Jonah and God’s Scandalous Mercy: Weekly Summary
Sunday
Jonah’s story breaks all the expectations of who is right and then remakes those expectations in favor of grace.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
Trust God, trust Holy Spirit to lead you into all truth. Make your intention clear that you will follow as called, without exception.
—Barbara Holmes
Tuesday
God’s goodness dares us to do the braver and riskier thing: to hold out for the hearts of those who belong to God, whether we like them or not.
—Debie Thomas
Wednesday
Will we run away from God’s vision or follow God’s call to embrace otherness, with all our ambivalence and anxiety, or will we baptize our prejudice and hatred in the waters of religious faith?
—Bruce Epperly
Thursday
While we often imagine public political protest to be a secular phenomenon, in the Book of Jonah God calls upon the prophet to initiate religious action.
— Shmuly Yanklowitz
Friday
The sign of Jonah is a symbol of surrender, of letting go, of giving up. Most of us wouldn’t describe those as the stages of the journey of enlightenment, but they’re much closer to the real truth and the real journey.
—Richard Rohr
Week Twenty-Eight Practice
Would We Welcome Jonah?
Theologian Megan McKenna reflects on the tale of Jonah as a modern-day parable of repentance:
The story of the reluctant prophet to the great city of Nineveh is very familiar. It has even been the subject of children’s books, with the tale told from the vantage point of the whale and the poor shriveled up plant that gave Jonah respite from the heat. It is almost comical if we forget Jonah’s mean-spiritedness, his refusal to obey, and his childish pouting when his enemies repent and God’s mercy is accorded to them. He does not want the city to repent—so he can gloat over its demise…
Jonah was so angry at YHWH’s mercy that he wanted to die, knowing that the turn of events would ruin his credibility at home!… YHWH rebuked him, expressing [God’s] concern for the people of Nineveh: “Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot distinguish right from left.… Should I not be concerned for such a great city?” (4:11). This morality tale ends with that question, which is meant to be taken to heart. Should not we, a nation of hundreds of millions who “cannot distinguish right from left,” also learn mercy and graciousness, become slow to anger and full of love, and relent from imposing harsh penalties in our self-justification?
What if [Christians in the United States were sent] a Buddhist prophet who lamented our insistence on the right to manufacture and keep on “ready-alert status” millions of nuclear weapons, defense missile systems, radioactive and depleted uranium bullets, and land mines? What if the prophet declared that our weapons and our covert low-intensity war policies at home and around the world were destroying any possibility of world harmony and that within forty days we would all be destroyed? Suddenly Jonah’s position isn’t so laughable but is, rather, worthy of a serious call to examine our national conscience.
Reference:
Megan McKenna, Prophets: Words of Fire (Orbis Books, 2001), 227–228.
Image credit and inspiration: Jong Marshes, untitled (detail), 2017, photo, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. Beneath the surface we flail, bewildered. Has our heart grown too hard to sense the gentle sun of God’s mercy drawing us up and out?
