“The Holy One said, ‘You had compassion on the plant, which you didn’t plant or tend. It came up during one night and died before the next one. And didn’t I have compassion upon Nineveh—that great city where there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who don’t even know their right hand from their left, not to mention many animals'” (Jonah 4.11)?
There’s a scene early in the film “Dr. Strangelove” where General Turgidson (played by George C. Scott) describes a scenario with what he calls “modest and acceptable” casualties. Launching an all-out nuclear assault on the Soviet Union would cause the U.S. to only lose twenty million people instead of one-hundred-fifty-million if they didn’t.
The delivery is so sincere that you can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the statement. Did he just say that? Is that really a successful outcome to him? Does he really think that much death and destruction is a good outcome? That the destruction of entire cities are acceptable, not to mention what happens to the Soviets, and the rest of the planet.
The book bearing his name doesn’t give us Jonah’s reasons for despising the Ninevites. We gather that they are enemies of Israel. And despite some modern and incorrect analogies that try and portray the city as an ancient Nazi Germany, we don’t know why Jonah really wanted to see those people wiped off the map. They are the bad guys and whatever happens to them is what they deserve.
Nineveh, for Jonah, isn’t really a place but a symbol. There’s no dichotomy, for Jonah, between the idea of Nineveh as an enemy state and the actual city made up of mothers, children, and other members of Creation.
In the face of mercy, that the destruction—the twenty million dead, if you will—didn’t come to pass, Jonah goes to grouse beyond the walls of the city. This, he admits, was why he didn’t want to come. He didn’t want them to be spared. He wanted destruction, the obliteration of his enemies. When the sun rose the following day, he wanted to rest in the knowledge that a threat had been neutralized.
God takes a strange path here. You’d expect the Holy One to take Jonah to task for what he’s feeling, maybe show up in the whirlwind with some great speech about grace and mercy that no human should ever question.
Instead, God just puts it out there. Did you not notice that I chose to have compassion on a city with a hundred-twenty-thousand people who aren’t responsible for your rage? Didn’t I just choose to be merciful to them, not to mention the dogs and cats and livestock living amidst those walls?
There’s no such thing, God is saying, as acceptable losses.
Maybe Nineveh really was a horrible place whose leadership committed atrocities beyond our imagination. Maybe they were led by racist, homophobic, immoral men who were just going to bring more and more harm upon the world. Maybe their current or former administration were just the worst of the worst. But was it okay to destroy everything around them just to punish those few?
Was what a few people did enough to make the loss of everyone in the city acceptable?
Not to mention the animals.
Holy One, it’s so easy to get caught up in the rhetoric, the hyperbole that fills the daily news cycle painting us as separate tribes who would be better off if the other were defeated. It’s too easy to forget that the labels hide the families and the creatures that fill up homes and neighborhoods, and who you love just as much as you love us. Help us see beyond the labels and the symbols to your beloved Creation.