Sermon Notes — June 7, 2026
“Jonah and the Whale”
June 7, 2026
Jonah 3:10-4:11 (CEB)
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
Thank you for indulging me in a little bit of fun this morning, and for helping me tell the story of Jonah. Today and for the next five weeks we’re going to revisit some of our favorite Old Testament stories, and maybe even read them in a new way.
Dig into the recesses of your memory with me. What was the lesson that we were supposed to learn from Jonah way back when we were in Sunday School? I remember learning the very important lesson that when God gives us something to do, we should do it, regardless of whether we want to or not.
And as children, the riveting part of the story was the part where Jonah gets thrown in the sea and swallowed by a whale, right? But it’s the rest of the story – which is honestly kind of a drag – it’s the rest of the story that gives us the deep insight into who God is.
Will you pray with me and for me?
Let’s talk about Nineveh. At the time of this story, Nineveh is the capital of Assyria, and it is a bad, bad place. In the Message translation of the Bible, the prophet Nahum calls Nineveh Murder City. And that’s where God sends Jonah.
Here’s what Jonah does instead
Jonah runs southwest to the port city of Joppa where he intends to sail 2,500 miles to Tarshish, in what is now Spain. Jonah was committed to not going to Nineveh.
Jonah gets on the boat and God hurls a wind into the Mediterranean Sea, and that storm is so bad that even these professional sailors are afraid that the ship will be torn to pieces. But Jonah is sleeping like a baby. Fast forward – the sailors wake Jonah up and ask him what to do to stop the storm and he says, “Pick me up and throw me overboard and the sea will calm down and everything will be fine.”
So they pick him and hurl him in and the storm stops. And when it stops, the story tells us, the sailors worship Jonah’s God. They make sacrifices and solemn promises to Jonah’s God who they’ve probably never heard of before that day.
Meanwhile, God has chosen a giant fish to swallow Jonah.
And when the whale finally spits up Jonah, God tries again. God says
Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and declare against it the proclamation that I am commanding you.
This time, Jonah does as he’s told. He goes to Nineveh and walks for one day, through the city, shouting,
Just forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown.
Jonah 3:3 tells us that it would take three days to walk across the city of Nineveh. Jonah has only walked for one and after that one day the Ninevites believe him. The citizens of Murder City, with dead bodies lining the streets, fast and put ashes on their heads. And when the king of Nineveh hears what’s happening he fasts and puts ashes on his head. Then he commands everyone in the city to fast from both food and water — even the animals. And he commands everyone to stop murdering and doing the other terrible things they were doing and pray to God.
And it works! God sees that they have ceased their evil ways and he stops planning to destroy them.
Let’s stand in Jonah’s sandals for a moment. By every metric imaginable Jonah is a raging success. Prophets rarely experience this kind of victory. Most Old Testament kings don’t pay a bit of attention to prophets; but in this case , not only does the king listen and not only does the most evil of all the evil cities stop being evil¸ but Jonah also manages to convert some pagan sailors along the way. How does he celebrate? He has a little temper tantrum.
In verse 4 God asks Jonah,
“Is your anger a good thing?”
The word we read as anger is literally burning. Jonah is so mad at God for showing compassion to Nineveh that he’s burning.
God literally asks him, “Does it feel good to you to burn with anger?”
Have you ever burned with anger? Sometimes it just feels good to be so full of righteous anger that we burn with rage.
That doesn’t make it. But sometimes it sure feels good.
Jonah doesn’t answer God’s question. Instead, he walks away and finds a nice place to sit so he can watch and see what happens to Nineveh. He still hopes that God will still destroy it. He makes himself a little hut with four walls and no roof, and then God makes a shrub grow up, right there in the middle of the day, to cover his head, and he is comfortable, and he is happy. The next morning God sends a worm to eat the shrub, and a dry east wind to go along with the beating sun.
Jonah asks to die.
And once again, God asks Jonah if his anger is good.
Yes, Jonah says, it feels good to be mad.
The story doesn’t resolve. God points out to Jonah that Jonah has no problem feeling bad about the shrub, so maybe Jonah should understand why God feels bad for the Ninevites who don’t know their right hand from their left.
And then the story is over. We know that Nineveh is destroyed, eventually, by the Babylonians. But what happens to Jonah is a mystery. The lessons from his story are not.
Jonah approaches his task in Nineveh with a lot of assumptions, beginning with the assumption that God would never forgive the Ninevites. The Ninevites were the enemies of God and God’s people. They are the nastiest and most evil people in the world. Surely God realizes that the world would just be a better place without them in it.
So we can only imagine how enthusiastic Jonah is when he walks through the city proclaiming
Just forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown.
Once he finally got to the city and started condemning it, he might have actually felt good about the whole situation. These terrible people were finally going to get what they deserved. They were going to be wiped off the face of the earth, and the earth would be a better place for it.
Which brings us to Jonah’s second assumption.
That he was free to make God’s wrath a tool for his own hatred and vengefulness. The great author Anne Lamott says in her book Bird by Bird, “You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” Jonah has weaponized God to bring about his own sense of justice.
The Book of Jonah is full of pun and irony, but my favorite bit comes the first time Jonah wishes for his own death. He says to God in Jonah 4:3
That is why I fled to Tarshish in the beginning, for I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.
Imagine being so full of rage that you fuss at God for being slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, and relenting from punishment.
What Jonah is beginning to understand — and he doesn’t like it — he is beginning to understand that God is free to do whatever God wants to do, up to and including destroying Nineveh – or deciding not to destroy Nineveh.
But God’s character is this: gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. It is well within God’s right to destroy Nineveh, but God doesn’t have to. Because God is God, God has other options. God can do things that we can’t do. That we could never do. God can turn the evil heart into something good. Philosopher Philip Cary says this:
[God’s] aim is always to overturn the evil that destroys his creation, and he can accomplish this justly by destroying the evildoer, but yet more justly and gloriously turning the evil heart into something new…defeating evil in the abundance of his mercy is doing more, not less, than justice.
Of all the lessons of Jonah, the one I leave with is this. Every time I point out someone else’s shortcomings or sins, I am taking an eye off of my own. Rather than being concerned about what God is going to do to those people – or that person – against whom my anger burns, perhaps I should thank God for being merciful to all of us.
Jonah was so focused on righteous anger and burning rage that God would dare to spare the people that Jonah believed were beyond forgiveness – He was so focused on his righteous anger and burning rage that God would show mercy to the worst people in the world – he was so focused on his rage at God’s mercy that he seems to have forgotten that the fish was more obedient to God than he was. May we never sit in our own anger at God’s mercy and grace to others, for we believe in God who can turn the evil heart into something good, even when that evil heart belongs to us.
And if we ever doubt that goodness and mercy, that slowness to anger and that abundance of steadfast love, may we look no further than the cross to see the proof of God’s inclination to us, God’s forgiveness of our sin, and God’s great mercy that saves us through Jesus Christ.