Jonah 3:1-6, 10
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
July 12, 2026
Do we love only those we think well of…and do we expect God to do the same?
The scriptures reveal a God whose love is anything but selective!
Let me tell you a story:
A prophet named Jonah hated God’s love for reaching out with care and concern to everyone, even the worst people. Though it was Jonah’s duty as a prophet to deliver God’s word wherever God sent him, when God commanded him to go to Nineveh to warn its people that their disgusting conduct destined them for destruction lest they repent of it, the prophet immediately set sail in the opposite direction, taking a ship to Tarshish, at the other end of the Mediterranean world.
Why would the prophet disobey his Lord? The third verse of the Book of Jonah tells us: to “flee…from the presence of the Lord”. And why would he want to flee from the presence of the Lord? Because he knew that if he called the Ninevites to account and they repented, the Lord would forgive them and spare them from the judgement they merited – the last thing in world Jonah wanted to happen! He hated those vile sinners, and looked forward to seeing them punished as they deserved.
The Ninevites did deserve punishment. They were nauseatingly evil – aggressive and brutal in war, and viciously cruel in conquest. They humiliated and tortured POW’s. They murdered non-combatants, even old folks hobbling on crutches and babies in their mothers’ wombs. No one could be harder to love than the Ninevites!
But the Almighty somehow managed to love them.
Jonah decided that if the Lord was that kind of God, the Lord was not the kind of God he wanted to serve. Yet, just as God was not about to give up on those wicked Ninevites, God wasn’t about to give up on a prophet so stingy about sharing God’s grace with others.
God hurled against the ship transporting Jonah away from Nineveh a fierce storm that threatened to break the vessel apart and drown all on it. The winds and waves were so violent, that the seasoned crew flew into a panic. And, though sailors are not typically known for their piety – you never hear anyone say someone “prays like a sailor” – they got religion fast and implored their various gods to rescue them. Maybe, just as “there are no atheists in foxholes”, there are none in storms at sea. At any rate, when those prayers brought no relief from nature’s onslaught, the captain roused a snoring Jonah, hiding in sleep from awareness of his physical and spiritual danger, to cry out, “It’s all hands on deck. Pray to your God too. Maybe yours can save us.”
After that, the tempest grew even more furious and the sailors began to wonder whether someone among them was being punished by a deity through a calamity that would do them all in. So, to figure out who it was, they cast lots, and they indicated Jonah was to blame. He owned up to it; because he thought he was a goner either way, he suggested that, to quiet the tempest and save themselves, they throw him overboard. But they first graciously attempted to give him a chance at survival by trying to row him closer to dry land. The force of the huge waves and howling winds, however, thwarted their efforts; and ostensibly out of deference to Jonah’s deity, but more likely out of deference to the ancient mariner principle of “better you than us”, they dropped Jonah into the drink. As soon as the prophet hit the water, the waves settled down and winds calmed; and the ship’s crew worshipped God out of gratitude for their deliverance – the first of several involuntary ministry successes that Jonah had not intended.
Meanwhile, as Jonah sank down to Davey Jones’ locker, a whale swallowed him whole; and Jonah spent three days and nights in the belly of that big beast, cobbling together a prayer from every scripture he could think of. Eventually, the fish threw him up on to shore; and, once Jonah washed off the half-digested seaweed, God repeated the order about going to Nineveh. This time Jonah sped straight there and preached the shortest sermon on record – which may explain its effectiveness, despite its being entirely negative! Jonah simply announced, maybe chortling in anticipation as he did, “In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed,” – and said nothing about repenting and being forgiven. He just predicted what he hoped to see: an annihilation proving that God hated the Ninevites as much as he! Somehow, however, those bad people heard more from God than Jonah spoke of; and everyone repented: the king, the littlest child, the cattle and all dogs and cats! And, sure enough, Jonah’s worst fears about God’s goodness were realized: God forgave them and delivered them from destruction – exactly the scenario for which Jonah fled from the Lord’s presence in the first place!
Though the salvation of that great number of sinners made Jonah as successful a preacher as ever existed, their salvation irked him. It violated his sense of justice. To him the only fitting and right thing would’ve been for them to suffer as they’d made others suffer. Jonah in fact protested God’s being as “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” as the scriptures declared; and whined that he’d just as soon die if that’s how God was going to be. And when God challenged him about begrudging the Ninevites an unmerited blessing, Jonah went off by himself to pout in private and to sulk in bitter disappointment.
Yet, God kept pursuing His grace-stingy prophet, and tried to turn his attitude around by making him the brunt of a heavenly practical joke. One day God gave Jonah extra shade from the desert sun by causing to grow over his head a castor bean plant – which is itself a joke within a joke because castor oil is a laxative and Jonah sure had a lot of stinky, stopped-up stuff to eliminate from his system! When that didn’t help, God – yet again making the weather change – let that plant die and deprive Jonah of shade in order to let him stew in the heat of his self-imposed misery. Jonah once more asked to be killed on the spot, and God once more challenged him by asking whether he was justified in being so upset over the loss of a little comforting shade when a whole bunch of people, so confused and lost they couldn’t tell their left hand from their right, got their heads screwed on straight and got saved by God.
God a second time asked Jonah why he was angry, and Jonah a second time refused to give God an answer.
We never learn whether Jonah ever gave God an answer; but we can decide what answer we will give God. Will we repent of our hating His loving the wrong kind of people? Will those among us who despise President Trump be gracious to those among us who support Him, and vice-versa? Will those among us who are traditional in theology be kind to those who are progressive, and vice-versa? Will we all be good, and ask God to be good, to those who are in our eyes the worst kind of people?
Jonah’s story is open-ended, but our story need not be. How will we write the rest of it? The Lord of grace and indiscriminate love awaits our decision.
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