Jonah is a funny little book. The story takes us to a city in modern day Iraq, and a reluctant and grumpy prophet who would do anything to avoid his calling. When God changes his mind and doesn’t destroy Nineveh, he seems disappointed. It’s tricky to work out who the story is written for. Is it a warning to us that God punishes the wicked but forgives those who repent? Is it an encouragement to hear God’s call on our lives, no matter how unattractive it might seem at first? Is it telling us that anyone, however unlikely can be helpful in God’s work of saving people from themselves? Well, it is possibly all of the above. But what it seems to describe is a way of living that we would struggle to identify with now. God is threatening the people of a whole city. And the people of the city, led by their king, all amend their ways and are reprieved. We live in a world of individuals and choices and although we might identify as British or even Yellow Bellies, our own individual freedoms are important to us. We expect individuals to be answerable for their actions or even punished for them, but we don’t, generally speaking, think it’s fair for God to punish entire cities because the council is corrupt, say, or the shopkeepers are dishonest. We feel a keen sense of injustice that civilians are being killed in such numbers in Gaza in an attempt to root out terrorists, for example. 

War has the capacity to make victims of everyone. The principles of a Just War, devised by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas, building on traditions of the ancient world, include the ideas that force must be proportionate and civilian casualties must be avoided. As another Remembrance Sunday comes around and another year has passed of conflict in the world, it is important to remember alongside the fallen in battle, all those lives lost that are not engaged in armed combat: the children, the elderly, hospital patients, families trying their best to survive, the uprooted and displaced. War, like the vengeful God portrayed in the story of Jonah, doesn’t differentiate between the innocent and the guilty. At the end of the story, God reminds Jonah how precious every life is, including the trees and the cattle. Every name etched on a war memorial and every little grave we see being dug in Gaza, or the thousand Israelis murdered on 7^th October last year, is a precious life to God, an individual as well as a member of a community. We may, at times, think there is nothing we can do to prevent or end war. As individuals, perhaps not, but as a member of a community of Christians, witnessing to the value of human life and the love of God, I have to live in hope.

You may have noticed a change to the format of the bulletin.  Do let me know what you think of it.