When we were children, our mothers told us: “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” Generally speaking, that’s good advice. But sometimes a hard word needs to be said.

 

According to Jonah 1:1-2, God asked a man named Jonah to speak a hard word to Nineveh: “The word of the LORD came to Jonah son of Amittai: ‘Go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it, because its wickedness has come up before me.’”

 

Who is Jonah? What is Nineveh? And does God expect us to speak a hard word too?

 

Jonah was a prophet. Second Kings 14:25 tells us four things about him: when he preached, what he prophesied, who his father was, and where he lived. Jonah preached during the reign of King Jeroboam II in the first half of the 8^th Century B.C. He prophesied that the king would restore the boundaries of Israel to their former greatness, and this prophecy was fulfilled. His father was an otherwise unknown man named Amittai, and he lived in Gath Hepher, a small town in the Galilee region of northern Israel.

 

In Jonah’s day, Nineveh was a great city of the Assyrian empire, located on the Tigris River, near modern-day Mosul, Iraq. It would eventually become the capital city of the empire. Nineveh was a large, wealthy, and powerful city, but it could also be quite cruel. In 722 B.C., long after Jonah, the Assyrians invaded the northern kingdom of Israel, destroyed it, and sent its people into permanent exile. Needless to say, there was no love lost between the Israelites and the Assyrians.

 

And that’s what makes Jonah such an interesting prophet. He was a nationalistic prophet, foretelling the expansion of Israel’s borders. And he was commissioned to speak a hard word against Israel’s soon-to-be mortal enemy.

 

What was that hard word? What sins of the Ninevites had come to God’s attention? Were they personal sins? Was Nineveh rife with sexual immorality? Were they social sins? Was God concerned with Nineveh because of violence and injustice? We don’t know, and Jonah doesn’t say. All we know is that God asked Jonah to “preach against” the city. We also know that Jonah’s was a message of imminent judgment: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overturned” (3:4).

 

At the end of the day, however, the book of Jonah is not really about Nineveh and its sins. Instead, it is about Jonah and his responsibilities as a prophet. He lived in a messed up world, and God commissioned him to do something about it.

 

And that’s where Jonah becomes a model for us. Like Nineveh, our world—our country, our community—commits its fair share of personal and social sins. And like Nineveh’s sins, our sins are due for judgment. The important question is whether we will take up the prophetic responsibility of saying the hard word that needs to be said, or keep silent. If we read Jonah, we’ll speak up, knowing that the hard word of judgment is simply a prelude to the good news of divine mercy.