The Last Line of Jonah Is a Question About a City

There is a man in my neighborhood who prays for eleven people, and he has prayed for the same eleven for thirty years.

I know that because he told me, and he was not boasting and he was not complaining. He keeps a small book. Wife, children, their spouses, two grandchildren, his brother, a neighbor, and one man from work who has been on the list since before I was born.

He is a better man than I am and I want that said before anything else. Thirty years of faithful, particular, unglamorous praying for eleven named people is not a small thing and I would not trade one page of it for a hundred general prayers about the world.

But he asked me a question once, at a table, that I could tell he had been carrying for a while. He said: do you think it is strange that I have never prayed for anywhere I have not been.

He had noticed something. His praying was exactly the size of his own life, and it had been for three decades, and nobody had ever suggested to him that it was allowed to be any bigger.

How the book ends

Everybody knows the first chapter of Jonah. Almost nobody knows the last verse, and the last verse is the whole point of the book.

The prophet has preached, the city has repented, and he is furious about it. He goes outside the city, builds himself a shelter, and sits down to see what will happen. God grows a plant to shade him, then takes it away, and Jonah says he is angry enough to die about a plant.

And then God asks him a question and the book stops.

And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle? (Jonah 4:11, King James Version)

That is the end. There is no verse twelve. The prophet never answers, and the reader is left holding the question, which is exactly what the writer intended.

Notice what God counts. He does not count sins and He does not count strategic importance. He counts persons, more than a hundred and twenty thousand of them, and then He mentions the animals, which is either tender or funny and is probably both.

You have a God who counts a city by heads rather than by usefulness, and that arithmetic was His long before it was anybody's mission statement, and Jonah 4 is where He does the counting out loud, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person an interest in numbers they will never meet.

The prayer He taught is not household sized

Go back to the pattern He gave, and read the second petition with fresh eyes.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:10)

In earth. Not in my house, and not in my week. The petition is the size of the planet, and He put it in the mouths of ordinary people with ordinary lives before He taught them to ask for bread.

That order matters. The bread comes after. A person praying this pattern asks for something the size of the earth and then asks for lunch, and the sequence is not an accident.

You were handed a request bigger than your own life on the day you learned to pray at all, and Matthew 6 puts it in the same short prayer as the daily bread, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an enormous request feel like something a person can actually mean.

And there is an older version of the same invitation, spoken to a king, and it is startling how direct it is.

Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. (Psalm 2:8)

Ask of me. The uttermost parts. That is not a promise about real estate. It is the shape of an appetite that God Himself proposes.

Why prayers shrink, and it is not selfishness

I want to be careful with the man in my neighborhood, because the easy explanation is wrong and it is also unkind.

Prayers do not usually shrink because a person got selfish. They shrink because a person got tired, and because the things in front of them are heavy, and because a household in trouble absorbs everything a person has. That is not a defect of love. That is love under load.

There is a second reason, and it is more practical than spiritual. Most of us have no idea how to pray for a city, because we have never been given a sentence to use. Praying for a sick brother has a shape. Praying for four million strangers does not obviously have one, so we skip it, and skipping it hardens into never having done it.

You have not been failing at something, you have been missing a sentence nobody handed you, and Jonah 4 shows God supplying the concern rather than demanding it. The same Spirit is the one who gives a person an appetite they did not manufacture.

And Paul, standing in front of a hostile crowd of philosophers, says something that makes the whole business less abstract.

And hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation. (Acts 17:26)

Of one blood. The people in that city you will never visit are not a category. They are relatives, and He set the boundaries of where they live.

You are related to the people you have never prayed for, and the relation was decided by Him rather than by any interest of yours (Acts 17:26), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a fact about descent feel like a fact about family.