Is Your Anger a Good Thing?
Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash
As a kid, my first “shoebox project” was on Jonah. I glued cut-out pictures to a cardboard box, retelling the version I’d learned in Sunday school: Jonah disobeyed God, got swallowed by a whale, and learned his lesson. The message? Obey or suffer the consequences. It’s a traumatizing message to hand a child, and yet many of us were handed it. The older I get, the more convinced I am that some stories were never meant for children—or at least not the way they’ve been told.
Years later, I returned to Jonah’s story, hoping to see something new. And what I found surprised me. There was no clear moral, no looming threat. Instead, I found a question—one of those piercing questions God tends to ask. A question that didn’t resolve but remained unsettled. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the story was never about the whale, but about a God who dares to ask us things we don’t yet know how to answer.
That question comes at the end, after Jonah runs from God’s call to warn Nineveh. After three days in the great fish, Jonah obeys and delivers his one-line sermon: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” It works. The people and the king repent. Even the animals wear sackcloth. But Jonah is furious—not because they didn’t listen, but because they did.
That’s often how we remember Jonah: the sulking prophet. But a decolonized reading invites us to pause, because Jonah wasn’t just a prophet—he was a survivor. The Assyrians were colonizers, and Nineveh was a city that sat at the center of imperial domination. This wasn’t just a mission trip; it was a command to confront a violent empire, one known for enslaving, displacing, and brutalizing his people. The violence, for Jonah, wasn’t abstract. It was personal. Perhaps, then, Jonah’s anger wasn’t petulance, but pain. And this story? Maybe it isn’t asking us to scorn him, but to see him.
So maybe his anger isn’t petulance, but the lament of someone who feels God failed to follow through. Jonah wanted justice, not platitudes. And maybe that’s not defiance at all. Maybe it’s what deep, anguished faith looks like.
“This is why I fled,” Jonah tells God after the Ninevites are spared “I knew you were merciful and compassionate, patient, full of love, and willing not to destroy,” he says, repeating Exodus 34, when God reveals God’s nature to Moses. But in quoting the text, Jonah misses one important word: “faithfulness,” also translated as “truth.” As Bible scholar Marty Solomon notes, Jonah—a prophet—would’ve known the text by heart, a detail we should hardly overlook. His omission isn’t a simple mistake; it is deliberate.
By leaving out “truth,” Jonah seems to be making a bold claim: God is loving, yes, but not faithful to the covenant, nor to justice. You see, Jonah expected fire, not forgiveness. After all, Scripture is full of promises that God will defend the oppressed and confront the oppressor. So when Nineveh is spared, it makes sense that Jonah is devastated. Like many of his people, he clung to the hope that God would deliver them—not by offering mercy to their enemies, but by ridding the land of them. God’s compassion toward the empire probably felt, to Jonah, like betrayal.
So maybe his anger isn’t petulance, but the lament of someone who feels God failed to follow through. Jonah wanted justice, not platitudes. And maybe that’s not defiance at all. Maybe it’s what deep, anguished faith looks like.
Then comes God’s response—not as a rebuke nor a lecture, but as a question that stopped me cold: “Is your anger a good thing?” (Jon. 4:4). It’s easy to hear this as a scolding because that’s often how we’ve been conditioned to believe God speaks. But I don’t think God is threatened by our emotions. God doesn’t silence Jonah or tell him to calm down. Instead, God meets him with gentleness, offering a question that invites reflection, not shame. Maybe it isn’t dismissal, but a sacred pause—an invitation to examine the fire burning within.
And maybe that question wasn’t just for Jonah. Maybe it’s meant for us, too. Because in a world so often unmoved by injustice, anger can be holy. It can rise from fierce love, from the deep knowing that things are not as they should be.
According to UNICEF, more than 50,000 children have been killed or injured in Gaza since October 2023. Last week, a mother was shot in the head while trying to get food for her babies. A crisis of starvation is unfolding before our eyes—and I’m angry. I’m angry at the injustice, the greed, the deliberate obstruction of aid. I’m grieving with mothers who cradle the bodies of their children, skin pulled tight over bone. I can’t stop wrestling with the unbearable dissonance of it all: while some children live in terror, mine sleep safely, bellies full. It’s not that I wish less for my own—but how I long for that to be true for every child. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe it never will. Grief doesn’t owe us explanations. And sometimes, neither does our anger.
In an interview with Krista Tippett, civil rights icon Ruby Sales puts it this way: “Love is not antithetical to being outraged.” She names two kinds of anger—redemptive and nonredemptive. Redemptive anger builds, transforms, upholds dignity. Nonredemptive anger tears down and mirrors the very violence it resists. The anger of white supremacy, for example, is nonredemptive. But the anger that rises in defense of the vulnerable? That is a holy flame. And like all fire, it must be tended with care.
Jonah sits outside the city, fuming not just at God’s mercy, but at a long and bloody history. His anger wasn’t baseless, it was born of grief. And grief, honored rightly, can give rise to a righteous anger that says: this is not okay. We need that kind of anger—the kind that fuels truth-telling, that turns over tables, that calls empire to account.
At the end of the story, God gives Jonah shade—brief comfort—and then takes it away. Again, Jonah is angry. “Is your anger about the shrub a good thing?” God asks. And Jonah, in his honesty, says, “Yes.” I love that moment. I love that God doesn’t strike him down for it. I love that Jonah doesn’t pretend to feel something he doesn’t. There’s space here to be human.
God responds, “You pity the shrub you didn’t grow, and I shouldn’t pity this city?” And then the story ends. No neat resolution. No tidy repentance. Just a lingering question, one that’s worth wrestling with. Is your anger a good thing? What does it reveal? What does it long for? And are we willing to sit with that question long enough to be transformed by it?
I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I refuse to let my spirit grow dull to the absurdity of injustice, to the brutality of empire, whether in Gaza or down the street. I will not look away. I will not let this ache be swallowed by indifference. And still, I will cling to hope—not as hollow comfort, but as a sacred act of resistance. Because anger, when rooted in love, is a sacred spark that fuels our giving, our divesting, our lamenting—and even our hope. These are not small things. They are how we carry the light, how we bear witness to a God who still dares to ask hard questions, and waits, not for our answers, but for our honesty—for us to tell the truth with our lives.
