The City and the Vine

Jonah 4



But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry.


He prayed to the LORD, "O LORD, is this not what I said when I was still at home?


That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, O LORD, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live."


But the LORD replied, "Have you any right to be angry?" Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city.


Then the LORD God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine.


But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered.


When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, "It would be better for me to die than to live."


But God said to Jonah, "Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?"


"I do," he said. "I am angry enough to die."


But the LORD said, "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?"

When I was a little boy and I used to watch westerns on TV, I asked my father how to tell who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. “It’s easy,” he told me, “The good guys wear white hats and the bad guys wear black hats. The Indians are always bad guys, unless it’s Tonto.”

That simplified things. When my friends and I played cowboys we always knew how to tell one another apart. If we wore a white hat, we were the good guy and were supposed to win, and if we wore a black hat, then we were supposed to lose. The Indians were also supposed to lose.

That simplified things Good guys, white had. Black hats and Indians, bad guys. We also knew how good guys were supposed to behave. The good guys didn’t smoke, cuss or drink. As for the bad guys—well, they were just there to be shot.

In the Sixties things changed. Movies became more naturalistic and nihilistic. Cowboys stopped wearing white hats and black hats. They stopped having heroes, too, in the old sense of the word. Sometimes the good guys did bad things. But mostly, like in those old Clint Eastwood westerns, you could still tell. Then they made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Bonnie and Clyde. In those movies, the heroes were the bad guys, and the bad guys were good guys.

Sometimes I long for those simple days of yesteryear when we could tell who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. But it was never that simple. There never were good guys and bad guys. There were just guys, frail and fallible, but sometimes capable of goodness.

A man came up to Jesus and started by saying “Good master—.” Jesus stopped him. “Why do you call me good? There is no one good but God.” Right there, Jesus had him. There are no good guys, except one. God is good, the rest of us are only sometimes good.

When Jonah was a little boy, what do you supposed he and his friends played? Israelites and Philistines? Judeans and Ninevites? Jonah grew up thinking that he had the world all figured out. The good guys were his people. The Ninevites were the bad guys. And we all know that the Ninevites were there only to get stabbed by the Israelites. It was a simple childhood world, good and bad were easy to discover.

But God messed it up for Jonah. God told Jonah to go and preach to the Ninevites. Preach to the Ninevites? Did the Lone Ranger ever preach to Butch Cavendish? Did Gary Cooper preach to Lee Van Cleef? No, they shot them or locked them in the calaboose. That’s what bad guys are for. Jonah was convinced that the Ninevites were not worth saving.

That was why he ran from God. But then God got him thrown overboard and swallowed by a fish. Then he had him vomited up on the shores of—of all places—Ninevah.

So (Jonah thought) God must have a different plan. He wanted him to go to Nineveh and tell them off. Yes, that had to be the plan. They deserved a good tongue-lashing.

But that was not God’s plan. God really did want to save the Ninevites.

Jonah built a booth on the east side of Nineveh, along the Tigris River. He built a shelter and settled back to watch when God rained down fire and brimstone on the Ninevites.

But God disappointed him again. The bad guys repented. The black hats put on white hats and became good guys. Jonah did not like this. If the Ninevites are the good guys, what does that make Jonah--The bad guy?

So now God had to correct the prophet. He did it a living parable.

God made a vine grow around Jonah. Now a vine doesn’t seem like much, but In Iraq the temperature there reaches over 120 degrees. A vine can make the difference between life and death.

Jonah took it as a sign. If God let a vine grow up to protect him, then he must be the good guy after all! After all, God would not work a miracle for the bad guy.

But the next night, a worm ate the vine. A Then a howling wind came. Most likely, this

was a desert sandstorm, where the wind can tear the paint off of a house. Imagine what it would do to a plant!

Jonah complained bitterly that it was better to live than to die. Three times Jonah mentioned dying. Did he have a death wish? He did not want to live in a world so unstable that Ninevites could become bad guys.

God asked him could he have compassion for a stupid plant, and let a city of a hundred and twenty thousand souls, not to mention their animals die. These people needed God’s love and mercy.

Life is not a television show. The sufferings we inflict on others are real. But God’s mercy is also real.

We talk a lot about evangelism in the church. We talk a lot about charity and mercy, too. But to tell the truth, I am not sure we want it. I am convinced that most of the time the church doesn’t care about the lost.

If we idealize the lost, we can get a certain sentimental feeling about them. But when we see the lost up close, they often repel us. They curse, drink, practice sexual immorality, use drugs, and act hateful. But so are we, if we are honest. We all act like the lost sometimes. It’s just that we don’t want to be around those who have no manners. We’ve been told since we were children to avoid such people. But God told us otherwise. He told us to go preach the gospel to everyone, not just the good people, but the bad ones as well. To God, there are not good guys or bad guys but people who need his grace.

So we are all Jonah’s in a way. We have been called to go to people we don’t like and tell them about Jesus. It’s the only way they will hear. God doesn’t want us to just go to good guys. He wants us to go to that neighbor we can’t stand, and that kid who is no good. He wants us to let them know that Jesus can change their lives, whether they wear a white hat or a black hat. Like Jonah, most of us would rather be swallowed by a whale than to do that.

But this is God’s hard mercy, that He loves the unlovable. He does not discriminate. He offers his Grace to any who will receive. He our only hope , and the hope of the whole world.

Did it work for Jonah? Well, he had to report what happened himself. There is also a legend about Jonah that suggests a possible outcome. In Mosul, Iraq, there is a mosque on the east side of town, just across the Tigris from the old sight of Nineveh. The Mosque is called the Nabi Yunis, the prophet Jonah. Beside it is a large building which is called Jonah’s tomb. Of course like it is? If Jonah were buried there, it would suggest that Jonah spent the rest of his life among the Ninevites. That would mean that Jonah finally did obey the call of God, and devoted himself to the people he hated the most. Jesus died to save the Ninevites. He also died to save Jonah, too.