He Was Angrier About the Plant

Most people who know the story of Jonah stop at the fish.

That is a shame, because the fish is chapter two and the book has four chapters, and the last one is where the whole thing is actually pointed. Jonah 4:5-11 is the end of it, and it does not end the way a children's story ends. It ends with a man sitting on a hill in a temper, and God asking him a question, and the book closing before he answers.

Here is where we come in. Nineveh has repented. The whole city, from the king down. The preaching worked, which is the outcome every preacher in history has wanted and almost none have got, and Jonah's response to it in verse one of the chapter is that it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was very angry.

So he walks out east of the city, builds himself a little shelter, sits down in the shade of it, and waits to see what will happen to the town. That is Jonah 4:5. He is not praying for them. He has taken a seat with a view, in case God changes His mind and does it after all.

Then God does something so gentle it is almost funny.

And the LORD God prepared a gourd, and made it to come up over Jonah, that it might be a shadow over his head, to deliver him from his grief. So Jonah was exceeding glad of the gourd.Jonah 4:6, King James Version

A plant grows up over him and gives him shade, and the text says he was exceeding glad. This is the only time in the entire book that Jonah is happy. Not when the sea calmed. Not when he was spat out alive. Not when a hundred and twenty thousand people turned to God. A vine.

The next morning God sends a worm, and the plant dies, and the sun comes up hot with an east wind behind it, and Jonah asks to die for the second time in one chapter.

The question He leaves hanging

God asks him twice whether he does well to be angry. The second time, Jonah answers, and the answer is the most honest line in the book: I do well to be angry, even unto death.

He means it. He has thought about it. This is not a flash of temper, it is a settled position, and I have met that position in the mirror and so, I suspect, have you.

Then comes the last word in the book, and God does not argue with him. He does arithmetic.

Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?Jonah 4:10-11, King James Version

You did not plant it. You did not grow it. It lasted one night. And you cared about it more than you cared about a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left.

Notice what God is doing here. He is not telling Jonah that his feelings are wrong. He is showing him where his feelings actually went, which is a completely different thing and considerably harder to argue with.

You are not required to keep the seat you built on that hill. Jonah 4:5 says he made himself a booth and sat under it, and the same Spirit who has been reading that chapter over stubborn people for twenty five centuries is reading it over the chair you sit in on a Tuesday night.

Let me say what I think the hill is, in a life like yours and mine.

The hill is the place a person sets up to watch something go badly for somebody. It has a good view. It is comfortable, because you built it yourself out of things that are true: what they did, what they never said, what it cost. Everything in the shelter is genuine material. That is what makes it so hard to leave. Nobody sits on that hill on a lie.

And the tell is not that you talk about it. The tell is the size of the reaction to small things. Jonah watched a whole city get spared without blinking and then came apart over a vine. When a person's bitterness has become the load-bearing wall, the small losses hit like large ones, because the small ones are the only things left that are allowed to move.

You are allowed to see the size of that reaction without it turning into a fresh charge against you. Jonah 4:9 has God asking the question a second time rather than pronouncing sentence once, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps an honest look at your own heart from becoming another case, this time with you in the dock.

You have been carrying a case that has quietly started carrying you, and Jonah 4 sets the two side by side so nobody can miss which is which. The written account puts the gourd and the city in one sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns that comparison from a story about a prophet into a mirror in a kitchen.

Now the mercy in it, because there is enormous mercy here and it is easy to miss under the rebuke.

God does not remove Jonah. He does not fire him, He does not replace him, and He does not close the book by telling him he has forfeited anything. The last thing that happens in the whole book of Jonah is that God explains Himself to a man who is sulking. He gives him the reason. He walks the arithmetic through with him like you would with someone you actually wanted to keep.

You are being reasoned with rather than dismissed, and that is what the last verse of Jonah is, in plain words. Jonah 4:11 is a question and not a sentence handed down, and the same Spirit who left it open is the one holding your Tuesday open too.

And the book ends. No verse twelve. We never find out whether Jonah came down off the hill.

I do not think that is a gap in the manuscript. I think the question is left hanging because the last person it is asked of is the person reading it.