I grew up in the twilight of institutional apartheid South Africa. I don’t remember the bombs or the blood, but I remember the tension in adult voices when they thought we weren’t listening. I don’t remember the fears of the people, but I have learned of the failures of the leaders, the failures of my own people, my own church. I remember sitting cross-legged on our living room carpet, watching history unfold as Nelson Mandela became president. The adults around me seemed to hold their breath. That night there was much uncertainty, but for many, hope glimmered. Was this the beginning of a rainbow nation?
In those years of hopeful optimism, everyone seemed to be saying this word: ubuntu. A word pregnant with meaning, it comes from the Zulu phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, “a person is a person through other people”. That word carries the idea that our humanity is bound up in one another. I cannot be fully human in isolation; the fabric of the universe is so ordered that my identity is found in relationship with other humans. Thus, to live is to belong, and with belonging comes a responsibility of mutual care toward the other.
Growing up in the so-called rainbow nation, with ubuntu painted across billboards and posters, I felt a strange mix of emotions. One of those emotions was deep embarrassment. Embarrassment that my people, my church, my country had been the last ones to figure out something so basic. In my small, ignorant and childish paradigm, I actually thought South Africa was the last place on earth still dealing with racism. I pictured the rest of the world shaking their heads at us, thinking “Finally!” I thought everyone else had long ago sorted it out, that they had embraced the philosophy of ubuntu decades before us, and we were just stumbling in, late and awkward, like showing up to dinner halfway through the meal, still asking for the menu. How I wish that had been true. But growing up has a way of dismantling illusions. Travel, study and experience showed me that ubuntu is rare everywhere. The absence of ubuntu is not an exception; it is the human story. Later I began to see it with sharper eyes. You see it in politics: conservative against liberal, Republican against Democrat, Labor against Liberal. You see it in faith: Protestant against Catholic, believer against unbeliever, traditional against progressive. And in the aftermath of COVID-19, it tore through families and friendships—vaccine or anti-vaccine—lines drawn like battlefields. Again, and again, the world divides itself into us and them. It is how we prop up our identity, by pushing against the other. But this is no modern disease. The problem of us versus them is as old as humanity itself, running even through God’s people, even His prophets.
Jonah’s story begins with a call. God tells him to go to Nineveh, the city every Israelite loathed. To Jonah, that name did not sound like a mission field; it sounded like enemy ground. It would be like telling a Christian today to go preach in the heart of ISIS, or asking a conservative to sit down with ANTIFA, (or vice versa). Not neutral territory, but the last place you would ever want to go. And Jonah knows exactly what God is like—merciful and forgiving—and he wants none of it. His fear is not that he might fail; it is that he might succeed. He cannot stomach the thought of mercy reaching the people he hates most.
So, he runs. The text traces his downward spiral: down to Joppa, down into the ship, down into sleep. Meanwhile, the pagan sailors are wide awake, crying out to their gods, desperate for rescue. And here is the sting: the prophet of Israel, the insider, is the most indifferent man on board. God hurls a storm across the sea, and in the irony only God could write, the outsiders end up praying, repenting, even showing compassion, while Jonah stays stubborn. When he is finally thrown into the water, the sea grows calm and the sailors bow to Yahweh. Chapter one unmasks the hypocrisy of insiders and shows that God’s mission cannot be thwarted by human prejudice.
Jonah’s descent does not end in the water. He sinks further still, swallowed by a great fish. What feels like judgement is actually mercy in disguise, like a parent catching a running child before they hit traffic. From inside the belly Jonah prays. At first it sounds like repentance, full of psalm-like language and thanksgiving. But if you listen closely, it is not confession. It is desperation. He never admits his sin, never mentions Nineveh, never names his rebellion. He paints himself as the victim rather than the runaway prophet.
His prayer is full of Scripture but empty of surrender. It is liturgy without heart. He even condemns idol worshippers, forgetting that the pagan sailors had just prayed more sincerely than he had. Jonah promises sacrifices and vows, but it all rings hollow. His words are orthodox; his heart is still twisted in pride.
And yet, here is the scandal of grace: even a half-hearted prayer cannot stop God’s mercy. God speaks to the fish, and Jonah is vomited out onto dry land. Jonah 2 reminds us that hitting bottom does not guarantee repentance. We can cry out to God with all the right words and still clutch a stubborn heart. But it also reminds us that God’s mission does not depend on the purity of His messengers. His grace keeps moving, even through the proud and the reluctant.
Jonah’s story does not end in the fish. God comes again, patient and persistent: “Go to Nineveh and proclaim the message I give you.” This time Jonah goes, but his obedience is only skin-deep. His feet move, but his heart still resists.
Nineveh is described as “an exceedingly great city”, vast in size and infamous for its violence. Into this world Jonah preaches the shortest sermon in the Bible. Five Hebrew words. No illustrations, no appeal, no mention of God’s mercy, just a blunt warning: “Forty days and Nineveh will be overturned.” But here is the twist: the word “overturned” can mean destroyed or transformed. Jonah means one; God delivers the other.
To Jonah’s horror, the entire city responds. From the king on his throne down to the cattle in the field, Nineveh humbles itself. The king himself steps off his throne, covers himself in ashes and prays for mercy—the very humility Jonah refuses to show. And God relents. The same mercy Jonah ran from now spills out on Israel’s greatest enemy. Jonah 3 shows us that God’s word is unstoppable, repentance is always possible and mercy is God’s favourite outcome.
Jonah is furious. The very thing he feared has happened: God has spared Nineveh. The reality that God is “gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in love”, (Jonah 4:2) Jonah now hurls back at God as an accusation. His problem was never that God might fail; it was that God might succeed. And he would rather die than live with a God who forgives his enemies.
So, Jonah storms out of the city and builds himself a little shelter, waiting and hoping that maybe Nineveh will still burn. God responds with an object lesson. First a plant grows up to give Jonah shade, and he is exceedingly glad, the only time in the whole story Jonah is happy. But then God sends a worm to destroy the plant, and Jonah falls apart. He grieves a plant more than a city full of people.
And then God speaks the last word: “You pity the plant, though you did not make it grow. Should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, with more than 120,000 people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many cattle?” (Jonah 4:10,11). The story ends on a question, unresolved. Jonah is left silent, and so are we. Jonah 4 exposes the scandal of grace and confronts us with a choice: will we sulk in the sun, clinging to our tribal resentments, or will we share God’s compassion for the city?
When I think back to those hopeful days, with ubuntu blasted from every street corner, I realise now how desperately fragile our attempts at human solidarity really are. Bumper stickers and good intentions cannot heal the real fractures of an “us versus them” world. Only grace can.
Today, as I watch the world split along ever-deeper lines, I see Jonahs everywhere. We all have our Ninevehs—enemies we’d rather see destroyed than transformed. We post about love and unity on social media while secretly hoping our political opponents get removed, our theological adversaries get proven wrong, our cultural enemies get their due.
But Jonah’s story won’t let us off that easy. It reminds me that the hope of the world is not found in human wisdom but in a God whose mercy runs deeper than our hate, whose compassion reaches further than our divisions. Ubuntu, true ubuntu, isn’t a human achievement we can build through better policies or prettier slogans. It’s a divine gift that flows through broken, reluctant vessels like Jonah, like me, like all of us who would rather God’s grace stopped at the borders of our comfort zones. The question is still hanging: will we, like Jonah, sulk in the sun, clinging to our tribal resentments, or will we rise and join God in His wide, stubborn mercy?
Quintin Betteridge is the pastor of Kingscliff Seventh-day Adventist Church (NSW), he is passionate about making the Bible applicable to everyday life.
