After the trumpet and the army no wall could stop, Joel's tone changes without warning. 12"Yet even now," declares the LORD, "return to me with all your heart." The invitation comes from the same God who has spent ten verses describing judgment. He is the one who opens the door, and he does so in the middle of the crisis, at the point where the situation looked settled.
Then comes the instruction the passage turns on. 13"rend your hearts and not your garments." Every Israelite knew what tearing a garment meant. It was the standard sign of grief, going back to Jacob tearing his clothes over Joseph. Joel takes that ritual and aims its verb at something no one tears. In Hebrew the heart names the seat of thought and will, the thing that steers a life. Joel still commands fasting and weeping in the same breath, so the outward forms stay. They matter only when they carry a turn of the will inside them. A garment can be torn by anyone in an afternoon. The heart takes a decision.
The reason given for coming back is a description of God. 13"Return to the LORD your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and he relents over disaster." These are the words God spoke of himself at Sinai after the golden calf, and Israel had carried them in its worship ever since. Joel builds the whole appeal on them. The ground for repentance is who God has always said he is, no matter how large the judgment or how small Israel's merit.
The same words turn up nearly verbatim in another prophet's mouth, and the contrast is sharp. Jonah admits why he ran: "I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger" (Jonah 4:2). Two prophets confess the same character of God. Joel finds hope in it for his own people. Jonah resents that the same mercy might reach people he never wanted saved. The sentence that comforts one man angers the other, and it shows how differently a heart can receive the same news about God.
Joel will not let hope harden into presumption. 14"Who knows whether he will not turn and relent?" That question guards a freedom. God's freedom to relent stays his own, even while his character gives every reason to hope.
The call reaches everyone. 16"Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her chamber." Newlyweds were excused from public duties in their first year (Deuteronomy 24:5), and here they are pulled from the wedding chamber. No one gets to sit this one out.
The priests then pray for something larger than their own relief. 17"Why should they say among the peoples, 'Where is their God?'" Their concern is for his name before the watching nations, wound so tightly with their own repentance that neither can be pulled apart from the other.
Prayer
Gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, we confess that we have torn the garment and left the heart alone, going through motions that cost us nothing. Teach us the difference. Give us Joel's confidence in your character, in place of Jonah's resentment of it, and let the mercy that reached Nineveh be the mercy we run toward. In Jesus' name, amen.