Please read the passage before reading the commentary
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time. It had come the first time and Jonah ran away from it. This second time, however, Jonah went.
He went to Nineveh, which is described as an enormously large city, one with divine proportions, one that would take three days to go from one end to the other.
Jonah went one day’s journey proclaiming his message. We are not told if he was being passively aggressive by going in part-way, or if he was being particular and going into every street, alley and dead end to carry the message to everybody.
The reaction is immediate. The people do penance, the king dresses in sackcloth the same as everybody else. Even the animals dress in sackcloth and ashes.
Everybody in Nineve responds positively to the preaching of Jonah, something which God’s people usually did not do.
Jonah preached the overturning of Nineveh. The people of Nineveh, however, turned over a new leaf and repented. God, then, repented of the decision to destroy the city.
What is the enormously large ego that makes up our Nineveh? What message does Jonah preach to us? How immediate is our positive response to the call to repent? The king and the people of Nineveh got God right, that God could easily change God’s decision to destroy and instead save. This God has in mind to do with us, as God did with the people of Nineveh, that we repent and that God would save.
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