than ours, where might God be inviting us to widen our mercy and forgiveness this week.
And how might this affect both our pray and actions
Image: Curated Lifestyle, Unsplash.com
