Jonah did not want to proclaim doom in Nineveh as God had ordered him, and when he finally did so, Jonah finds himself even more humiliated because the doom that Jonah proclaimed did not come to pass (Jonah 4). Jonah wants Nineveh condemned, in accordance with what he had proclaimed. He has more regard for the rectitude of his own proclamation than he does for the life of those he had been called to condemn.
There are people who, like Jonah, are ready to rail at a God who may find hidden and unexpected ways to save those who “know not their right hand from their left” (Jonah 4:11). For example, there are many people who seem desperate to attack anyone who dares hope that all human beings—each one of whom is God’s beloved work, whom God desires life for and fashions in his own image—could perhaps be saved in the fullness of time. But do people not have a right to hope that God’s will be done? The first letter to Timothy declares that God wills “all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4)? Surely we have a right to hope for that! If certain people choose not to have this hope, that is their concern, but they should know that great saints have had this hope, including St. Edith Stein, who hoped for the salvation of the Nazis who killed her and her kinsmen. (For more information on this Christian hope, please see https://www.wordonfire.org/hope/.) For certain saints, like Edith Stein, this very hope for the salvation of all men in the face of the greatest odds might constitute part of their spiritual mission. Those who would take this hope from such little ones who may be called to this hope today might well have to answer to God for the divinely-willed missions and fruitfulness that may be lost as a result.