“And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd?

And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death”

(Jonah 4:9)

Jonah was angry. He was very angry. He had been cool and calm enough when he shipped out of Joppa that eventful day on his famous Mediterranean cruise. He remained cool through the storm at sea, sleeping calmly while everyone else on ship, including the captain and the crew, panicked. Jonah even remained coolly courageous when he told the sailors their only hope of surviving the storm was to pick him up and hurl him overboard into the boiling waters.

But Jonah finally lost his composure when God did not destroy the wicked Ninevites in fulfillment of Jonah’s prophetic prediction and when God did destroy the gourd vine under which Jonah had sat for protection from the blistering sun. Then Jonah was angry, angry unto death.

Anger is a destructive fire that sweeps through a personality, burning up judgment and reason and wisdom, belching out hot words, and pouring out a smoke screen that make visibility of all reality well-nigh impossible. Anger is a fire that spreads through the interconnecting halls and corridors of human relationships in families, cities, and nations.

In the parable of the prodigal son, the record states of the elder brother that when he heard the merriment and the feasting his father had set in motion to celebrate the prodigal’s return, he, the elder brother, “was angry, and would not go in.” No, he would not go in and have fun with family and friends. He was mad and his own anger shut him out. Anger shuts out so effectively so many from the felicity and joy the family circle should always be including.

See the devastation that anger has caused in China today, when the reasonable, humane requests of the Chinese students were not given sensible consideration by China’s totalitarian rulers, and in their wrath, they unleashed the power that comes out of a gun barrel.

The story of Jonah furnishes us a lesson in the causes and control of anger.

Jonah’s lost cool began with an act of disobedience. He refused to carry out a command of God. We read, “Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah the son of Amittai, saying, Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry against it; for their wickedness is come up before me. But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the Lord” (Jon. 1:1-3).

When the command of God came to go to Nineveh, Jonah packed his bag and took off in the opposite direction. Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian empire, lay overland to the east on the banks of the Tigris River. But Jonah went west, not east. He set out for the farthest known seaport west, Tarshish in Spain.

Why this reverse action by Jonah when the command of God came to him? Why does any person disobey the clear command of God? Why, because he thinks he knows better than God or anyone else what is good or best for him.

God says, “Thou shalt not steal,” but man says, “I have to steal a little, or I can’t compete with my competitors.” God says, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour,” but men and women say, “They lied about me first.” God says, “Thou shalt not kill,” but man says, “Somebody’s got to stop communism.” God says, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy,” but people say, “We can’t this week. We have to get away to get some rest and recreation.”

The word of God came to Jonah: “Go preach to the Ninevites. Cry out against the wickedness of those terrible sinners.” But Jonah went off in the opposite direction, because he couldn’t care less about those Ninevites. They were the people who had enslaved his fellow Jews. They had taken away their freedom, oppressed and persecuted them. It was only recently that some Jews had been permitted to come back to Jerusalem and rebuild their native land. In Jonah’s theology it was unthinkable that a Jew should be concerned for the affluent, oppressive Ninevites. Indeed, for God to show interest in their welfare was, to Jonah, the equivalent of God’s going back on his own nature. For the word of God to come to Jonah, the son of Amittai, “Go proclaim God’s message to Nineveh,” was like God commanding an or­thodox Jew in Israel today to go preach freedom and mercy and reconciliation to the rock-throwing Palestinian youths.

For there was a strong exclusivist theology abroad in Jonah’s day, and he had swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. He was an exclusivist in his attitude toward the Ninevites as European Christians were to become in their attitudes toward the Jews centuries later. Raul Hillberg points out in The Destruction of European Jews that the Nazi destructive process in Germany before World War 11 did not come out of the void. It was the culmination of a cyclical trend that began with the unsuccessful efforts of Christians to convert Jews after Constantine had made Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire. The missionaries had said in effect, “You have no right to live among us as Jews.” The secular rulers who followed them said, “You have no right to live among us.” The German Nazis at last decreed, “You have no right to live,” and herded them off to the crematoriums.

The exclusivist sentiments of Jonah that left no room in his heart and mind for compassionate concern for the Ninevites drove him to disobey the word of the Lord that came to him, saying, “Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city.”

But the second thing that the story of Jonah reveals about the cause of anger and the loss of control is that action is not so important as attitude. It wasn’t Jonah’s contrary action to the command of God that undercut his cool, so much as his contradictory attitude. The first duty of God’s servant is, not obedience to a given command, but reconciliation to God’s point of view, becoming of one mind with God.

When Jonah was given his second chance to obey, after being thrown overboard in the storm and being rescued by the great fish, Jonah repented of his disobedience to God’s command, but he was still of the same point of view with reference to the worthless Ninevites. His was an obedience based on a false theology. Therefore, Jonah’s preaching to the Ninevites was vindictive crying out against their wickedness.

How popular it is today to cry out against the wickedness of the great cities. There is no lack of prophets. Everyone wants to get into the act. The prophets of the poor and the homeless cry out against the arrogance, the luxury, the cruelty of the rich. The prophets of the establishment cry out against the crimes of violence, looting, and arson of the impatient poor. The prophets of the electorate and the press and the media cry out against the corruption and unethical behavior of the politicians.

Jonah proclaimed the coming judgment of God upon the wicked Ninevites with a hot hostility toward them. He was unprepared for both their repentance and God’s merciful withholding of the predicted destruction. He couldn’t stand to have his word proved false, even by a miraculous deliverance. It was this that blew his cool. Then Jonah poured out his peevish soul in denunciation: “I knew you to be a God of soft, loving kindness. That is why I ran away to Tarshish when you first called me to go to Nineveh. Now look, you have made me a laughingstock. You told me to preach, `In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed.’ But you didn’t do it. When the king and all these sinful people repented, you changed your mind. I’m sick. I’m mad. I want to die.”

In The Layman’s Bible Commentary, Jonah’s experience is described as an instance “in which a prophet succeeded in proportion as his prediction failed. It was not the Lord’s purpose, of course, to destroy even Nineveh; his purpose was to save it. Prophecy was directed to the salvation of the people, and so the prophetic word was always somewhat conditional — if the people repented, destruction would be stayed; if not, it would come to pass.”

It is not enough for the servant of God merely to obey the commands of God; he must also adopt God’s attitude toward a lost, sinful world, an attitude of love and forgiveness and willingness to accept and save the penitent. It’s when one gives obedience without adopting the attitude of God that one runs the risk of losing his cool.

When Dave Brubeck, the great jazz pianist and composer, was in Memphis for a concert 20 years ago and he was questioned about his oratorio, he said, according to The Commercial Appeal: “It’s based on Christ’s words — words almost totally ignored, even by churches. It has a new concept. Christ said to love your enemies, do good to those that hate you. If you can’t do this, you’re not a Christian. If your minister can’t help you, switch churches. If you hate any person or any country, you don’t understand love.”

When we try to be obedient to God’s commands but remain unreconciled to his attitude of forgiving love toward his world and his redemptive purposes for all his human children, we are heading for a terrible disillusionment in the judgments of God in history and perhaps for petulant spells of deep anger. But the most penetrating lesson from the Book of Jonah on the causes and control of anger is Jonah’s poignant failure to learn from his most fundamental personal experiences of pleasure and pain what his attitudes and actions must be toward all his fellow human beings.

The maddest Jonah becomes — when he is so angry that he wants to die and even justifies his anger in response to God’s question, “Doest thou well to be angry?” with his reply, “I do well to be angry, even unto death” — is when the pretty little gourd vine that God made to grow up over Jonah’s lean-to and shade his head from the hot sun dies because God sends a worm to cut the stem and a dry wind to wither it away. Then Jonah is really angry.

And the Book of Jonah ends with the awful, yet merciful, rhetorical question God puts to Jonah: “If you care so much about your gourd, for which you neither labored nor made to grow, which came up in a night and perished in a day, how much more should not I, the Lord and Father of all mankind, care to spare that great city, Nineveh, where there are 120,000 little children who know not yet their left hand from their right hand?”

How pitiful when men and women cannot apply the simple, fundamental experiences of pain and pleasure to their concept of theology, sociology, anthropology, and religion! Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, uses the same argument in his famous words: “Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases…. If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?”

And when men and women do not take this fundamental application from personal experience of pain and pleasure into the realm of their attitudes and actions toward others, rage, anger, even hatred, result.

In the Academy Award-winning movie In the Heat of the Night, the harassed police chief, Gillespie, whenever threatened or pushed into a corner or humiliated by the mayor, the town council, or its toughs, takes it out by getting angry, not with those who outrank him or outnumber him, but by getting angry with his subordinates or prisoners and venting his hostility on them.

Oh, what a timely tract is the Book of Jonah! If ever we find those things that have given us comfort and protection and security threatened or destroyed, instead of being like Jonah and growing angry, should not this serve to make us more aware of the merciful intentions of Almighty God, our Heavenly Father, toward all his children who are suffering from hunger, homelessness, discrimination, unemployment, lack of dignity and respect, and spur us to offer ourselves as the instruments of God’s intent for their salvation?