Little Plant

Then the Lord said, "You had compassion on the plant for which you did not work, and which you did not cause to grow, which came overnight and perished overnight. And should I not have compassion on Nineveh, the great city in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know the difference between their right and left hand, as well as many animals?" Jonah 4:10,11 (NASB)

We often think of Jonah as the story of a runaway prophet and how God used a big fish to get him back on track. But that's just the main story line. There is a subplot to this story that is just as important and it reveals to us a lot about the compassion of God.

Jonah had nothing but contempt for what God calls “that great city” of Nineveh. You cannot blame him though. For Jonah after all, is an Israelite, a prophet from North. And Nineveh was the capital city of the mighty Assyrian empire – Israel’s greatest enemy. To preach a message of repentance to the notoriously cruel Assyrians would be like helping Israel’s enemies. The reason he didn't want to go preach there was that he was afraid the wicked people of Nineveh might actually listen to him, repent, and God would spare them. That's the last thing he wanted to have happen. He really wanted God to destroy them for their wickedness. He felt so righteous about this that he went off and pouted after preaching to them, sitting on a hill overlooking the city waiting for God's wrath that never came.

While he sat there in the hot sun getting madder by the minute, God caused a vine to grow up and give shade to him, but no sooner had He done this than the plant withered and died leaving Jonah once again exposed to the hot sun. This angered Jonah all the more, and that was when God brought to his attention the 120,000 people and many cattle in the city of Nineveh who were worth a lot more than Jonah's silly little plant, and his poor self exposed to the hot sun. “Should I not be concerned about that great city?”

Do we have this Jonah-like attitude of contempt for people we do not like? For people whom we feel deserve the judgment they will get for their sins? This is a dangerous attitude to have, because just like everyone else, we are also not righteous enough, we also deserve the judgment of God. Our only hope is the grace of God. That was Nineveh's hope, too. That is also the hope of everyone else. Do we have a hard time seeing it applied to someone we despise? Remember the great compassion and mercy of God to a wicked city. May we also learn to have just a fraction of that compassion and share God’s love to anyone and everyone alike.