Changing God’s Mind

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Matthew 5:43-48; 1 Colossians 1:15-23

Has your boss at work ever asked you to do a task that you really didn’t want to do? You put it far on the back burner, hoping that they’ll eventually forget they asked you to do it. But they don’t. A few days later, it’s “Hey how’s it coming along with that thing I asked you to do?” You huff and puff and take care of it with as little enthusiasm as possible. It’s clear from the story of Jonah that this is how he felt about being told to go Ninevah. He ran away from the task when it was first presented to him. It took getting thrown off a boat into stormy seas, being swallowed by a fish, and then regurgitated onto the shore for him to finally get to task.

“How’s that thing coming along, Jonah?” God nudges. You can imagine Jonah rolling his eyes and letting out an exasperated sigh as he combs fish vomit out of his hair, “Yeah, yeah, I know, I’ll get right on it.” Jonah’s “sermon” to the Ninevites contained only 5 words. “You’re goners in forty days.” Considering his lack of enthusiasm in delivery, the response he got was pretty incredible. Imagine pulling your car over onto the sidewalk and groveling for mercy on the pavement because you drove by some guy with a sloppily scrawled “The End Is Near” sign. Now imagine the entire population of New York City doing that. Hard to imagine that happening, but it does in this story. Ninevah has a huge change of heart.

And then God changes God’s mind. “And when God saw how the Ninevites turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity he said he would bring upon them.” Jonah was quite upset by this. He tells God, “I didn’t want to go to Ninevah because I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” Where was this in his sermon? This is great news about a great God, worthy of being shared with joy and energy! “God is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love!” And yet Jonah doesn’t say any of this to the Ninevites. Jonah speaks these words to God with contempt. Why was he so upset?

We come to learn that Jonah was upset because he didn’t want God to change his mind about Ninevah, he was disgusted by them, and he wanted to stay disgusted by them. He wanted God to carry out the original plan and overthrow them. He didn’t want God to forgive them, he wanted them to pay for their evil ways. We come to see that the conflict in this story was never really between God and Ninevah, God was upset with their wickedness, sure, but it was always God’s will to be reconciled to them, the conflict is between God’s will and Jonah’s will.

God had no problem changing his mind about Ninevah, this is because, as John Calvin points out, God has no greater desire than to be reconciled to us, and that we should be reconciled to him. God speaks “sharply” to us, Calvin says, to induce us return to favor with God.[1] Another way of putting this would be, before God had decided to let his wrath burn against Ninevah, he had already made up his mind to forgive them. What seemed to Jonah to be God changing his mind about Ninevah had been God’s will all along.

As we learn from this story, and truthfully, throughout all of Scripture, the will of God is love. And it is through loving that we serve God and share God’s good news to the ends of the earth. Jonah knew this about God, therefore we must assume that his struggle with going to Ninevah wasn’t that he was afraid of what these nasty people might do to him, he just simply didn’t want to share God’s love with them. It is when we allow Jonah to become a stand-in for the religious community that this story begins to challenge us. As a prophet, it was Jonah’s task to represent the will of God to the people; as the church, we are the hands and feet of Christ in the world. Christ is still the head, we serve Christ’s will. Just as God sent Jonah to share his love with Ninevah, so too does Christ challenge us to “love our enemies.”

We don’t want to. We’d rather use them as scapegoats, blame them for everything that’s wrong in the world, curse them, belittle them. We like to pretend that Jesus said, “Love your enemies…except for those people, man those people are terrible, you can keep despising them and I’d be cool with that.” But he didn’t say that…not even close.

Jonah didn’t want to change his mind about his enemies. Yet, God had no problem changing his mind, so that they might know God’s love and forgiveness. Why do we have such a problem with changing our minds? I mean, the world and our perception of it is constantly changing as we learn and grow and yet when it comes to our opinions about things, “we demand consistency, even when it makes no sense,” says Alex Lickerman of Psychology Today. “Politicians endure almost universal scorn when they change their minds about almost anything….It seems we like people to change their minds only when it benefits us. Otherwise, changing one's mind seems to suggest uncertainty, lack of leadership, lack of confidence, even weakness of character. Few of us, it seems, like people to ‘waffle.’”[2] Jonah had no problem being saved by a fish, he didn’t being forgiven for running away from God’s will…but when God offers that same salvation to Jonah’s enemies…woah!

Lickerman continues, “The ability to change one's mind, to admit implicitly or explicitly that we were wrong, in other words, ultimately boils down to an issue of character—of our ability to transcend our small-minded ego and care more that value is being created than we're the ones creating it. And when we attain that perspective, we'll come to see a willingness to change our minds not as an indication of uncertainty but of commitment—commitment not to appearing to care about what's best for others but to actually caring about what's best for others more than what's best for our egos and ourselves.”[3]

Not to ignore the elephant in the room, it would seem that our political leaders would rather defend the ego of their party than function. And we, at least in the commentary and discussions I’ve heard, are no different: it’s always their fault. Each partisan stance has its own argument to prove exactly why the government shutdown is the other party’s fault, and why they need to change their minds. When it comes to changing our minds, perhaps we could all stand to be a bit more like God, whose commitment is to compassion, to actually caring about what’s best for all of creation. If you are to set your mind on anything, let it be this: that God’s love might be shown through all that you do. I pray that we would all be granted the strength and humility to make it so. Amen.

[1] https://www.ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom28.iii.3.ix.html

[2] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/happiness-in-world/201108/changing-your-mind

[3] Ibid.