Author Debie Thomas considers how Jonah’s story challenges our notions of God’s mercy:
Following his preposterous marine adventure, Jonah grudgingly obeys God’s instructions and warns the people of Nineveh that their wickedness is about to be punished. But then the impossible happens.
The Ninevites listen to Jonah’s warning, take it seriously, and repent. And God, seeing their penitence, changes God’s mind and shows them mercy. In other words, Jonah preaches a sermon, and his congregation responds to it!… You’d think that Jonah would be thrilled. But no. He’s furious, and he tells God so.
After hearing Jonah’s complaints, God asks, “What right do you have to get angry?” (Jonah 4:9). Thomas continues:
To Jonah, then, God’s question is a ridiculous one. Of course he has a right to be angry. Isn’t it right to be angry that God’s mercy extends to killers? Isn’t it right to be angry when people who break the rules don’t get the comeuppance they deserve? Isn’t it right to be angry about a grace so reckless and wasteful that it challenges our most cherished assumptions about justice?
God doesn’t scold Jonah for his anger. Instead, God engages it with compassion. God even goads it in a playful attempt to broaden Jonah’s horizons. God wants the grumpy preacher to see the Ninevites as God sees them. For while the Assyrians are everything Jonah believes them to be—violent, depraved, and wicked—they are also more…. They’re human beings made in God’s image, but they’re lost and broken. What they deserve is neither here nor there. What they need is compassion….
God challenges Jonah to consider the hard truth that even his worst enemies are God’s beloved children…. Should God not care for God’s own? Is it right for Jonah to be angry? The story wisely ends with these questions unanswered. We’re left with Jonah still sulking….
All too often, we are also left to wrestle with the scandalous goodness of God, a goodness that calls us to become instruments of grace even to those who offend us most deeply. God’s goodness gently probes beneath our pieties and asks why we often prefer vindication to rehabilitation—prison cells and death sentences to hospitality and compassion. It exposes our smallness and stinginess, our reluctance to embrace the radical kinship God calls us to embrace. Why do we grab at the second chances God gives us, even as we deny those second chances to others? God’s goodness dares us to do the braver and riskier thing: to hold out for the hearts of those who belong to God, whether we like them or not.
Do we have a right to be angry? God knows that the only way to answer this question, and so many others like it, is to wrestle it to the ground. God meets us in the ring, openhanded, willing, forbearing. God’s hand rests on us in love, even as we prepare to attack. God’s patient love enfolds us, absorbing our anger into God’s all-sufficient self.
| Jesus Didn’t Promise You a Mansion. from Skye Jethani, With God Daily |
 In his book, The King Jesus Gospel, New Testament scholar Scot McKnight makes a simple but stunning observation. The Book of Acts, in which Jesus’ Apostles travel broadly proclaiming his gospel, contains no mention of heaven. Not one of the seven gospel sermons in Acts speaks of salvation as entering heaven after death. (Hell is also never mentioned in Acts, in case you were wondering.) This raises an important question—If going to heaven was not part of the gospel Jesus and his Apostles proclaimed, why is it so central to the one we often hear? It’s hard to imagine a gospel sermon today that doesn’t emphasize the centrality of one’s postmortem residence. Since at least the Middle Ages, much of Christianity has been obsessed with avoiding hell’s eternal slum and entering the gated community of heaven.This ironically unbiblical fixation on heaven is why we see endless religious movies about the coming apocalypse, and why travel guides written by those who claim to have returned from heaven become best-sellers. American pop Christianity is enamored by heaven’s golden streets, pearly gates, or other opulent architecture while dismissing their scriptural symbolism to create a virtual map of the afterlife. We also do this with Jesus’ words in John 14:2-3. There he speaks of his Father’s house having many rooms, and that he is going to prepare a place for his followers. The old King James Version, which poorly translated “many rooms” as “many mansions,” has caused Christians for centuries to view the afterlife as merely an idealized version of earthly life, but without the nuisance of taxes, health care, or non-Christian neighbors. We’ve even composed hymns about the mansions and palaces that await us as if the greatest reward of the gospel is an upgrade in real estate.Just like the golden streets or pearly gates spoken of in Revelation, in John 14, we tend to focus on the metaphor rather than its meaning. We want to know about literal mansions or rooms in heaven rather than what Jesus was communicating about himself and the Father. The word Jesus used is difficult to translate because it only occurs one other time in the New Testament, and it’s just a few verses later in John 14:23. There, Jesus speaks of the Father and the Son making their “home” or “dwelling” within those who keep his word. The word has nothing to do with mansions or rooms in a palace; it’s simply referring to where one resides. And the context eliminates the silly idea of Jesus literally building a house inside our bodies. Instead, he is speaking of the intimacy and unity that will exist between us and him.Remember, Jesus’ disciples were confused and distraught about his announcement that he was leaving them. His words about preparing a place for them in his Father’s house were meant to comfort their anxiety about losing Jesus. In other words, these verses aren’t about mansions, houses, or even heaven (which, like Acts, is never mentioned in Jesus’ farewell discourse). It’s about Jesus promising his frightened friends they would have a permanent place in God’s presence with him. John 14, like the gospel itself, isn’t ultimately about heaven; it’s about God and living in unity with him.Our common misreading of these verses exposes the pervasive misunderstanding of Jesus’ gospel altogether. The goal of his life, death, resurrection, and ascension was not to get us into heaven. His goal was to reconcile us to God. He is the goal. He is our reward. When we make heaven or avoiding hell the goal we’ve exchanged the true gospel of Jesus Christ for a false gospel of pop-Christianity. If we make a celestial mansion our true desire we’ve reduced Jesus into a broker who merely secures it for us. Such a gospel makes Jesus instrumental rather than ultimate in our hearts. As one theologian put it, “People who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there.” In John 14 Jesus isn’t promising his followers a mansion in heaven. He’s promising us something infinitely better—himself. |
