NOTES for Jon 4:10-11
God looks at a person, even one wounded by original sin, in a completely different way than a person looks at his own sin. In fact, the word "own" in this case can hardly be understood literally: each of us usually looks at our own sins, if not indulgently, then at least with understanding. This is, of course, by no means always a matter of indulging our own sins, but even when we hate in ourselves some concrete thing that hinders us, in a normal case we still do not go so far as self-hatred.
To hate the sinner who is nearby, together with his sin, is, alas, a completely ordinary thing for us. It has become a bad habit of fallen humanity, one that must be overcome with some effort. And if we are entirely clear that we do not want punishment for our own sinfulness, then with regard to those around us our position is usually far less definite.
Simply put, for ourselves we usually want mercy from God, while for everyone else we want justice without any leniency. And the prophet, as we can see, was by no means an exception to the rule: for the inhabitants of Nineveh he wanted precisely justice, which in this particular case meant just punishment, without any leniency.
Quite unexpectedly for Jonah, God shows mercy precisely to the repentant townspeople. Perhaps the prophet thought that God could have such relationships only with His own people, that only His own people could be forgiven much by Him, again and again averting what should have fallen on their head because of the sins they had committed, including those Assyrian armies that more than once threatened Jerusalem.
In any case, it could hardly have occurred to Jonah to compare God's attitude toward the Jewish people with His attitude toward the Assyrian Empire, its capital, and its inhabitants. After all, that empire was associated for the prophet, as for all his contemporaries, with everything worst in the world at that time, and Nineveh was in his eyes the center of world evil.
For God, as we can see, there is neither an empire nor a center of world evil. For Him there is only a city whose inhabitants repented of their sins and turned to the God about whom Jonah had spoken to them. Perhaps they understood little, but what can one expect from people who, in God's own words, "do not know their right hand from their left"? And God forgives them. After all, they are only people who need to be saved, in any country and in any age.