Too Much Mercy
If people can be too generous or humorous or detailed or nice, can God have "Too Much Mercy"? In Jonah 4:5-11 we read about Jonah's confusion, clumsiness, and even anger at God. The whole time God's mercy was at work within and around him. October 16, 2011.
She can analyze numbers better than some computer programs, a gift which has landed her a job at a prestigious financial firm. But at home her detailed inventory of cupboard contents, to-do lists numbered in priority order, and to-the-penny budget line items drive her family crazy. At what point does her talent become too much of a good thing? He’s a gregarious extrovert, a people magnet who hangs out with friends in every spare moment, and is so saturated socially that he needs multiple media platforms to keep in touch with everyone. He doesn’t have budget problems because he doesn’t have a budget, and he doesn’t have calendar problems for the same reason. At what point does his trait become too much of a good thing? If people can be too generous or humorous or detailed or nice, can God have Too Much Mercy?
On them
The people of Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, had humiliated Jonah’s people (the Israelites) stripped them of their culture and land, terrorized their women and children, and frankly their behavior on their best day offended God vastly more than Israel’s on its worst. It was about time that these miserable heathens got caught in the crosshairs of God’s condemnation. The book of Jonah begins with God commanding Jonah, “Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me” (Jonah 1:2). You’d think Jonah would trash talk a bit, like little brother taunting big brother who just got in trouble. Instead, “Jonah ran away from the Lord…and sailed for Tarshish” (Jonah 1:3). Was he afraid because he knew that the Assyrians bury their enemies alive in the sand, leaving their head sticking out of the ground like a lawn ornament, while the person suffocates unless first dying from scorpion bites to the face? No, much worse. Jonah later admits to God, “I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity” (Jonah 4:2).
No, God, please. No! Anything but Too Much Mercy! Stop! Give me a god who hurls indiscriminate thunderbolts that kill arbitrary bystanders and he says, “Oops, I missed.” Give me a god who exercises his power to unleash pestilence on all the bad people in this world. Give me a god who hates the ideas, organizations, and people I hate. Give me a god who offers people one chance to get it right, but the minute they mess up he pulls the lever on the trap door and they plunge to their eternal peril. But, no! Not a God of Too Much Mercy.
As it happened, Jonah’s worst fear came true. His preaching saved the Ninevites’ souls. “When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he had compassion and did not bring upon them the destruction he had threatened” (Jonah 3:10). These infidels who didn’t practice kosher dining habits, didn’t read from Moses, didn’t go to church or offer charity to find a cure for breast cancer—God had mercy on them. Four times in the short story of Jonah, God refers to Nineveh as a “great” or “important” city, not just in the world’s economy of that time, but in God’s estimation of them as excellent candidates for his mercy.
On me
Like your obnoxious neighbor who lets his dog bark all night. Like the project team member who conveniently accepted the praise you deserved, and with it stole your promotion. Like the idiot driver going way too slow for my busy self-importance. Like the snobby parents of the spoiled kids who play sports at MSOE on Sunday morning and snatch our parking spots. Like other church people whose doctrine disagrees with the WELS. It can be that in our estimation these people don’t qualify for God’s approval like we do, and that makes us the perfect candidates for God’s mercy too. The slightest thought that we deserve more favor from God than others makes us like the workers in the vineyard who complain that they should receive more compensation for working longer hours. What they miss is that the landowner isn’t paying them for their work. He’s paying them because he is generous. Fellow sinners, we can’t buy God’s mercy. We can’t earn it. We don’t qualify for it. We don’t accumulate frequent-faithfulness vouchers that give us special first class treatment from God through some righteous rewards program. Any inkling of an idea that I’m better before God than you are, or that we are infinitely more righteous than war criminals, deranged murderers, and perpetrators of hate crimes puts us outside of God’s kingdom, pouting on the back step because we wanted what we deserved and he gave it to us—his judgment for our puffy pride and lack of love. “The first will be last,” is Jesus’ warning. But “the last will be first” is also Jesus’ promise (Matthew 20:16). And it applies to us, when we realize that our sins put us in the back of the line for deserving anything from God. Even behind the cruel coworkers, the idiot drivers and neighbors, and, yes, deranged murderers. Last means last! And then, in God’s kingdom of Too Much Mercy, last becomes first. The dead, humiliated Son becomes the risen, victorious Savior. Poor, lost sinners become adopted, wealthy heirs of salvation. The one who is least in the kingdom is really the greatest. Faith wins. Hope remains. Love endures.
Jonah had trouble putting himself last, especially when compared to the Ninevites. So God, in his mercy, did it for him. After God spared the Ninevites, Jonah pouted. He left the cool shade of the city’s trees and sat down in the desert. “Then the Lord God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy…but…the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered.” Not only that but God sent a scorching wind and blazing heat that brought Jonah’s brow—and his anger—to a boil. Jonah claimed the right to be happy about the shady vine one day and then angry about it the next. Then why can’t God be angry with the Ninevites one day and happy to extend his mercy to them the next day when they repent? Is this Too Much Mercy? Absolutely. And God’s mercy is so generous that it can afford to also forgive Jonah. And us.
On them
It was a beautiful fall day just over five years ago when Terri Roberts heard an ambulance scream by her workplace near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. As was her practice, she uttered a brief prayer for whoever might be having the emergency.Moments later, her husband Chuck called, telling her to come to their son Charlie’s house right away. In her car en route, she heard on the radio that there’d been a shooting at an Amish schoolhouse in nearby Nickel Mines. She knew that Charlie sometimes parked his milk truck there, and it crossed her mind that her son might have been shot trying to save the children.What she soon learned was much worse. Five Amish school girls had been shot dead and five more seriously wounded—and Charlie was the shooter. He had then killed himself. Terri and Chuck were immediately overwhelmed with grief at what their son had done. Though family and friends arrived, no one knew what to say.That evening, however, an Amish neighbor arrived and said to Chuck, “Roberts, we love you.” And that was but the beginning of the expressions of mercy that members of the local Amish community extended to Terri and Chuck, as well as to Charles’ wife Marie and her children.In the days that followed, Amish neighbors continued to reach out to the Roberts. They attended Charlie Roberts’ funeral and set aside some of the approximately $4 million they received from well-wishers as a gift for the Roberts family, with a special concern for the shooter’s children. Mercy makes a difference. Too Much Mercy is often exactly what people need.[i] Who needs more of your mercy?
The story of Jonah is one of the better known books of the Bible, which people know as a whale of a tale about a misguided middle-aged man. We who by faith find ourselves as recipients of Too Much Mercy from God know that the real story is about God and his mercy on people who deserve the opposite. And Jonah is not our Savior, but he is our hero, for in him we see ourselves, not high and mighty, not achieving anything all that extraordinary, and even when Jonah got things right he got them wrong. But through his confusion, clumsiness, and even anger at God, the whole time God’s mercy was at work within and around him. Too Much Mercy. Which is exactly enough for us. And others. Amen.
Preached at Grace Lutheran Church, Milwaukee, WI (www.gracedowntown.org) on October 16, 2011
[i]“Murderer’s Mother Tends a Surviving Amish Victim,” The Wired Word, http://www.thewiredword.com/subscriber/default.aspx?id=4766, © Communication Resources 2011
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