Who Cares? - Jonah Part 4

I used to have this cool ceramic bowl. It was blue on the outside, white on the inside, and the perfect size for a bowl of cereal. I had that bowl since I was a kid and then one fateful day it fell off the counter and was gone forever. I still get bummed when I think about losing that bowl. It’s funny some of the things that we care about and sad some of the things we don’t and in this final chapter of Jonah we get a picture of what Jonah, “the prophet”, and God care about.

Over the years in my conversations with people, I often hear something to the effect of, “I can’t believe in God because there is too much evil in the world.” And there seems to be a consensus that God doesn’t care as much as we do about the injustices of the world, that we’re the ones who are compassionate and forgiving, that we are the ones who are merciful and God is just concerned with judging, but that’s not what we see in the final scene of Jonah.

Up to this point, we don’t know why Jonah was running from Nineveh and when he finally tells us, it’s a bit surprising, especially from a prophet as we see that Jonah ran away because he knew that the Lord was gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now there’s nothing wrong with a God like that unless you don’t like the people God is showing this mercy to, which is exactly the case with Jonah and is often the case with us. Our moral compass conveniently points to our prejudice.

If you think I’m exaggerating, ask a group of high school students if they saw a stranger and their dog drowning and could only save one, which would they save? The overwhelming response in my experience has been to save their beloved pet that makes them happy rather than the stranger, a fellow human made in God’s image.

When someone tells me that they can’t believe in God because there’s too much evil in the world I usually answer them, “Okay, you win there is no God. Now who do we blame for the evil in the world?” You see, God was just an excuse to shift the blame off us. The truth is we’re the ones, like Jonah, who have a problem with prejudice. We’re the ones, like the Ninevites, who mistreat one another. We, like Jonah, grieve more over a plant that dies, or a ceramic bowl that breaks, than for those who are lost and cannot tell their right hand from their left. We are the ones who don’t like to forgive those who have hurt us and want to see judgment for those we dislike and we, like Jonah, are able to close our eyes and ignore the fate of 120,000 people in Nineveh, or Haiti.

So, who really cares? …God does.