“Because of this I fled,” Jonah tells God after the Ninevites are spared “I knew you have been merciful and compassionate, affected person, full of affection, and keen to not destroy,” he says, repeating Exodus 34, when God reveals God’s nature to Moses. However in quoting the textual content, Jonah misses one vital phrase: “faithfulness,” additionally translated as “fact.” As Bible scholar Marty Solomon notes, Jonah—a prophet—would’ve recognized the textual content by coronary heart, a element we should always hardly overlook. His omission isn’t a easy mistake; it’s deliberate.
By leaving out “fact,” Jonah appears to be making a daring declare: God is loving, sure, however not devoted to the covenant, nor to justice. You see, Jonah anticipated hearth, not forgiveness. In spite of everything, Scripture is stuffed with guarantees that God will defend the oppressed and confront the oppressor. So when Nineveh is spared, it is sensible that Jonah is devastated. Like a lot of his folks, he clung to the hope that God would ship them—not by providing mercy to their enemies, however by ridding the land of them. God’s compassion towards the empire in all probability felt, to Jonah, like betrayal.
So perhaps his anger isn’t petulance, however the lament of somebody who feels God didn’t comply with by way of. Jonah needed justice, not platitudes. And perhaps that’s not defiance in any respect. Possibly it’s what deep, anguished religion appears like.
Then comes God’s response—not as a rebuke nor a lecture, however as a query that stopped me chilly: “Is your anger factor?” (Jon. 4:4). It’s straightforward to listen to this as a scolding as a result of that’s typically how we’ve been conditioned to imagine God speaks. However I don’t assume God is threatened by our feelings. God doesn’t silence Jonah or inform him to relax. As an alternative, God meets him with gentleness, providing a query that invitations reflection, not disgrace. Possibly it isn’t dismissal, however a sacred pause—an invite to look at the fireplace burning inside.
And perhaps that query wasn’t only for Jonah. Possibly it’s meant for us, too. As a result of in a world so typically unmoved by injustice, anger could be holy. It could actually rise from fierce love, from the deep understanding that issues are usually not as they need to be.
In line with UNICEF, greater than 50,000 youngsters have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023. Final week, a mom was shot within the head whereas making an attempt to get meals for her infants. A disaster of hunger is unfolding earlier than our eyes—and I’m offended. I’m offended on the injustice, the greed, the deliberate obstruction of assist. I’m grieving with moms who cradle the our bodies of their youngsters, pores and skin pulled tight over bone. I can’t cease wrestling with the insufferable dissonance of all of it: whereas some youngsters dwell in terror, mine sleep safely, bellies full. It’s not that I want much less for my very own—however how I lengthy for that to be true for each little one. It doesn’t make sense. Possibly it by no means will. Grief doesn’t owe us explanations. And typically, neither does our anger.
In an interview with Krista Tippett, civil rights icon Ruby Gross sales places it this manner: “Love will not be antithetical to being outraged.” She names two sorts of anger—redemptive and nonredemptive. Redemptive anger builds, transforms, upholds dignity. Nonredemptive anger tears down and mirrors the very violence it resists. The anger of white supremacy, for instance, is nonredemptive. However the anger that rises in protection of the weak? That could be a holy flame. And like all hearth, it have to be tended with care.
Jonah sits outdoors town, fuming not simply at God’s mercy, however at a protracted and bloody historical past. His anger wasn’t baseless, it was born of grief. And grief, honored rightly, can provide rise to a righteous anger that claims: this isn’t okay. We’d like that sort of anger—the sort that fuels truth-telling, that turns over tables, that calls empire to account.
