Jonah has been a lot of things in this story: disobedient, reluctantly cooperative, and even successful in his mission. What we are not entirely prepared for is what he is in the final scene: angry, very angry. What is going on here? Eugene Peterson offers this helpful observation.

Anger is most useful as a diagnostic tool. When anger erupts in us, it is a signal that something is wrong. Something isn’t working right. There is evil or incompetence or stupidity lurking about. Anger is our sixth sense for sniffing out wrong in the neighborhood. Diagnostically it is virtually infallible, and we learn to trust it.

Anger is infused by a moral/spiritual intensity that carries conviction: when we are angry, we know we are on to something that matters, that really counts. When God said to Jonah, "Do you do well to be angry?" Jonah shot back, "I do well to be angry, angry enough to die." (4:9)

What anger fails to do, though, is tell us whether the wrong is outside or inside us. We usually begin by assuming that the wrong is outside us— our spouse or our child or our God has done something wrong, and we are angry. That is what Jonah did.… But when we track the anger carefully, we often find it leads to a wrong within us— wrong information, inadequate understanding, underdeveloped heart.1

So what about Jonah’s anger? Wrong information? I don’t think so. He seems to have had a pretty good grasp of God’s message of warning for Nineveh. In fact, he communicated it effectively enough for the Ninevites to know what they needed to do in response. And, as much as it irked him, he even understood the very real possibility that God just might be gracious to them. His information was correct. "Inadequate understanding" is perhaps a step closer to what went wrong, but I suspect that at the root of Jonah’s anger was "underdeveloped heart."

What Jonah got wrong was that, in spite of the importance of his role, the story he was participating in was not primarily about him. Yet, living in a culture that carefully nurtures the very mind-set that derailed Jonah should at least help us listen to his story with a bit of sympathy, if not understanding. Witness the approaches to personal spirituality where the focus is all about us or what’s in it for us. Notice the angry disputations that erupt over suggestions that we might have been wrong about some things, or that our church might have to rethink some aspects of how it understands itself, what it means to be a community, or how it goes about its mission.

For Jonah, credibility and identity appear to have been built around his story, and upon being right about what he said and the way he said it, no matter what the human cost of insisting on what that might be. Jonah had become the star of his own show, and he didn’t appreciate God changing the script. Peterson comments further:

[T]hings didn’t turn out the way he expected. His program was not fulfilled. No matter that in his preaching God was heard and believed; Jonah was ignored.… [H]e had confused the biblical vocation by which he was called into God’s work for a religious job in which he used God as an adjunct to his work.2

But God is gracious not only to Ninevah. Through his experience with the plant, which surfaced Jonah’s preoccupation with himself, his comfort, his need to be correct—as if the story were all about Jonah—God sought to provide a redeeming moment for Jonah as well. It was an opportunity for him to see the bigger picture, one in which Jonah mattered, but was not the star.

This, however, is hard work—for God, for Jonah, and for us—and success is not always assured. We don’t know if Jonah ever did get it. But it is important work nonetheless—perhaps some of the most important. Jonah is angry because he has lost track of who the story is really all about. He has lost perspective and needs to change paradigms. He needs,

that interior shift of the imagination, that radical reconceptualizing of reality [that] immediately expands our sense of reality past understanding, [and] sets us down in a world far, far larger than anything we could have dreamed of, and makes it possible to travel, build, heal, learn, and experience in ways impossible previous to the paradigm shift.3

It might have been different, you know, if the people of Ninevah as a result of Jonah’s preaching had all became Jews. Or perhaps if at least some of them had come out of the city to join him as he watched for it’s destruction. Could it be that they responded more to God than Jonah? God was happy. Jonah was angry.

And what about the rest of us? What happens to us when we, personally or corporately, become the stars of our own shows? When good things happen in ways that were not in our plan book, what do we do? Embrace them? Discount them? Write them off as an enemy deception? What if others in the Christian world begin to embrace the wholeness of man and the Sabbath and began to change, and we aren’t as unique as before? What it Babylon repents? And if it does, does it count if it doesn’t join us?

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Do we rejoice with what makes God happy? What makes us mad? Whose story is it anyway? Something to contemplate on those days when we find ourselves somewhere east of the city more preoccupied with the fate of those things that make us comfortable than those that matter most.

Notes and References

1. Eugene Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 157.
2. Ibid., 162.
3. Ibid., 175.

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