NOTES for Jon 1:17; Jon 2:1-9

Each chapter of the book of the prophet Jonah is a concise and accurate outline of how a person behaves after encountering the will of God. Knowing what he ought to do, Jonah flees, tries to hide, refuses even to pray, and as a result finds himself in a hopeless situation. It is easy to replace the belly of the whale with something more understandable and familiar: illness, failure, depression, loneliness, or a lack of understanding. Everything that deprives us of the will to live and plunges us into despair. Everything that is for us an obvious consequence of our disobedience to God, of our sin. All this is the belly of the whale, where we suddenly realize that escape is possible only by turning to the One who makes even the laws of nature act as His will pleases.

At first glance, hardly the God of Abraham and Moses will seem to somebody, merciful, especially if we focus on His image of the Old Testament. But do we understand correctly what is this mercy, about which speaks the prophet? By mercy we imply mostly a certain indulgence, the readiness to forgive to somebody his weaknesses not by love for him, but from indifference to the sins that he committed, maybe in the secret hope that one day our sins and our weaknesses shall also be indulgently "forgiven" to us. The God of Israel is not like that: He is demanding and, according to the word of the Holy Scriptures, "jealous", not because He needs the worship of whoever it maybe, but because otherwise, if the man does not surrender into His hands completely, without reserve and without looking behind, He cannot purify and sanctify such a person, and therefore cannot also join him to the new life, to the life of His Kingdom.

This task is of course incompatible with mercy, as we understand it quite often. But in this sense, in which the word "mercy" is used in the biblical books, our understanding of the mercy has nothing common. The mercy in the Bible is the readiness to do to someone more than what requires the law or the contract, more than what is required to do. Such readiness is also possible when it comes to relations between men; it was often for those receiving the help a real salvation in difficult and sometimes critical situations. When it concerns God, His mercy is for man the only hope.

The only because after the fall man lost any rights for any future strictly human, being much closer to the animal kingdom, than to the God, in Whose image he was created. In the less global scale, having in mind only the history of the people of God, we could say that these people lost the right on all that was due to them according to the alliance concluded on Sinai: because the conditions of the union concluded in that period were violated by the people more than once.

One could only hope that God will forgive His people and will still give them a chance to start everything if it is not from the beginning, then at least, on a white leaf. This God's readiness to forgive and to give again another chance is His mercy. Of course, the gods of the heathen could also be sometimes merciful to their fans, but merciful in particular in the human sense of the word. There is nothing surprising here: because these gods were created by man for himself in his image. Here is only, in a critical situation, when help was needed, they couldn’t help at all. Quite as cannot help a man the "mercy" pushing him to his sins and vices.

For what man could leave the one who behaves towards him with mercy? And what in such case this person would lose? If we speak about relationships between God and His people, the scale of the loss becomes immediately visible. It is no more and no less about salvation, about the possibility of entering the Kingdom of God, which the people can receive only in the case if God shows manifests to him His mercy. Mercy means, above all, the will to do to someone more than he deserves, more than what he is entitled according to the law or the concluded agreement.

All the prophets of Israel testify unanimously that the union-covenant concluded with God on the Mount Sinai was violated by the people more than once, and each of these violations, in fact, became its break. The torn union deprived the people of all these possibilities, which had appeared to them on Sinai. It remained only to hope on God's mercy, that God will all the same achieve the promise made to the people on Sinai. In such a situation any refusal of God's mercy looks like a real madness. Why do many decide so easily on it? Perhaps, because they do not simply realize all the depth of the problem and all the gravity of the situation. But other thing is possible: the people want a quiet life.

Indeed, even a merciful God remains demanding or, expressing in the biblical language "jealous". He is ready to give His people another chance, but His exactingness as regards the commandments, the way of righteousness and generally all that is connected to the spiritual life, is the same. The heathen gods are mostly created by people in their image, and it is not surprising that man is more comfortable with such gods: the religious feeling (and it exists to everyone) is satisfied, seen that no uncomfortable requirement the gods created by the man, will not present of course to their creator. Only that in a critical situation these gods will not help and will not open the Kingdom.