Michael Gerson mentioned on Facebook this week that he is re-reading Graham Greene’s “The Power and The Glory.” It’s the story of a failed priest on the run from the police. He is friendless, homeless and searching for some sense of purpose in his life. Hiding from his calling and decisions he has made in the past he is ironically incapable of not being a priest and ministering to people – even at the risk of his life. Tormented by his own sense of guilt he spends the whole of the novel both in flight and in pursuit.

It is so much like the life of Jonah. I don’t know if Graham Greene had him in mind as he wrote but how similar their stories are. I’ve been thinking about Jonah for a couple of reasons. First, I taught on the Book of Jonah this week. Second, I’ve had similar experiences over the years and have come to believe we all have had at least one “Nineveh” in our lives.

Mine are not cities or nation states. They are people. There are people in our lives who deserve our anger and God’s and we have built a small but growing dark area of our lives around our anger. We nurse and feed it. There are people I consider hypocrites – but they are successful in ministry and life.

There are people about whom I enjoy hearing bad news. When I see articles about their failures I read and re-read them. I don’t skim. I absorb the details. I linger. The Germans have a word for it: schadenfreude. It means finding joy in the misfortune of others. It is the delicious feeling of knowing that someone you despise has received what you knew they deserved all along. They are undone and, ideally, in public for everyone to see.

There are people I have met along the way who do not meet my standards or God’s. I have become an expert in their hypocrisy and their being unqualified for success. I know their flaws and failures and honestly I don’t want to see them humbled. I want to see them exposed.

I think that is why Jonah ran. He ran from grace he could not understand. He ran from the chance to be free of his own anger. He ran from love. Greene writes:

“… God is love. I don’t say the heart doesn’t feel a taste of it but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn’t recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us – God’s love. It set fire to a bush in the desert didn’t it and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around.”

It’s true, isn’t it? For some people their being humbled or saved is not enough for us. First, we want to see them exposed for who we know them to be – and then they can repent afterwards. Then God can save them.

I read somewhere that “resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” It’s true and only the kind of love that is enough to scare us and from which we long to run can save us. I would have headed to Spain myself and suppose I still do when God’s love for my Nineveh’s exposes me – not them – for who I am.

Jonah’s story is ours.