The book of Jonah was written for an Israel that knew Assyria as the empire that would, or already had, devoured them. Nineveh is not an abstract foreign city; it is the capital of the people Israel most wants God to destroy. The book ends not with a verdict but with a question, and the question is aimed at the reader. Jonah is the prophet who got everything he asked for — a storm survived, a city repented — and is still angry. The audience is meant to find themselves sitting beside him under the withered plant, hearing God's last sentence as their own examination.

From the writers we read together

C.S. Lewis

Oxford literary scholar, Anglican lay theologian (1898-1963)

Lewis's point is that the only alternative to a heart that can be broken is a heart locked in a casket of selfishness, where it grows not safe but unbreakable in the worse sense — impenetrable, dead. Jonah has chosen the casket. He would rather his heart not be wrung by 120,000 Ninevites than risk God's mercy reaching them. The book's last verse is God prying the casket open. The question "should not I pity?" is also a diagnostic: it tells Jonah what kind of heart he has been protecting.

The hard turn for us is that Jonah's grievance is not crazy. Nineveh was cruel; their repentance was thin; history would prove them dangerous again. Lewis's instinct is that love anyway is the only road that does not end in the casket. God's pity here is not naivete — he knows exactly who lives in that city, down to the cattle — it is the willingness to be wrung over people who do not yet know their right hand from their left. To pray for our enemies is to consent to that wringing. It is also to be made, slowly, into people who can stand the question God ends the book with.