What our portion today does not discuss is Jonah's reaction to God's forgiveness, a part of the story that I always found interesting. After giving his message, Jonah goes up to the top of a nearby hill and waits in eager anticipation to watch the wrath of God swallow up the city. When God does not, Jonah is furious that what he had preached did not come to pass. He wanted the sinful punished; he wanted to watch God in his wrathful fury make them suffer for all of their wrongdoing. When God chooses not to, Jonah says that he would rather die than see them unpunished.
I feel this wrath inside me from time to time. I get especially furious when someone does things that I believe to be particularly foolish, and yet they succeed anyway. "Where is the fairness or justice?" I cry, but the truth is that I want neither of those things. What I want is for those people to come crawling back to me, acknowledging my superiority and begging for my forgiveness. How dare God, or luck or fate or destiny, to deny that of me!
Thankfully, I can usually acknowledge my own sinfulness in such a wish. God does not have to send me comfort and then take it away, as He does with Jonah, for me to realize where my thoughts have gone wrong. Instead, I remind myself to continue to pray for those whose choices I dislike, for both their sakes and my own. I should not begrudge others when they receive God's mercy and blessings, especially when all I have also comes from His charity.