Two Sundays ago, the sermon was about accountability in relationships. Jesus talked about pointing out a fault when someone is in error, bringing it back up, and then treating them like a Samaritan and tax collector. Reading along in Matthew’s Gospel, the next section – last week – was about extensive forgiveness: “beyond measure”. Following along, this week, the texts are about resentment and anger resulting from all that mercy and forgiveness.
There is something deeply unsettling about grace. We love forgiveness and that undeserved kindness when we are the ones receiving it. But it becomes uncomfortable when given so freely to someone else.
Primatologist Frans de Waal shows how even monkeys can be deeply upset when they feel life is unfair. Two capuchin monkeys were placed in neighboring cages and given a simple task: hand a pebble to a researcher. Both monkeys were rewarded with a cucumber slice for doing the task. They happily repeated the behavior 25 times in a row. But when one monkey got a cucumber, while the other got a grape for doing the exact same task. The monkey who received the cucumber immediately rejected it, threw it back at the researcher, and slapped the ground. It refused to eat anything until its partner also got a grape. De Waal described this as a “Wall Street protest” — a visceral, emotional reaction to perceived injustice. The monkey wasn’t just angry at the experimenter; it was protesting the unequal treatment of its peer.
Jonah gets really angry and hurt that God actually forgives Nineveh. The latercomer works in the vineyard still gets the day’s wage.
We want God to be generous—but we often want God’s generosity to make sense according to our ideas of fairness. We want mercy—but sometimes we want mercy with boundaries. We want forgiveness—but perhaps only for people who deserve it. And we especially want God to notice how hard we have worked.
You might remember Jonah as the man swallowed by a great fish. The Jewish faith, which celebrates Yom Kippur tomorrow, will spend the day reading the book of Jonah. But the fish is not really the most important part of the story. The deeper story is about Jonah’s struggle with the mercy of God.
God sends Jonah to Nineveh, a city notorious for its wickedness. Jonah does not want to go and runs in every other direction, it seems. Jonah is an effective preacher. With a short sermon, everyone repents and turns away from their violence.
Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, responsible for the decimation of Israel and the destruction of the Northern Monarchy. The barbarity of the Assyrians included skinning people and carving out hunks of flesh while they were alive, and impaling them. Jonah’s geographical context—today’s Iraq and Syria the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, al Qaeda, ISIS. God asks: “And should I not be concerned about them and all the people and animals who live in their cities?” Jesus calls us to love our enemies. God cares for, reaches out to, accepts, and welcomes those we hold in enmity and those who harm us.
And God sees what they have done and decides not to destroy them. And it makes Jonah furious. Jonah says: “I knew you would do this!”For I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.” But Jonah doesn’t say it as praise. He says it as a complaint.
Jonah is angry because God has forgiven people. Jonah doesn’t think the people would actually change or deserve a second chance especially wiping the slate clean. God responds: Should I not care about Nineveh? Should I not care about all those people?
Forgiveness is tough business. Should we just let someone get off the hook and keep abusing, keep the hurt, and not learn? From the blog of Pastor Nadia Bolz Weber: “When Jesus says that we ourselves are forgiven, it has a lot more to do with freedom from those moments when we were the worst version of ourselves than it does with pretending those moments weren’t bad.”
Divine grace trumps human fairness. Grace is dangerous because it reverses business as usual. The world says the last are last and the first are first because they deserve it. It’s fair. But grace, God’s generosity, mercy and love, looks beyond our productivity, who we are, our accomplishments. God’s grace even looks beyond our failures, our shortcomings, and all that we have done and left undone.
If we keep counting the times we’ve been wronged, if we keep records of grievances, if we tally up all the ways parents or children, friends and co-workers have wronged us, that kills relationships and isolates us from everyone. Love, generosity and forgiveness allow relationships to flourish, and living in this grace reveals the goodness of God.
The late-hired workers received more than they earned, more than they deserved, more than they had a right to ask for. The parables of Jesus allow us to identify with more than one character in the story. In the Gospel lesson, imagine yourself— not as the one who worked in the heat of the day and didn’t get the extra payment — but as the latecomer. Why might you have been late, and what bills might you still need to pay?
Like Jonah, we want to run from the responsibility, blame others instead of ourselves, and fail to empathize with those who are in a different place, abilities, or understanding than ourselves.
We often imagine God’s grace as though it were a limited resource. If God is generous to that person, perhaps there is less for me. If God forgives that person, perhaps my faithfulness doesn’t count for as much.
God’s grace is abundant. God can love the person who has been faithful for decades and the person who comes to faith at the very end. God can welcome the lifelong disciple and the person who has spent years running away.
God forgave Nineveh. God forgave Jonah. God forgives us. There is enough mercy. There is enough love. There is enough grace.
The book of Jonah ends with a question hanging in the air: “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh?” So perhaps the question for us this week is: Who is our Nineveh? Who is the person or group toward whom we find it difficult to imagine God being merciful? Who do we believe has gone too far? Who makes us uncomfortable when they walk through the doors of the church? Who do we struggle to forgive? Who receives God’s generosity and causes something inside us to say: “Wait. What about me?”
In your heart of hearts, there is someone all of us want to see pay. Jonah is reminded that God is concerned for all the 120,000 inhabitants of Nineveh, which is an enemy city, “and also many animals.” Some suggest that Jonah the phrase could be a slogan for green Christianity. God stands ready to forgive the city and to protect the lives of its animals. God seeks to widen Jonah’s narrow vision, and ours as well.
The answer of should make us uncomfortable. But it may also be where God is doing some of God’s deepest work in us. Because grace is not merely something God gives to other people. Grace is something God uses to change us. Paul gives us the practical response. “Live your life in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” If the gospel is grace, then a life worthy of the gospel is a life becoming gracious. If we have received forgiveness, we learn to forgive. If we have received mercy, we learn to show mercy. As God has welcomed us when we did not deserve it, we learn to welcome others. As God has been patient with us, we learn patience. As God has loved us despite our failures, we learn to love people despite theirs.
This does not mean ignoring injustice. Grace does not mean pretending that harmful actions do not matter. It does not mean eliminating accountability. But it does mean refusing to believe that another person’s failure places them permanently outside the reach of God’s mercy. It means leaving room for repentance. It means leaving room for change, transformation, and new possibilities.
The parable asks, “are you envious because I am generous?” Can we rejoice when someone else receives grace? Can we welcome someone whose story is different from ours? Can we stop keeping score? Can we trust that God’s generosity toward another person does not diminish God’s love for us? Can we allow God’s grace to make our own hearts more gracious?
God’s grace is not scarce. There is enough for the faithful worker. There is enough for the latecomer. There is enough for Nineveh. There is enough for Jonah. There is enough for the person sitting beside us. And, thanks be to God, there is enough for us.
