Musings on the Daily Lectionary

I've always liked the book of Jonah, the second half of which is today's Old Testament reading. The ending of it strikes me as funny, when God chastises Jonah's temper tantrum over the mercy shown Nineveh. "And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?" And also many animals? What an odd ending. But given that Nineveh's king made the animals fast along with the people, I suppose that God has heard their cries as well.

More interesting to me is what happens when Jonah has done his prophetic duty, in admittedly minimalist fashion. The king orders all people and animals to fast and put on sackcloth, saying, "Who knows? God may relent and change his mind; he may turn from his fierce anger, so that we do not perish." And God does turn from that anger. "When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it."

God here acts in ways I don't often attribute to God. God changes God's own mind. Actually, God "repents." I did a study on Jonah not too long ago and I recall that the Ninevite king's hope that God would "change his mind" is literally a hope that God would "repent," and God does "repent" I suppose Bible translators just can't bring themselves to write "God repented."

Christian theology has usually pictured God as unchanging and immovable. But here the Bible explicitly speaks of God turning and repenting. Now I would be a little troubled by an image of a capricious and wavering God whose behavior might change on a whim. But don't relationships require at least a little dynamism, a little sense that each partner in the relationship responds and reacts to the other? And I wonder if my relationship with God wouldn't be more fulfilling, if I thought of that relationship in more dynamic terms.

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