Today is Ash Wednesday and the reading from the Old Testament for Morning Prayer is from The Book of Jonah. Jonah has succumbed and acceded to the Lord’s request to proclaim the Lord’s word concerning the destruction that lies ahead for the city of Nin’eveh. The Nin’evites heard the word given by Jonah and repented and God did not destroy the city.

One might think that Jonah would have been pleased with the work that God and he had done, but no. It is written that Jonah is exceedingly displeased and he was angry, so angry that he wanted to die. This comedic story has a great deal of psychology exposed in it and a lot of truth as most good comedy does.

Perhaps Jonah didn’t think the Nin’evites were worth saving? Perhaps Jonah thought he knew who was in and who was out of God’s reach based on his own limited and self-serving understanding of God? How this book rings so true of our own current society. Each of us seems to know who deserves God’s favor and who doesn’t and for some, they twist and pervert the spiritual stories of our ancestors to make them fit their own selfish myopic view.

My take on this story and others in our canon is that good and bad things happen to God’s children. It is in our constantly growing relationship with God that we learn to celebrate with God, the good things, the life giving things that come from God. It is in our constantly growing relationship with God that we learn to place our trust in God, that her love will be with us to the end forever, and that’s a long long time. If that makes us angry, then there’s a story to share, it involves a rather large fish.