Violence, Forgiveness, and the God Who Refuses Both

Jonah names two sources of violence: Nineveh’s brutal paganism and Jonah’s moralistic religion. God refuses both. He does not excuse Nineveh, and he does not excuse Jonah’s anger. The way forward is forgiveness that has already dealt with hate before it confronts injustice. The ultimate answer is a gospel identity formed by the cross: humbled enough to lose the right to hate, secure enough to lose the need.

The Surprising Sources of Violence

Jonah is sent to Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the dominant imperial power of his era. History documents what the text names in verse 8: this was a society of systematic violence. Assyrian warfare was notorious for cruelty, massacre, and the institutionalized terror of helpless populations. Jonah’s anger at being sent there is entirely understandable. He wants them punished.

The Hebrew word rendered “violence” in 3:8 is hamas. It covers both physical cruelty and the structural oppression of the weak by the powerful. It names what power does when unrestrained by moral accountability.

And yet the book refuses to stay on that level. God refuses to accept either the violence of Nineveh or what turns out to be the poisonous anger of Jonah. This double refusal opens the question: where, exactly, does violence come from?

Two Sources Named

Source 1: Pluralistic relativism, the paganism of Assyria,

The first source is the worldview under Nineveh: paganism, or in modern form, pluralistic relativism. Ancient polytheistic cultures such as Assyria, Greece, and Rome differed from one another, but they shared a moral problem: violence could be built into public life without a stable foundation for human dignity.

St. Augustine, in City of God, gives the structural explanation. If one God is supreme lawgiver and supreme power, then reality is ordered toward justice and peace. Polytheism, by contrast, imagines many competing powers and no single truth. If reality itself is conflict, peace becomes unnatural and justice loses its foundation.

The same critique reaches secular relativism. Aldous Huxley admitted in Ends and Means that a philosophy of meaninglessness could become an instrument for desire and power. If there is no God, no truth, and no inherent moral order, tolerance has to be borrowed from somewhere else. Meaninglessness cannot produce a “therefore” strong enough to restrain power.

Source 2: Moralistic religion, the rage of Jonah,

Here is where the biblical narrative becomes genuinely surprising. The second source of violence is not Nineveh. It is Jonah.

Jonah comes to Nineveh, the New York of the ancient world, with a hard, unambiguous proclamation: give up your violence and your evil ways or you will be destroyed in forty days. And Nineveh listens. From the greatest to the least, from king to livestock, the city puts on sackcloth and calls urgently on God. It is the apex of Jonah’s prophetic career. The book, by every narrative convention, should end at chapter 3, verse 10, with Jonah returning home rejoicing.

There is no chapter 3, verse 11.

Instead, chapter 4, verse 1 records something startling. The Hebrew text is difficult to render, but its sense is this: when Jonah saw God refusing to be violent toward the violent, he became violently angry. He goes outside the city, makes himself a shelter, and waits, verse 5 makes clear he is hoping to see fire come down, a Sodom-and-Gomorrah reckoning, buildings smashing, the destruction he preached finally arriving.

Jonah is violent. He is violent not in spite of being a prophet, not in spite of being moral and religiously serious, but because of it. These are the sinners, the heretics, the pagans, the bad people. Why hasn’t God bombed them?

This is the danger of morality when it is not placed within a framework of grace. Moral people, religiously serious people, have a strong tendency to ground their self-worth in their morality: I obey the truth. I know the right. I believe correctly. That is what makes me better than other people. When morality curdles into moralism, it becomes a ranking system. And ranking systems generate the same oppressive logic as polytheism: the strong, the righteous, may do to the weak, the sinners, whatever their superiority justifies.

Friedrich Nietzsche noticed the same uncomfortable pattern: the violence that kills Jesus does not come from criminals and the poor. It comes from the respectable religious establishment. Jonah makes the same point with characteristic directness.

Both pluralistic relativism and moralistic absolutism can seed violence. Conservative commentary can blame lost moral values while missing the violence moralism generates. Secular commentary can blame religion while overlooking Stalin. Both are too simple.

The resolution is not to find the right ideology but to identify the right fundamental. The Amish are, by every measure, fundamentalists, doctrinally conservative, culturally separatist, patriarchal. Nobody fears Amish terrorists. The reason is that their fundamental is Jesus: the Son of Man who came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. “It depends on what your fundamental is”, and when the fundamental is the self-giving servant-God of the cross, that fundamental does not generate hostility. It drains it.

The Remarkable Strategy: Forgiveness Is Not Resignation

God’s answer to violence is neither payback nor passivity. His response to Nineveh models the strategy he requires of his people: moral seriousness joined to real openness to repentance.

On one side, God sends Jonah with an uncompromising proclamation: forty days and Nineveh will be overturned. There is no negotiation, no softening, no asterisk. Evil and violence must stop. God does not accept what Nineveh has been. On the other side, God makes Jonah vulnerable, sending him into the very heart of this violent city, and offers Nineveh a chance. The proclamation is hard. The sending is an act of compassion. God is, as Jonah accurately, if bitterly, recalls in his prayer, “gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity.” The formula comes from God’s self-declaration to Moses at Sinai after the golden calf incident, Exodus 34:6-7, and recurs throughout the Psalms, Joel, and Nehemiah. Jonah’s complaint is not ignorance. He knows exactly what God is like, and he is furious about it.

This combination, absolute moral seriousness and genuine openness to repentance, is not the strategy most people naturally take when they have been wronged. When wronged, there are two common responses:

Vengeance: The goal is not justice but to hurt the wrongdoer more than they hurt you. You are not thinking about truth, about what the world needs, about what would actually set things right. You are managing your own pain by inflicting pain. The wrongdoer becomes an instrument for processing your wound.

Resignation: This looks more Christian. You let it go. You don’t bring it up. You say, whatever was done is done, nothing can undo it, so you move on, avoid the person, get past it. But resignation also fails to think about truth, about justice, about what the world needs. It also fails the wrongdoer, who continues, unchallenged and unchanged, to live among others. And here is the thing: the pummeler and the avoider are, at bottom, doing the same thing. Both are excluding the wrongdoer permanently from the circle of community. Both are managing their own hurt, not serving justice. Resignation simply looks more controlled.

Forgiveness as the third way

Forgiveness is not a synonym for resignation. It is something more demanding and more specific. Forgiveness is dealing with your hate and anger before you deal with the wrongdoer, and then going to deal with the wrongdoer.

In vengeance, you process your hate by weaponizing it. In resignation, you process your hate by avoidance. In forgiveness, you deal with the hate first, separately, prior to engagement, and then you go to confront, to seek justice, to call the wrongdoer to see what is true and right.

Miroslav Volf, writing out of the Balkan wars, puts it this way:

“Forgiveness is not a substitute for justice. Forgiving someone does not mean you demand no change in the perpetrator and no righting of wrongs. In fact, forgiveness provides a framework in which the quest for properly understood justice can fruitfully be pursued.” Miroslav Volf

The logic follows: if you have not forgiven, if the hate is still in your chest when you go to confront, you are not really pursuing justice. You are pursuing punishment. You want to humiliate, to see the person brought low. Even if you tell yourself otherwise, the anger is working its own agenda, and you will overreach. You will go beyond justice into vengeance, even while using the language of justice. “If you want justice and nothing but justice, you will inevitably get injustice”, because without love in the heart, what feels like justice is almost always vengeance wearing justice’s clothes.

The inverse is also true: refusing to confront, refusing to seek justice, is a sign that forgiveness has not actually happened. It is avoidance, another way of managing your wound by keeping the wrongdoer outside the circle.

This is the reason most people in any given room are neither violent pummelers nor formal practitioners of resignation, they are, in Jonah’s precise mode, hating on the inside and saying nothing on the outside, waiting outside the city for fire that will satisfy what they feel. God demands the opposite: “Forgive and love your enemy and then be willing to open your mouth and confront.” Even if confrontation requires something strong. Even if it requires real consequences. The consequences can be just rather than vengeful if, and only if, the hate has been dealt with first.

The Ultimate Solution: Gospel Identity and the Absorbing of Debt

Forgiveness raises the practical question: how? The answer is not mainly behavioral. It is about who you are before God.

The diagnostic question: Do you have the right to be angry?

In Jonah 4:4, God asks Jonah a question: “Do you have any right to be angry?” The form of this question is as important as its content.

On the content level: sustained bitterness toward another person requires a sense of entitlement to that bitterness. You can only maintain it if you believe, at some level, that you would never have done what they did, that your moral history exempts you from the judgment you are applying to them. This is the confrontation God levels at Jonah: Don’t you remember what the whole first part of this book was about? Don’t you remember what the fish was about? You are a sinner saved by grace. You are not the judge.

The question to ask oneself honestly is this: if you had their upbringing, their family, every influence and pressure they faced, their entire life, would you be confident you would have done nothing like what they did? Most honest self-examination will not support a yes.

On the form level: notice that God asks a question rather than making a declaration. After everything Jonah has done and said, including telling God he would rather die than live in a universe governed by a compassionate God, what does God do? He asks a gentle question. The patience and gentleness of God here are extraordinary. God is still totally committed to Jonah. He has not given up. He is still working with him, still seeking the moment when Jonah might wake up and see it for himself. The content of the question confronts Jonah’s pride. The form of the question demonstrates that God’s commitment to Jonah is unconditional.

This double movement, confronted on his sin, still unconditionally loved, is the definition of gospel identity:

“Ridiculously, comically, inveterately, deeply flawed, and yet completely and absolutely unconditionally loved.”

Jonah had this identity at the end of his psalm in the fish, and he has now slipped out of it. Violence, and the anger that feeds it, is what happens when gospel identity erodes.

Why moralism cannot produce forgiveness

A person whose identity rests on their moral performance, the moralist who says, I’m a good person, I’m better than others, and that’s why God loves me, is structurally incapable of genuine forgiveness. Forgiveness requires a certain kind of humility: you cannot sustain the sense that you have the right to be permanently angry if you genuinely believe you are also a sinner dependent on grace. But the moralist’s identity requires feeling better than others. You cannot simultaneously believe you deserve grace and believe you have the right to withhold it.

The gospel provides both the humility and the security needed for forgiveness. The humility: if God’s love for me is not based on my moral performance, I have no standing to treat others as my moral inferiors. The security: if God’s love for me is not contingent on my reputation, I can absorb the cost of someone’s wrong against me without needing to recoup it through vengeance or protect myself through avoidance.

Forgiveness as absorbing the debt in small payments

Forgiveness is not a single moment of resolution. It works more like a debt being paid off in installments. An illustration of this from a man reflecting on being abandoned by a fiancée: he had to forgive her, but it took a full year, paid in small sums:

“I paid them whenever I spoke to her and kept myself from rehashing the past. I paid them whenever I saw her with another man and refused self-pity and rehearsal inside for what she’d done to me. And I paid them whenever I praised her to others when I really wanted to slice away at her reputation.”

She never knew those payments. He never knew hers. But he could tell she made them. “Forgiveness is not only refusal to hate someone, it is choosing to love and will the good of the offender. It is painful. But wood, nails, and pain are the currency of forgiveness. But it is, as the ultimate wood and nails were, it leads to healing and more to resurrection.”

If you smash someone’s lamp, and they forgive you, they absorb the $50 cost. They pay it. Forgiveness is always absorption of a cost. When you forgive someone, you are taking on a debt that was not yours to bear and paying it yourself, in the refusals: refusing to rehearse, refusing to wound, refusing to knock the person to others. This is what it costs. This is what it means.

The two steps: Look at Jesus, then pay the debt

Two practical moves follow from this:

First, look at what Jesus has done for you. Not abstractly, look at it until it does something. The cross is the place where Jesus absorbed the cost of your violence against God without requiring you to pay it back. When that lands, the anger you are carrying toward someone else does not vanish, but it melts down to a proportion that can be managed rather than one that manages you.

The contrast between Jonah 4:5 and Luke 19:41, 44 makes the point vividly. Jonah sits outside a city that could have killed him and wanted to destroy it. Jesus, in Luke 19, approaches Jerusalem, the city that will kill him, and weeps over it: “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace, but now it is hidden from your eyes.” He says, I wished I could have gathered you like a mother gathers her children. He is weeping over the city that is about to execute him. This is Jesus Christ as the ultimate solution to violence: he takes violence without paying it back. He absorbs it. He pays the cost, in full, for all of it.

Second, pay the installments. There will be debt left even after looking at Jesus. The remainder is paid in small sums: each refusal to rehearse, each choice not to take the small pin at the person’s reputation, each time you choose what is truthful and good instead of what is satisfying to your grievance. This is costly. It is supposed to be. But it is the same currency, wood, nails, pain, that the ultimate forgiveness was paid in.

God can use imperfect forgivers

Jonah’s gospel presentation is, objectively, the worst on record: “Forty days and Nineveh will be destroyed. Period.” He could not bring himself to say the part about repentance and forgiveness. He left out everything that might have helped. And God used it anyway. If God can use that, he can use imperfect and inconsistent efforts at forgiveness. Jonah kept slipping out of his gospel identity and back into violence and resentment. God kept working with him. The same patience is available to anyone who is trying to forgive and finds themselves failing and trying again.

Summary

Jonah 3:1-4:5 moves along three lines. First, violence comes not only from Nineveh’s pagan brutality but also from Jonah’s moralistic religion. Both relativism and moral superiority can become seeds of violence. Second, forgiveness is neither vengeance nor resignation. It deals with hate before confronting the wrongdoer, which makes real justice possible. Third, forgiveness requires gospel identity: knowing yourself as both sinful and unconditionally loved. Jesus is the ultimate answer to violence, the one who approached the city that would kill him with tears instead of fire and absorbed the cost of human violence on the cross.

Practice

Diagnose which of the two identities you are operating from, moralist, grounding your worth in moral performance and moral comparison, or gospel-formed person, grounding your worth in grace, not performance. If you are sustained in bitterness toward someone, the diagnostic question is: do you believe you have the right to be angry? That sense of entitlement is the marker of moralism.
Before confronting someone who has wronged you, deal with your anger first, separately and prior to the confrontation. Do not approach the confrontation while still in the grip of the wound. What looks like justice-seeking at that stage will almost certainly become vengeance.
Look at what Jesus has done for you specifically enough and long enough that it begins to melt the anger down. This does not eliminate the anger entirely, but it reduces it to a proportion that can be managed.
Pay the remaining debt in small installments over time: refusing to rehearse the wrong internally, refusing to take small pins at the person’s reputation in conversation, refusing to humiliate when you have the opportunity. These refusals are the payments. They are costly and mostly invisible to the offender.
Do not wait for your forgiveness to be complete or your gospel identity to be stable before acting. Jonah’s gospel presentation was the worst in biblical history, and God used it. Imperfect, inconsistent efforts at forgiveness can still be used.

Credit

Based on Tim Keller’s sermons on Jonah at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, New York City.