Biblical narratives are stories of transformation. At times, several transformations can be discerned in the text. So it is with Jonah. The story of Jonah is generally remembered as the conversion of the Ninevites, a wicked population bound for destruction, repent and escape executive judgment as a result of God changing his mind. But there is more to the story than meets the eye.

Jonah is involved in several programs. He receives a mission, runs away from Nineveh (far from God’s presence), journeys to Tarshish, meets a storm, is summoned to reveal his identity, is thrown into the sea, remains in the belly of a fish, goes from the seashore to a great city, and sits outside Nineveh eager to witness its destruction.

Yet in the end Jonah is still unchanged. Even the wonderful prayer of Jonah in chapter two does not signal real change. The whale vomits Jonah on the shore as an acknowledgment of an incomplete mission.

Finding himself on the shore, Jonah starts out again. His old ideas about God and the Ninevites still stick to his skin, so to speak, after he leaves the fish. Jonah doesn’t understand that the evil of the Ninevites is only one part of the problem. Another facet of evil is even more difficult to deal with—to get rid of—because it is connected with the person of Jonah himself (the same Hebrew word can be translated as either "evil" or "wickedness" [1:2], "calamity" [1:7; 3:10], or "discomfort" [4:6]).

God actually has a harder time with Jonah than with the Ninevites. With Nineveh, the preaching of a gifted man was crucial, but God has to mobilize several of his agents and his own persuasiveness to come to terms with Jonah. Or so it seems, for we actually don’t know the final outcome of the encounter between God and Jonah. Did Jonah finally get rid of the evil he had internalized? The kind of evil that does not let him love his enemies is more stubborn, and the book leaves us questioning.

The main purpose of the book of Jonah is to show that evil is not only what people do to each other, as exemplified by the wickedness of Nineveh’s inhabitants, but also what people think and wish for one another, as shown in the person of Jonah himself.

Jonah’s situation contrasts sharply with that of Daniel, the Hebrew captive who went out of his way to protect the lives of the Babylonian magicians who faced execution for being unable to interpret King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Daniel 2). Unlike Jonah, Daniel cared about the lives of pagan idolaters and asked his companions to pray for the meaning of the dream to preserve the lives of the Babylonian wise men.

But such a mindset was alien to Jonah. Jonah certainly was a religious man, a believer in the God of creation (Jonah 1:9). He also knew something about God’s compassion:

He prayed to the Lord and said, ’Please Lord, was not this what I said while I was still in my own country? Therefore in order to forestall this I fled to Tarshish, for I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, and one who relents concerning calamity.’ (Jonah 4:2)

In addition, Jonah believed that salvation belongs to the Lord (Jonah 3:9). This can be seen in the beautiful psalm he narrates in Jonah 2. What bothered Jonah was the availability of God’s salvation to Gentiles—to others besides his own people.

Still, as with Nineveh, God demonstrates compassion with Jonah. We glimpse this in part through God’s use of several "adjuvants," or helpers—the great wind, storm, fish, plant, worm, sun, and scorching east wind—through which he patiently tries to direct or redirect Jonah’s itinerary, thinking, and feelings.

Jonah’s mission itself gives him an opportunity to share in God’s purpose, to understand how God feels about his creatures, both humans and animals. God’s patient pedagogy mirrors his compassion.

In fact, God’s compassion can be seen throughout the text, from the decision to send Jonah to Nineveh, to Jonah’s rescue by the sailors, his deliverance from the abyss, and God’s forgiveness and deliverance of the Ninevites, to the multiplication of means that God offers to deliver Jonah himself from evil. No wonder God argues his case before Jonah about the legitimacy of showing compassion now that Jonah can identify with its reality:

Then the Lord said, "You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work and which you did not cause to grow, which came up overnight and perished overnight. Should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?" (Jonah 4:10–11)

It took the fullness of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ to demonstrate that compassion itself is rooted in God’s love (1 John 4:7). God so loved the entire world, even his enemies.

God’s compassion—shown in the book of Jonah—offers all of us an example to follow.

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