Jonah ends up on the shore once again, after having spent three days in the bowels of the sea monster. The word of the Lord comes to him again, ordering Jonah to proclaim Nineveh’s doom, and this time Jonah obeys. Although it takes three days to walk through the whole city, the inhabitants immediately heed the proclamation and begin to fast on the first day, hoping that the Lord might relent and save what has been unambiguously marked for condemnation. Had they not dared to hope that they might be saved, they would not have changed. And it is not just a few who dared to hope, but the whole city banded together, from the King even down to the beasts to do penance and to cry out for a mercy that had not been explicitly offered.
In this story, at least, the audacity of hope prevails, and God, who “saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out” (Jonah 3:10). Let us, too, have the audacity to hope in mercy, even where it is not proclaimed, because God’s heart is nowhere so perfectly revealed as in the heart of Christ, who gives his life not only for the whole world, but most especially for those whose salvation one might have the least reason to hope.