Jonah 4:9

Jonah had run from God’s call, been swallowed by the great fish God prepared (Jonah 1:17), and at last preached in Nineveh, “an exceeding great city of three days’ journey” (Jonah 3:3). The people repented, and God turned from the judgment he had threatened (Jonah 3:10). That mercy made Jonah angry, and he asked God to take his life (Jonah 4:1–3). He went and sat outside the city, hoping to see it destroyed. God made a gourd grow up to shade him, and Jonah was glad of it. Then God sent a worm to destroy the plant and a scorching east wind, and Jonah, in great discomfort, again wished to die (Jonah 4:5–8).

The story is set in the reign of Jeroboam II in Israel (793–753 BC). Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, a powerful empire known for its cruelty, including impalement and flaying, and a constant threat to Israel. From a human point of view Jonah’s reluctance is easy to understand. To an Israelite prophet, mercy for such a people could feel like an affront to Israel’s covenant with the LORD and like justice withheld from its enemies.

Everything in this chapter answers to God: the gourd, the worm and the wind, just as the great fish did. The plant is his object lesson, given and then taken away to bring out what is in Jonah’s heart.

God’s question, “Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?”, asks whether Jonah’s anger is good and right. The verb yâṭab means to be good or to go well, and in its causative form to do good or to do well. Jonah answers with the same word: “I do well to be angry.” God is asking Jonah to look at the cause of his anger, and Jonah defends it.

The word for being angry, chârâh, means to burn or grow hot, and Scripture uses this one verb for God’s anger and for man’s. A form of it is the “fret” of Psalm 37:1, “Fret not thyself because of evildoers”, where it means to heat oneself in vexation. That describes Jonah well. His anger began when God spared Nineveh, and now it flares again over a plant. It is a selfish resentment that God’s mercy has gone against what Jonah wanted for the city. Proverbs puts the matter plainly: “He that is slow to wrath is of great understanding: but he that is hasty of spirit exalteth folly” (Proverbs 14:29).

“Even unto death” uses mâveth, the ordinary word for death. Jonah is overstating his feeling to show how deep it goes. He would rather die than live with God’s decision to spare Nineveh and with the loss of the shade, and the words lay bare how much self-pity has taken hold of him. There is irony here. God saved Jonah from death in the fish, and now Jonah asks for death over a plant, while God is at work saving a whole city from death.

God’s patience shines through the exchange. He keeps speaking to his rebellious prophet, drawing out the root of his anger, and his questions open the way for Jonah to see his own heart.

“Thou hast had pity on the gourd,” the LORD says. The verb is chûwç, to pity, to have compassion on, or to spare. Jonah’s sorrow over the plant is real, and God builds his whole answer on it.

The gourd, qîyqâyôwn, was likely the castor oil plant, which grows fast and has large leaves that give plenty of shade. In a hot, dry land shade is precious, so its loss was a real hardship for a man sitting out in the sun.

God names three things about the plant. Jonah had “not laboured” for it. The growing was God’s work as well, and the verb gâdal here is the causative “madest it grow”, to cause something to become great. And it “came up in a night, and perished in a night.” It was a gift, received freely and held for a very short time. Jonah’s pity went to something he had put nothing into, and which was always going to pass.

In verse 11 God takes up the very verb of verse 10. Jonah had chûwç on the gourd, and God asks, “should not I spare”, using chûwç again, “Nineveh, that great city?” Jonah’s own pity becomes the measure. If Jonah could feel this for a plant that lived a night, how much more should God, who made and sustains all life, have compassion on a city full of people.

Nineveh is “that great city”, gâdôwl, a word for greatness in size, age, status or intensity. Here it speaks of the city’s size and population, and perhaps of its power. The adjective comes from the same root as gâdal, the growing that was God’s work in the gourd. The wickedness of so great a city makes God’s mercy all the more remarkable. He has every right to show mercy where he wills, and here he gives Jonah his reasons.

God shows Jonah who he is. He is the God who proclaimed himself “merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (Exodus 34:6–7), and his mercy is freely given, to Nineveh as much as to Israel. He is “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9), and Jesus says there is joy in heaven “over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:7).

In the same chapter of Luke, the elder brother is angry when his father welcomes home the son who wasted everything, and he refuses to share in the feast (Luke 15:28–30). Jonah stands where that brother stands. Jesus calls us to the Father’s heart: “love ye your enemies… Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful” (Luke 6:35–36), and “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you” (Matthew 5:44).

Jesus spoke of “the sign of the prophet Jonas” (Matthew 12:39–41), pointing to Jonah’s three days and three nights in the fish as a picture of his own death, burial and resurrection, through which the salvation Jonah watched so grudgingly is offered to all.

Jonah and Christ stand in sharp contrast. Jonah was angry “even unto death” over a lost comfort and the sparing of his enemies. Jesus went willingly to death on the cross to save his enemies: “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8–10). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9). The gourd withered in a night, and Christ is the lasting refuge, “a shadow from the heat” (Isaiah 25:4).

God’s patient pursuit of Jonah and his pity for Nineveh find their fullest expression in Christ, who “is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). He wept over Jerusalem as one who would have gathered its children “as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings” (Matthew 23:37). After his resurrection he sent his followers into all the world to preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15), and “whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13). At the cross God spares sinners by taking their judgment on himself.

God’s question to Jonah is a question to us as well. We can grow hot over small losses, or over God’s grace reaching people we think unworthy of it, and we can call that anger right, as Jonah did. God answers us as patiently as he answered him. He uses discomfort and loss to show us our hearts, and then he shows us his own.

The comforts we hold most tightly are often gifts we did nothing to earn, and many of them come up in a night and perish in a night. The people around us, the hard to love, the far off, and even those we count as enemies, are the ones God pities. To share his heart is to grieve over sin, to rejoice when anyone repents, and to be glad, with him, that he spares.