Chapter 3 ends with God's compassion, and chapter 4 opens with the sharpest turn in the book. 1"But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry." The city that repented and was spared is, to its own prophet, a personal offense.
Then Jonah's prayer explains the flight that started the story. He ran to Tarshish, he says, because he knew God was 2"a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love." Those are the words God spoke about himself at Sinai, the same words Joel builds his hope on, and Jonah throws them back at God as an accusation. He always knew this mercy might reach Nineveh, and he ran to avoid watching it happen. The man who said from inside the fish that salvation belongs to the LORD is furious that it does.
God answers with a question. 4"Do you do well to be angry?" It is an invitation to look at what is happening in Jonah's own heart, the same kind of question God once put to Cain before his anger led somewhere worse.
Jonah leaves the city and sits down to watch, still hoping that destruction might fall. God appoints a plant to grow up and shade him, and Jonah is very glad. Then God appoints a worm to attack the plant, and appoints a scorching east wind to beat on Jonah once the shade is gone. That verb, "appointed," also described the great fish in chapter 1. It is now used of a plant, a worm, and a wind, four times in the book, each one summoned and dismissed by the same hand. Nothing in these pages, not even a worm, happens outside God's careful arrangement.
Jonah's grief over the dead plant is the opening God has been waiting for. 10"You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow." Jonah's compassion cost him nothing. The plant came in a night for his own comfort, and he mourns it only because his comfort went with it. He never planted it, watered it, or tended it for a day.
Then the question the whole book has been building toward: should God not pity Nineveh, that great city? God's compassion for that city cost far more than a night's shade. He made every one of those people, sustained them, and watched over even their cattle. Jonah, who wept over a vine he did nothing to grow, cannot bring himself to rejoice that a whole city of God's creatures has been spared.
The book ends there, in the middle of the question, with no recorded answer from Jonah. The silence is deliberate. Every reader who has ever resented mercy reaching someone they judged unworthy of it is left where Jonah stood, holding God's question and no answer yet given.
Ask whose repentance you would rather not see rewarded, and what that says about your own hold on grace. Then answer the question God asked, since Jonah never did.
Prayer
LORD, you are gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and we confess that we have loved that truth most when it was aimed at us. Forgive us the compassion we withhold from those we have judged unworthy of yours. Finish in us what this book leaves unfinished in Jonah, an answer that welcomes your mercy wherever you choose to send it. In Jesus' name, amen.