1. The Jonah of the last chapter becomes again the Jonah of the earlier portion of the book. The prophet who fled to Tarshish had been temporarily recalled to a better mind by God's great mercy to him. He had asked the people of Nineveh to choose between repentance and destruction. And the people of Nineveh had chosen in such a way as to please God, but not in such a way as to please Jonah.
The psychology of Jonah at this point is exceedingly interesting. There was a little, perhaps, of the pique of the prophet at seeing his prophecies unfulfilled. He had been denouncing the Ninevites with all his might; he had got them to listen to him; he had enjoyed the dread which his awful denunciations excited; he had looked forward to his personal triumph when the proud city sank into ruin; now all that he had predicted was to be falsified, and he would probably be jeered at by those in Nineveh, and certainly such there were who had laughed all along at his predictions as the ravings of a madman. It was a sorry plight for a prophet, and Jonah smarted under the humiliation. “It displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.” Part of his anger was due to his Hebrew patriotism. He had delivered his message, but with no kindness in his heart towards the Ninevites. It would have been joy to Jonah to see Jehovah avenging Himself on His adversaries, inflicting upon them a punishment so terrible, so complete, that it should make all the other nations pallid with fear, and be a salutary warning to every hostile people never more to sully the soil of Jehovah's land with impious, invading feet. And now Jehovah Himself deprives him of this fierce patriotic satisfaction, and Jehovah Himself rebukes him with the question: “Doest thou well to be angry?”
Jonah was thinking of himself; God was thinking of Nineveh. Jonah was thinking of his prophetic reputation, his official dignity; God was thinking, in His magnanimity, how He might be gracious yet to Nineveh, to her people, to her children, and even to her cattle! Jonah was thinking of the greatly impressive demonstration of his own eminence as a prophet. But in the Divine Nature there is no pride of office to be considered; God-as we read of our Lord Christ-“counts it no prize to be God.”
A minister's humility is the crown and jewel of his ministry. It is a great deal easier to grow proud of the thoroughness and faithfulness with which you hold a doctrine than of the completeness with which you understand Christ. The doctrine you may squeeze so small that you can hold it all in your hand and feel that you have comprehended it. The Divine Saviour, we know, however we may talk competently of Him, is past our comprehension, wiser, dearer, truer than we have begun to know. Your pride in doctrine requires a doctor wiser and more orthodox than you to shake it. Your pride in Christ any poor saint nearer to Him than you have ever dreamed of being, or some wretched beggar bringing Him in some new shape of appealing misery to your weak love, may overturn in a moment. “The man is thrice welcome to whom my Lord has reprimanded me,” said Mohammed one day most nobly, but he said it not of a theologian who had beaten him in argument, but of a blind wretch whose supplication he had rejected, and thereby learned how far he still was from God. If you want to protect your religious pride, make your religion consist in knowing truth. If you want to be humble in your religion, make your religion begin and end in knowing Christ.1 [Note: Phillips Brooks, Essays and Addresses, 58.]
2. There, on the hill-slope, sat Jonah watching the busy hive of humanity swarming at his feet. His thunder-cry of warning had made a fearful flutter, had brought the city to repentance, and had extorted from them all, from king to beggar, the cry of prayer. To screen himself from the fierce rays of the burning sun, Jonah reared a rude booth, or shanty, from such scanty materials as were within his reach. There he sat, only thinly screened from the scorching rays, and with a hotter fire of jealousy and anger burning at his heart. What the prophet had foreboded now rose in all its reality before his eyes. While, as a whole, the people of Israel despised the word of God, the heathen had willingly received it; while the judgments of God were falling ever more fearfully on the chosen people, the sun of His grace seemed to be shining now with all its brightness and blessing upon a heathen people.
Thus it was not bloodthirstiness, or a cruel and callous heart, that made Jonah wish for the destruction of Nineveh; it was the conviction that, if the heathen city were spared, his own people would be crushed. This thought pierced his heart with an infinite sorrow. In his vexation and bitterness he felt, like Elijah, that life was no longer worth living.
“More than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left,” the Prophet had desired to see sacrificed to his preconceived notion of the necessities of a logical theory, or to the destruction of his country's enemies. Better (so it has often been said by Jonah's successors) to die than that unbaptized infants should be saved-than that the reprobate should repent-than that God's threatenings should ever be revoked-than that the solemnity of life should be disturbed by the restoration of the thousands who have had no opportunity of knowing the Divine will-than that God should at last “be all in all.” He sat under the shadow of his booth, still hoping, believing for the worst, “till he might see what would become of the city.”
Most just was the application of this passage by an apostolic pastor [Fletcher of Madeley] to the harsh Calvinists of the eighteenth century: “Get ye from under your parched gourd of ‘reprobation'; let not your eye be evil because God is good; nor fret, like Jonah, because the Father of mercies extends His compassion even to all the humbled heathen of the great city of Nineveh.” And not to Calvinists only, but to all who would sacrifice the cause of humanity to some professional or theological difficulty, is the startling truth addressed, “Doest thou well to be angry? God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.” The foredoomed destruction of the wicked, the logical consistency of the prophet's teaching, must go for nothing before the justice and “the great kindness” of God-before the claims even of the unconscious heathen children, of the repentant heathen king.1 [Note: A. P. Stanley, History of the Jewish Church, ii. 304.]
3. Jonah's inhumanity is straightway rebuked. The style of the rebuke is as pictorial and ideal as the previous scenes of the story. A broad-leaved gourd grows up in a night, and he rejoices in its shelter from the sun. But God sends a worm which gnaws the gourd-stem. The next day it is withered, and Jonah is scorched by the noonday blaze till he faints and begs for death. But the Divine patience pities even this hard and intractable pupil, and reprimands him only with the still small voice of gentle remonstrance: “Thou hast had pity on the gourd, and should not I have pity on Nineveh, that great city,” its guiltless children, its dumb cattle?
One of Principal Rainy's daughters writes: “To us he was just ‘Father.' I suppose most children begin by thinking their father the most wise and strong and tender of beings, and with us that went on to the very end, with an always increasing sense of how unusual such wisdom and strength and tenderness were. For myself, it is to him I owe all my earliest ideas of what the Fatherhood of God might mean. They all came translated to me so inevitably, so securely, through that dear and familiar medium that never once failed me all my life-never once came short of my hopes or my needs. And it was so with us all. I remember how a sister once wrote to me, ‘I know you read the thirteenth verse of the 103rd Psalm as I do-Like as my Father pitieth his children'-and that means just everything.”2 [Note: P. Carnegie Simpson, The Life of Principal Rainy, ii. 93.]
4. What followed-what effect the Divine rebuke had upon the prophet, what became of him-is all unsaid. The effect is that of a striking tableau on which the curtain drops. The prophet appears, in all his discontent at the wideness of God's mercy in admitting the heathen to His grace, just long enough for us to hear the Divine voice correcting his selfish thoughtlessness, and then vanishes utterly. What a world of meaning reverberates in those parting words of the Spirit of goodness-“and also much cattle”-in which the wants of the whole brute creation are shown dwelling in the compassionate remembrance of their Maker, equally with the wants of His elect servants! What emphasis is given to this protest of mercy against inhumanity by the sudden close while these words of pity are left ringing in our ears! So dramatic an effect cannot have been accidental. The book ends because its object is accomplished, and its lesson taught.
At night we returned to the Taj, which we saw by splendid moonlight, in company with the Maharajah of Bhurtpur, who tells me that he still keeps up the preserve mentioned in a passage of my Notes of an Indian Journey:
“Later in the day, I asked another person about the woodland in which the Pilu was growing. ‘It is,' said he, ‘a preserve of the Maharajah's.' ‘Does he shoot?' I asked. ‘No,' was the reply; ‘he thinks it wrong to take life, and never shoots. When he sees cattle overworked on the road, he buys them and puts them in there to live happily ever afterwards,' holding, apparently, to the good maxim of Jehangeer, ‘that a monarch should care even for the beasts of the field, and that the very birds of heaven should receive their due at the foot of the throne.' ”1 [Note: Sir M. E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1881-1886, ii. 102.]
5. Jonah was the typical bigot of all ages. He believed the Jewish Church was the only Church, and that there was no salvation outside it for any Gentile. Yet he was a very good man. Read his prayer in the third chapter; and there is no higher test of genuine piety and devoutness than prayer. No ungodly man could have composed a prayer like that. He was a true prophet, and was recognized as such by Christ Himself. So we ought to be taught that deep personal piety often exists with extreme and most anti-Christian bigotry.
John Calvin is certainly correct when he says that Jonah had far more respect to his own reputation as a prophet of the Divine judgment to Nineveh than he had either to the good of Nineveh or to the glory of God. But Jonah was not a false prophet. He was a good man, who would, however, limit God's love and mercy to his own nation. And God sought to enlarge his vision, and moved his sympathy by wounding him in his most vulnerable point, his self-love. The prophet is taught to look beyond the foreign policy of his petty nation; he is no longer the mouthpiece of the Northern or the Southern tribes, but the envoy of Jehovah, whose purpose fulfils itself in many peoples and whose love embraces all mankind. Jewish exclusiveness and bigotry are rebuked; mutual toleration and respect are taught by this story.
At the funeral service of the Archbishop, the Primate (Dr. Alexander) who gave the address, laid stress upon the entire absence of bigotry that marked the late Prelate. “He united,” said the Primate, “intense religious conviction with a beautiful, a wonderful toleration. It is easy to be tolerant when we are latitudinarian; easy to make a present of that which we do not value. Toleration is a shabby gift when it costs us nothing. But for a man who loves his principles passionately to pause and try to understand his opponent thoroughly, to shield his adversary from the immoderate zeal of his own partisans-still more, to think over his opponent's ideas until he finds that there is an aspect of them under which they appear greatly better than at first they seemed, and thus to become able to afford them hospitality in his own soul-this is the history of good men who can say, ‘Grace be with all them who love our Lord Jesus in sincerity.' ”1 [Note: F. D. How, Archbishop Plunket: A Memoir, 380.]
