Now usually when you hear that a preacher is about to hold forth on Jonah, you expect a whale of a tale. Right? We focus on the fish. It doesn’t say what kind of fish it was that swallowed Jonah and regurgitated him three days later ñ bowhead whale, great white shark, large mouth bass, whatever. We imagine being inside the belly of the fish and waking up in the vomit on the beach. Yuck! We wonder how such a thing can be so, about whether it’s true that such a thing could happen. And all the while we are missing the story.

It’s a beautiful story of repentance really, human and divine. Of how God meets our change of heart with a change of heart too. It teaches us about God’s desire for mercy. One minute we think the story is about Ninevah, then about Jonah, then about God. But finally, if we get it, we have to see that it is also about us. And if it isn’t about us, then the Bible isn’t God’s Word today at all; it is only a curious book of old stories.

We pick up with Jonah today in chapter three. We have zoomed past the whole fish thing. Jonah is called by God to go to Ninevah and proclaim their coming doom. Jonah’s name means "dove," but he is hardly eager to offer an olive branch of peace to the Ninevites. He probably likes the idea of seeing them get what’s coming to them. But for whatever reason, the text doesn’t say, he runs away to see if he can leave the call behind.

Mary Morris is a writer and teacher of writing at Sarah Lawrence University in New York. She writes about a time when, as a junior in college, she boarded the S. S. France for a year abroad. Her mother said to her, You take yourself with you. And she hated that because she was convinced she was going to Paris to leave her old self behind and become someone else.

Jonah thought no doubt that he was boarding a ship for Tarshish to run away from the burden of being a dove when he wanted to be a hawk. He took himself with him though. Or rather, God went with Jonah to remind him of who he was no matter where he was. In those days people still thought deities had geographic boundaries. Once you crossed over into Canada say, you could shirk off the duties of America’s god. Israel found that wasn’t so. So did Ninevah. We’re still learning ourselves.

We some of us think, I think, that God’s rule over us ends at the parking lot of the church. Or maybe at the front door of our house. We think of God as being mainly interested in what we do on Sundays at church and then the rest of the week with our families. Other gods rule the marketplace and courtroom and neighborhood: gods of consumption or stock valuation or retributive justice or social status. We pay homage to them and obey their demands without thinking much about what the God of heaven might want of us in those realms. We hope God is still back in church or at home, but we find unluckily for our prejudices that God is wherever we go, making all kinds of moral demands.

Jonah finally goes to Ninevah and does what God told him to do. He musters up the courage to lay it out for those sinners. Forty days and you people are done for. God has had it with you and all your wickedness. You’re dead! Deal with it.

Now Jonah had a right to want God to lay it on Ninevah. If they had those surveys back then about the most livable cities in the Middle East, Ninevah would have come in dead last. They invented cruelty. They would skin their enemies alive and paper their game rooms with human hide. They would bury them in sand up to their necks and pour honey on their heads so that insects would come and eat away at their flesh. Want more? I’ll spare you. The point is, they deserved only God’s punishment. Jonah delivered the word. God takes sin seriously.

I called American Airlines the other night to book a flight. The woman on the phone must have thought she wasn’t being monitored; it was the oddest conversation. At one point she asked me which newspaper I read, The Dallas Morning News or The Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The Morning News, I said. You agree with what they write in there? she asked. On the editorial page? At this point I asked what this had to do with the price of tea in China, and she said she was just making conversation. I asked her what her beef was with the paper. She said she’s a big believer in moral responsibility and she thinks they are too soft on people.

I don’t know about that, but if I’m any measure I generally want moral responsibility for others and mercy ñ mercy for me! God rest your soul, Marvin Gaye.

There was a young guy on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? the other night with lots of personality, nattily dressed. He missed the $100 question. What did the boy in the nursery rhyme pull out of the pie? Well of course Little Jack Horner stuck his thumb in the pie and pulled out a plum. This guy said blackbird. Okay, so? He was on the radio the next day and was saying how people were calling him and telling him what a disgrace he was to his school, asking him if he knows a word that rhymes with plum ñ dumb! Stuff like that. What is it with us?

In presidential politics it is the season for moral responsibility. Who is toughest on crime? We’ve executed twice as many criminals in the state of Texas in the past few years as any other state. Even if you are for the death penalty, should you be happy about that? Even if you think it is sound social policy, shouldn’t it make you shutter to think of doing unto another what you would not want done unto you?

Have you heard any of these ads on the radio by the Methodist Church about the Golden Rule? Apparently, one of them is a guy getting cut off in traffic and grousing about the driver of the other car when it dawns on him that he has done just that and worse behind the wheel. Realizing that he himself should be so judged changes the way he thinks about the situation.

This is my problem with all the zero tolerance rules in the schools. It takes all judgment out of discipline and makes it into some supposedly neutral standard by which everyone is judged. Which leaves no room for mercy. Same with mandatory sentencing of criminals. Judges don’t get to judge as much because legislators have usurped their wisdom.

We don’t know how to let up. Atlanta Braves relief pitcher John Rocker recently said some unbelievably stupid things about immigrants, minorities, homosexuals, and New Yorkers. I can forgive him for all but the last, don’t you know?! Anyway, you’d think it was the General Secretary of the United Nations who said these things. He’s a dumb jock, for God’s sake. Who cares what he thinks? Okay, so maybe that’s a bit much, but I do think we ought to follow Ted Turner’s advise on this one: I think he was off his rocker when he said those things. But I don’t think we ought to hold it against him forever. He didn’t commit a crime. See the thing is, some people are calling for Rocker to be banned from baseball. And yes, some moral indignation is called for when someone defames others unjustly. But will he ever be allowed to recover? How will we let him?

God knows how to take sin seriously and stand up for victims, and at the same time not give up on the sinners. God is willing to take the boot of justice off the neck of the villains at the point when genuine repentance and change of behavior is evident. God wants to see people change. The problem is, and this is the big news of the Book of Jonah, we don’t always want to see people change. We forget the mercy God has shown to us.

The Book of Jonah anticipates Jesus. He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone. What Jesus did was to suffer for the sins of others rather than declare them lost forever. You have to desire the best for others more than anything else before you are willing to give up your life for them. And this is what God teaches us in Jesus.

Mason Murray is three and a half. His parents asked him on the way home for church last week what they talked about in Sunday school. Mason replied, Jesus —again! Well, that’s true. We’re always on that subject, because we need Jesus to teach us how to hold together justice and mercy.

We are usually a bit like the group of frogs that were traveling through the woods. Two of them fell into a deep pit. All the other frogs gathered round the pit. When they saw how deep the pit was, they told the two frogs that they were as good as dead. The two frogs ignored the comments and tried to jump up out of the pit with all of their might. The other frogs kept telling them to stop, that they were as good as dead. Finally, one of the frogs took heed to what the other frogs were saying and gave up. He fell down and died. The other frog continued to jump as hard as he could. Once again, the crowd of frogs yelled at him to stop the pain and just die. He jumped even harder and finally made it out. When he got out, the other frogs said, Didn’t you hear us? The frog explained to them that he was deaf. He thought they were encouraging him the entire time.

Thank God people don’t always hear what we are really saying. Thank God God finds a way to overcome our desire for vengeance couched as justice with God’s desire for righteousness enabled by mercy. But is the message we are sending really the one God is calling us to deliver?

Jonah’s preaching was wildly successful, though he didn’t see it that way. He forgot what a dove he was. He forgot to take himself with him. He had gotten a taste of being the hawk, and he liked it right well. But the widespread repentance of Ninevah was just what God was hoping for all along.

Jonah should have known. The fish was actually an instrument of divine mercy. Jonah would have drowned were it not for the fish. But then when Jonah is all mopey about God’s change of heart over destroying Ninevah, God makes a vine to grow up in the hot sun to give Jonah shade. The next day God sends a grub worm to eat up the vine. Jonah didn’t thank God for the shade of the vine, which he didn’t deserve. He only grumbled about it being taken away.

Mercy is God’s deepest desire. It isn’t permissiveness though; it is a hard-won suffering mercy. God gives up the divine right to punishment in order to give us what we don’t deserve. Mercy is never about what we deserve; it’s always about what God wants to give. The question the book of Jonah poses to us is this: Do we want what God wants? Do we want mercy for others or only for ourselves?