Mercy on Nineveh, and a Greater than Jonah
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Scripture: Jonah 3–4 (with Matthew 12:41 and Luke 11:30–32)
Before this session, read Jonah 3–4: the word coming a second time, the five-word sermon, the astonishing repentance of Nineveh from the king to the cattle, the LORD’s mercy, and Jonah’s bitter anger over the withered plant. Then read Matthew 12:41 (and Luke 11:30–32), where the Lord Jesus holds up the men of Nineveh and declares that something greater than Jonah is here. Keep your Bible open, and ask: why was the prophet angrier at God’s mercy than at the city’s wickedness, and where might that same resentment of grace hide in us?
Should I not be even more concerned about Nineveh, this enormous city? There are more than one hundred twenty thousand people in it who do not know right from wrong, as well as many animals!
(Jonah 4:11)
The Word a Second Time
The LORD’s message came to Jonah a second time, “Go immediately to Nineveh, that large city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you” (3:1–2). Before we follow Jonah into the city, we should stop and marvel at that little phrase, a second time. Here is a prophet who had heard the call of God and run the opposite way to the ends of the earth; who had to be hurled into the sea and swallowed by a fish and brought back from the gates of death before he would listen. By every reckoning of merit, Jonah had forfeited his commission. And the word of the LORD comes to him a second time, with exactly the same charge as the first. God does not scrap His failed servant and find a better one. He calls the runaway again.
That is the God we have, and every believer who has ever failed Him needs to hear it. The LORD is the God of the second word, and the third, and the seventy-times-seventh. The Lord Jesus restored Peter by a charcoal fire after the threefold denial, with a threefold do you love me? (John 21:15–17); He does not deal with us as our failures deserve. The same grace that reached down into the deep to bring Jonah up now reaches into his shame to commission him again. There is no sin of ours, no flight however far, that puts us beyond the reach of the God who comes a second time. The word that calls is the word that forgives, and it comes again to the very man who fled it.
And Jonah, this time, goes. But mark the sermon he preaches when he gets there, for it is the bleakest in all of Scripture. After a single day’s walk into that vast city, the prophet opens his mouth and says, in the Hebrew, exactly five words: At the end of forty days, Nineveh will be overthrown! (3:4). That is all. No call to repent, no offer of mercy, no if you turn, God may relent; only the bare announcement of doom with a forty-day fuse. It is the law and nothing but the law, preached, one suspects, by a man who rather hoped it would not work. Jonah gives Nineveh the minimum: the threat, with no door of escape named. He wanted them warned, perhaps, but he did not want them spared, and his sermon is calculated to leave no opening. He could not have known that the word of God is never as small as the preacher who carries it.
We can scarcely overstate what Nineveh was, or what it cost the heart of God to send mercy there. It was the capital of Assyria, the superpower of the age and the most efficient engine of cruelty the ancient world had yet produced. The Assyrians boasted, on their own monuments, of flaying captives alive, of heaping up the severed heads of the conquered, of impaling the survivors of conquered cities and leading the rest away with hooks through their lips. This was no abstract enemy; it was the empire that would, within a generation or two, grind the northern kingdom of Israel out of existence. The text calls Nineveh an enormous city that took three days to walk through (3:3), a sprawling place of more than a hundred thousand souls. When the LORD sent Jonah there with a word of warning, He was extending the offer of repentance to the very people most of Israel longed to see destroyed. The wonder is not that Jonah ran; the wonder is that God sent him at all.
The City That Repented
What happens next is one of the great wonders of the Old Testament, and it happens at the preaching of a sermon the preacher half-hoped would fail. The people of Nineveh believed in God, and they declared a fast and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them (3:5). The whole city turns. Not a remnant, not a faithful few, but the entire population, top to bottom, the greatest to the least. Word reaches the throne, and the king of Nineveh, the absolute monarch of the cruelest empire on earth, got up from his throne, took off his royal robe, put on sackcloth, and sat on ashes (3:6). The most powerful man in the world climbs down off his throne, strips off his royal robe, and sits in the dust like a beggar.
And his decree is astonishing in its thoroughness. Man and beast alike are to fast and be covered with sackcloth; everyone is to cry earnestly to God, and (here is the heart of it) everyone must turn from their evil way of living and from the violence that they do (3:8). The Hebrew says literally “the violence that is in their hands.” This is no mere ritual of fear; it is repentance reaching all the way to the hands, a turning from the very violence that had made Assyria a terror to the nations. And the king’s reasoning is humble to the bone: Who knows? Perhaps God might be willing to change his mind and relent and turn from his fierce anger so that we might not die (3:9). He claims no right to mercy, presumes on nothing, demands nothing. He simply hopes, with the bare hope of a man who knows he deserves judgment, that the God he has offended might yet relent. It is, in its way, a more honest faith than the prophet’s.
And we should mark that the LORD did not look on the sackcloth and the fasting as such, but on something underneath them. God saw their actions (3:10), that is, that they turned from their evil way of living. It was not the outward show the text fixes on (we heard Amos thunder against sackcloth and solemn assemblies offered by hard hearts), but the turning itself, the genuine abandonment of the violence in their hands. Nineveh’s repentance reached all the way down to conduct; the men of blood put away their bloodshed. This is what true repentance looks like in any age: not merely the feeling of sorrow or the ritual of contrition, but a real turning, a changed direction, the fruit that proves the sorrow was the gift of God and not mere fear of the consequences. The king of Nineveh modeled it from his throne to the dust, and a whole city followed him down. Would that the covenant people had ever turned so completely at the preaching of their own prophets.
We should not miss the lesson hiding in this for everyone who has ever preached, or taught, or witnessed, and felt the weakness of it. Nineveh repented at the word of a reluctant, resentful prophet who delivered the barest possible message and secretly wished it would fail. The power was not in Jonah; it was in the word. This is a deep comfort and a needed correction, and the Lutheran Confessions state it plainly (AC VIII): the word and sacraments are efficacious not because of the holiness or the eagerness or the skill of the one who administers them, but because they are God’s, and Christ works through them regardless of the minister. A grudging sermon by a hard-hearted man brought a whole city to its knees, because the word he carried was not his own. The weakest, most reluctant proclamation of God’s word carries the whole power of God in it, which means no one need wait to feel adequate before he speaks it, and no one may take the credit when it works.
God Relented
God relented concerning the judgment he had threatened them with and did not destroy them (3:10). The threatened overthrow does not come. God sees the turning of the city and turns away His anger. We met this language back in Amos (the Hebrew verb, which older versions render “repent,” means to relent or to be moved to pity), when the prophet’s intercession stayed the locusts and the fire, and we said then what must be said again here: this is not God changing His mind in the way a fickle man does, discovering new information and reversing course. It is God being perfectly consistent with His own revealed character. The threat of forty days had an unspoken unless folded inside it, as every prophetic threat of judgment does; for the LORD takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn and live. When Nineveh turned, God did exactly what He had always said He would do for the penitent. The relenting was not a change in God; it was the unchanging mercy of God meeting a changed city.
The LORD had once spelled out for Jeremiah the very principle at work here. There are times, Jeremiah, when I threaten to uproot, tear down, and destroy a nation or kingdom. But if that nation I threatened stops doing wrong, I will cancel the destruction I intended to do to it (Jeremiah 18:7–8). Every prophetic threat of doom carries within it an unspoken door, an implied unless you turn. The forty days were never a fixed and unconditional sentence; they were a summons, a mercy disguised as a threat, designed precisely to drive a city to its knees while there was still time. This is how the law always works in the hand of God: it announces the wrath we have earned, not to slam the door, but to drive us through it before it is too late. Jonah preached only the threat and named no door; but the God who sent the threat had mercy folded inside it, and Nineveh cast itself on that mercy.
And here is the scandal that the whole book has been building toward, the offense that drives the final chapter. The mercy of God has reached Nineveh: not Israel, not the covenant people, but Nineveh, the capital of the empire that embodied everything cruel and godless in the ancient world. The grace that Jonah thought belonged to his own nation has spilled clean over the border and spared an enemy city. We should be careful to say exactly what the text says. Nineveh’s repentance was real as far as the text describes it, and the city was delivered from the threatened destruction; Scripture does not tell us the final spiritual state of every individual Ninevite. Its focus is the power of God’s word to bring a pagan city to repentance and the breadth of God’s mercy toward the nations. We have watched this theme gather force through the Twelve already: the booth of David rebuilt to gather in the nations, the pagan sailors brought to fear the LORD, and now a whole Gentile metropolis spared. The God of Israel will not be kept inside Israel’s fences. His mercy is going out to the nations, and it is going there on purpose, and nothing, not even the sulking of His own prophet, will stop it.
There is staggering comfort in this for the worst of sinners. If the LORD spared Nineveh (the city of flayers and impalers, the cruelest power of its century, the enemy that deserved every ounce of the threatened overthrow), then there is no one, and no sin, beyond the reach of His mercy. The grace that found Nineveh is wide enough for any conscience that has ever despaired of being forgiven. None of us has done what Assyria did, and Assyria was spared the moment it turned. The mercy of God is not a narrow gate reserved for the respectable; it is an ocean wide enough to drown the sins of the worst city on earth, and it is held out to every sinner whom the law has brought down off his throne, like that pagan king; yet where the king of Nineveh had only a “Who knows?”, we have the sure promise of the gospel, spoken to us for Christ’s sake.
I Knew That You Are a Gracious God
Now, at last, Jonah tells us why he ran, and the confession is staggering. The sparing of a city of more than a hundred and twenty thousand people, the repentance of a whole city, the turning away of God’s wrath: all of this displeased Jonah terribly and he became very angry (4:1). And out of that anger comes the truth he had hidden since chapter one. Oh, LORD, this is just what I thought would happen when I was in my own country. This is what I tried to prevent by attempting to escape to Tarshish, because I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in mercy, and one who relents concerning threatened judgment (4:2). There it is. Jonah did not flee because he doubted God’s mercy; he fled because he was certain of it. He knew the LORD was gracious, and he could not bear the thought that this grace might reach Nineveh, so he ran rather than be the instrument of it.
And notice the words Jonah uses, for they should stop us cold. A gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in mercy: this is the great self-revelation God gave to Moses on the mountain, the most precious description of the divine character in all the Old Testament. We heard Joel reach for these very words and set them forward as the ground of all hope: Return to the LORD your God, for he is merciful and compassionate, slow to anger and boundless in loyal love (Joel 2:13). The NET varies its English between the two books, but the Hebrew formula is the same. Joel cited the creed of mercy to call sinners home. Jonah cites the identical creed as a grievance. The same truth that is the gospel itself to a humbled heart becomes, to a hard one, a thing to resent. Jonah believed every word of it, and hated it, because it was true for his enemies as well as for him. There is no more searching diagnosis of the human heart in all the Twelve: a man can hold the doctrine of grace flawlessly and despise it utterly, the moment grace is shown to someone he would rather see destroyed.
So now, LORD, kill me instead, because I would rather die than live! (4:3). Jonah would rather be dead than watch his enemies forgiven. He is the elder brother of the Twelve, the same figure the Lord Jesus would later paint standing outside the feast, refusing to go in, furious that the father has killed the fattened calf for a son who did not deserve it. The elder brother and Jonah suffer from the same disease: a heart that has lived close to mercy all its life and never understood it, that resents grace shown to the undeserving precisely because it has never reckoned itself undeserving. And the LORD’s reply is not a thunderbolt but a question, gentle and probing: Are you really so very angry? (4:4). It is the question He is still asking every heart that begrudges the mercy of God to another.
The Lord Jesus would one day paint a portrait that could hang beside Jonah’s, without naming him, in the elder brother of the prodigal. There stood a son who had never left home, who had kept all the rules, who was scandalized that his father would kill the fattened calf for a wastrel who had squandered everything, and who stayed outside the feast, sulking, while the music and dancing went on without him. You never gave me even a goat so that I could celebrate with my friends! he complained. But when this son of yours came back … you killed the fattened calf for him! (Luke 15:29–30). It is Jonah’s grievance exactly: anger that grace has been shown to the undeserving, and blindness to the fact that the complainer is himself a debtor with nothing to boast of. The elder-brother sin is the peculiar temptation of the lifelong churchgoer, the one who has lived nearest the mercy and understood it least. And to that son, as to Jonah, the Father comes out and pleads, not with a rebuke, but with an invitation to come in and be glad.
The Little Plant and the Worm
Jonah does not answer the question. Instead he stalks out of the city, builds himself a shelter on the east side (the Hebrew word is the one used for the booths of the Feast of Tabernacles), and sits down to see what would happen to the city (4:5), still hoping, it seems, that the forty days might yet run out and the fire might fall after all. And there, while the prophet sulks in the heat, the LORD begins to teach him with the patience of a parent. The LORD God appointed a little plant and caused it to grow up over Jonah to be a shade over his head to rescue him from his misery. Now Jonah was very delighted about the little plant (4:6). A broad-leafed plant (older English versions call it a “gourd”) springs up overnight to shade him, and the man who a moment ago wanted to die is suddenly, childishly delighted over a little shade. His moods swing on his own comfort. He felt nothing for a city of thousands; he is overjoyed at a plant.
Then God appoints two more things, as deliberately as He appointed the fish and the plant; the same Hebrew verb stands behind all four, though the NET varies its English. So God sent a worm at dawn the next day, and it attacked the little plant so that it dried up (4:7); and then a hot east wind and a beating sun, until Jonah grows faint and, for the third time in the book, begs to die. The God who appointed a great fish to save him now appoints a small worm to instruct him. And the lesson is built entirely on Jonah’s own reaction. The prophet who could watch a hundred and twenty thousand people go to destruction without a tear is undone, reduced to wishing himself dead, by the loss of a plant that gave him shade. His pity is real, but it is pity for his own comfort, pity that extends exactly as far as his own skin and no further. The withered plant has exposed the smallness of his heart against the vastness of God’s.
We should notice, too, how the LORD deals with His furious prophet, for it tells us much about how He deals with us. He does not strike Jonah down for his insolence, though Jonah three times wishes himself dead and twice all but accuses God of wrongdoing. Instead, the LORD becomes a patient teacher, arranging a living parable out of a plant, a worm, and a wind, and reasoning with His angry servant through a question repeated twice over: Are you really so very angry? The God who could have answered Jonah with a thunderbolt answers him instead with a plant and a conversation. This is the long-suffering of God toward the hardness of His own people: the same patience that sent calamity after calamity in Amos, hoping Israel would return; the same patience that bears with our resentments and our sulking, and teaches us gently, by the small losses of our own comfort, what His heart for the lost is like. He would far rather instruct an angry man than destroy him.
Should I Not Be Concerned About Nineveh?
And so the LORD springs the lesson the whole ordeal was for. Are you really so very angry about the little plant? And Jonah, defiant to the last, snaps back: I am as angry as I could possibly be! (4:9). Then comes the final word of the book, the question that has been waiting since the first verse, and it is left hanging in the air unanswered. You were upset about this little plant, something for which you did not work, nor did you do anything to make it grow. It grew up overnight and died the next day. Should I not be more concerned about Nineveh, this enormous city? There are more than 120,000 people in it who do not know right from wrong, as well as many animals (4:10–11).
Weigh the argument, for it is the heart of God laid bare. The same Hebrew verb stands in both halves of it: Jonah “had pity” on the plant (the NET’s you were upset about), and should not God “have pity on,” that is, spare, Nineveh (the NET’s be … concerned about)? Jonah pitied a plant he did not make, did not grow, did not earn, a weed that lived one night and died the next. If Jonah’s small heart could break over a withered vine, how much more shall the great heart of God be moved over a city of a hundred and twenty thousand living souls? People … who do not know right from wrong renders a Hebrew phrase that says literally that they do not know their right hand from their left. Many take it to mean the little children, the innocents who could not yet tell good from evil; others hear in it the moral helplessness of the whole city. Either way, a city full of the helpless. And then, tenderly, almost with a smile: as well as many animals. The God who spared Nineveh thought even of the animals. Here is the pity of God in its full breadth: He grieves over the lost, He has compassion on the helpless and the ignorant, He cares even for the beasts of a pagan city. The book of the angry prophet ends with the gentlest question in the Bible, and it is aimed straight at the reader. Jonah is not told whether he repented. We are left with the question hanging (should I not be concerned?) because the question is really being asked of us. Will we rejoice in the mercy of God to those we would rather see judged, or sit in our booth outside the city and sulk?
A Greater than Jonah
The Lord Jesus took up this little book and set Himself beside its reluctant prophet, and the comparison is the key to the whole. The people of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, because they repented when Jonah preached to them—and now, something greater than Jonah is here! (Matthew 12:41). The NET’s something greater follows the Greek, which is neuter: what stands before that generation is more than a greater preacher; it is the kingdom of God come near in the person of Jesus Himself. A pagan city repented at five grudging words from a prophet who wanted it destroyed; how much more, the Lord Jesus says, should the generation standing before Him repent, for here is not a reluctant Jonah but the willing Savior, not a doom-preacher hoping for fire but the very Mercy of God in person, come to seek and save the lost. If Nineveh turned at so little, what excuse will there be for those who will not turn at so great a One?
There is a reason Jonah has always been read as the great missionary book of the Old Testament. Long before the risen Lord Jesus sent His apostles to disciple all nations, the LORD was already reaching past the borders of Israel to a Gentile city, and doing it through a reluctant servant who wanted no part in it. The heart of God for the nations did not begin at Pentecost; it runs through the whole of Scripture, and here it stands out in the open. And the book searches every believer who has ever preferred to keep the gospel among people like himself. The mercy of God is not our private possession to guard; it is a flood meant to go out to every Nineveh on earth, including the ones we would rather see judged. Jonah teaches us that God will have His mercy reach the nations, and that He would far rather we carried it gladly than be dragged, like Jonah, kicking against the breadth of the very grace by which we ourselves were saved.
But the contrast runs deeper than greater preaching, and it is here that the gospel of Jonah finally breaks open. Jonah sat down on the east of the city and waited, hoping to watch it burn; the Lord Jesus came down to the city of men and wept over the one that would not be saved: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem … How often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you would have none of it! (Matthew 23:37). Jonah wanted his enemies dead and was angry that they lived; the Lord Jesus, with His enemies driving the nails, prayed Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing (Luke 23:34). Jonah fled the cost of mercy to the ends of the earth; the Lord Jesus embraced the full cost of mercy on a cross, and was Himself three days in the heart of the earth so that the mercy Jonah begrudged could flow freely to every Nineveh on the face of the world. Jonah is the prophet who could not bear that God would spare his enemies. The Lord Jesus is the Savior who died to spare them. That is what something greater than Jonah means: a mercy so much wider, so much costlier, so much more willing, that the runaway prophet in his booth becomes, by sheer contrast, the dark backdrop against which the love of God shines out in full.
And there is a sober warning folded into the comparison, which we dare not soften. The Lord Jesus said the people of Nineveh would stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it. A pagan city that repented at the barest preaching will stand up at the last day to testify against those who heard the fullest preaching, who heard the very voice of the Son of God, saw His works, and would not turn. The more light a soul is given, the more it must answer for. It is a fearful thing to have heard more than Nineveh heard and repented less. But the warning is the back of the same hand that holds out the comfort: the One whose preaching we have heard is greater than Jonah precisely because He is not only the herald of mercy but its price, the Savior who purchased the very repentance He calls for. To hear Him and turn is to be safer than Nineveh ever was; to hear Him and refuse is to be left without the excuse even Nineveh could not have claimed.
Gathering the Threads
Jonah is the strangest of the Twelve, the only prophet whose book is mostly about his own hard heart, and its lesson is aimed not at Nineveh but at us. The word came to the runaway a second time (the mercy of the God who does not scrap His failed servants), and Jonah, going at last, preached five bleak words and watched, to his fury, as a whole pagan city repented from the king to the cattle. The power was never in the reluctant prophet; it was in the word, which carries the whole strength of God even on the lips of a man who hopes it will fail. And when the mercy he dreaded reached his enemies, Jonah finally confessed why he had run: he had always known the LORD was gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in mercy (the very creed of the gospel), and he hated it, because it was true for Nineveh too. He is the elder brother of the Twelve, holding the doctrine of grace flawlessly and despising it the moment it is shown to someone he would rather see judged. We dare not read Jonah at arm’s length, as though his hardness were a curiosity belonging to someone safely far from us; the book was written to put a mirror into our hands, and the face that looks back is too often our own: orthodox in its creed, narrow in its love, and quick to ration the very grace by which it was saved.
And the book ends, deliberately, on a question. Jonah pitied a plant he did not make; should not God pity a city of a hundred and twenty thousand souls, and even the animals? The God of the Twelve grieves over the lost, has compassion on the ignorant and the helpless, and will not be confined to the borders of one favored people. That pity has a face, and it is the face of the One greater than Jonah: the willing Savior who did not sit outside the city hoping it would burn, but came down into it to weep over it and to die for it, praying forgiveness for the very enemies who killed Him. Jonah went down into the deep for his own sin and grudged the mercy that followed; the Lord Jesus went down into death of His own accord so that the mercy might reach the whole world. The runaway prophet leaves us with God’s unanswered question, and the gospel answers it on a cross: yes, He will spare. He has spared. Should I not be even more concerned about Nineveh? He gave His Son to answer exactly that. The angry prophet sat in his booth under a withered plant and would not answer the question; but the empty tomb has answered it for him, and for us, in a mercy wide enough for Nineveh and for Israel and for every sulking elder brother who will at last lay down his anger and come in to the feast. The God who spared the great city spares great sinners still.
For Discussion
These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.
The LORD’s message came to Jonah a second time (3:1). What does it mean that God recommissions the very prophet who had run from Him? How is the God of the second word a comfort to every believer who has failed Him, and how is Peter’s restoration (John 21) the same grace?
Nineveh repented at five grudging words (in the Hebrew) from a prophet who half-hoped to fail (3:4–5). What does this teach about where the power of preaching lies? How does the confessional truth (AC VIII), that the word and sacraments are efficacious because they are God’s, not because of the minister, free us both to speak and from taking the credit?
Jonah fled because he knew God was gracious and compassionate (4:2), citing as a grievance the very creed Joel cited as the ground of hope (Joel 2:13). How can a person hold the doctrine of grace flawlessly and yet despise it? When grace is shown to someone we resent, what does our reaction reveal about us?
The prophet who felt nothing for a doomed city grieved over a withered plant (4:6–9). How does the little plant expose the difference between pity for our own comfort and the pity of God for the lost? Where is our compassion narrowed to the circle of our own skin?
The book ends on God’s unanswered question, Should I not be even more concerned about Nineveh? (4:11), and we are never told whether Jonah repented. Why does the writer leave it hanging? In what sense is the question really being asked of the reader?
The Lord Jesus is something greater than Jonah (Matthew 12:41): He wept over the city Jonah wished to see burn, and prayed forgiveness for the enemies Jonah wanted destroyed. How does setting the reluctant prophet beside the willing Savior reveal the breadth and the cost of God’s mercy? How does the cross answer the book’s closing question?
Looking Ahead
From the reluctant prophet sent to a Gentile city we turn to a prophet of Judah whose little book holds one of the brightest stars in all the Old Testament. In the next session we open Micah: a contemporary of Isaiah, a country prophet who thundered against the corruption of Jerusalem’s leaders and yet saw, across the centuries, the very town where the Savior would be born. We will hear his indictment of a people whose rulers built Zion with blood, and his vision of the mountain of the LORD’s house exalted above the hills, with the nations streaming up to it; and we will come at last to the words the chief priests would quote to Herod when the wise men asked where the King of the Jews should be born: As for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, seemingly insignificant among the clans of Judah—from you a king will emerge who will rule over Israel on my behalf, one whose origins are in the distant past (5:2). The little town, the Ruler whose origins are in the distant past, the Shepherd who would feed His flock in the strength of the LORD.
Before the next session, read Micah 1–5: the indictment of Samaria and Jerusalem, the vision of the mountain of the LORD’s house and the nations flowing to it, and the great promise of the Ruler to come out of Bethlehem. Then read Matthew 2:1–6, where the prophecy is quoted to point the wise men to the newborn King. Ask what it means that the One whose origins reach back to days of old, the eternal Son, should come forth from so small a town, and what kind of King this Shepherd will be.
Closing Prayer
Gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in mercy, we confess that we are far more like Jonah than we wish to admit. We have run from Your call and gone our own way; we have held the doctrine of Your grace with our lips and resented it in our hearts the moment it reached someone we would rather see judged; we have grieved over our own small comforts while feeling nothing for the multitudes who do not know their right hand from their left. Forgive us our narrow hearts, and the secret anger we carry at the breadth of Your mercy.
We thank You that You are the God of the second word, who did not cast off Your runaway prophet but called him again, and who calls us again no matter how far we have fled. And we bless You for the One greater than Jonah, our Lord Jesus, who did not sit outside the city hoping it would burn, but came down into it to weep over it and to die for it, praying forgiveness even for the enemies who nailed Him to the tree. Answer Your own ancient question in us: teach us to rejoice that You spare Nineveh, to long for the salvation even of those we have counted our enemies, and to carry Your word, however weak we feel, trusting that its power is Yours and not ours. Make our hearts as wide as Your mercy; through the same Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.