The story depicts a reluctant prophet who heads off in the wrong direction when God calls him. Finally forced by God to go to Nineveh, Jonah unenthusiastically fulfills his mission, then is angry that God reverses course (literally "repents") on plans to destroy the city. Jonah complains that this is why he ran from God's call. He feared God would show mercy all along.
The story concludes with a curious little aside that is both poignant and humorous. Jonah goes out and sits, perhaps hoping God will yet destroy Nineveh. As he waits, God has a plant spring up to provide Jonah shade. But then God sends a worm that bores into the plant which withers, taking its shade in the process. And Jonah is so upset he asks to die himself. This allows God to respond, "You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. 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?"
The story ends there with that "and also many animals?" Jonah is angry that God has not meted out justice to those Gentile Ninevites. Then he becomes so enraged over the loss of a bush that provides shade, he loses all composure. In a mixture of religious self-righteousness and egocentricism, Jonah cannot even see the thousands of men, women, and children he hopes God will kill, not to mention all those animals.
"And also many animals?" Interesting that their fate would weigh on God so. I know many Christians who seem to picture God as remarkably cavalier over the fates of those who don't get their religious beliefs correct. And who even counts animals?
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I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self-contained,
ReplyDeleteI stand and look at them and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition.
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins.
They do not make me sick discussiong their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.
-Walt Whitman
A righteous swipe at human vanity, this, but Walt Whitman may be sentimentalizing the animal kind. For lack of shared speech, humans are at liberty to project their sentiments, as well as their stupidity on their mute fellow creatures.
Our world has had plenty of righteous indignation at least since the time of Jonah. People now raise it to the level of performance art. Letting go the self-consciousness, the hate, fear, anger, and self-loathing is harder than you'd think. They're all cut from the same cloth.