Jonah Part 2: It’s Not Fair!
BMCC Sunday Sermon · 13 Sep 2026 · Speaker: Gia Yu
Children learn to say “it’s not fair” early in life. Gia Yu opened her message by recounting what it was like to be the eldest of five siblings: on birthdays, her slice of cake was bigger, her books were new, her clothes were new — and her younger brothers and sisters would call out in her ear, “Not fair! Not fair!” The phrase did not stay in childhood. As she grew older, she found herself saying it too — especially in her early years working in theatre, where she watched others be paid on time while she was left unpaid year after year, with no recourse to complain because she was a freelancer. That sense of unfairness went deep into the bone.
This Sunday’s message was the second part of the “Tuna” series — Jonah 3:10–4:4, together with Micah 6:8. It was the second of two consecutive Sundays in which Gia Yu taught through the book of Jonah at BMCC. The first message began with Jonah’s flight from God’s call, his three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, and his eventual repentance, showing that God’s justice and God’s mercy are not opposites but are joined together by the love of the cross. This second message asks something more specific and closer to home: when God forgives those who seem “undeserving,” how will Jonah — and how will we — respond?
When History Becomes Hatred
Gia Yu began with the idea of inherited national grievance. She admitted that in her younger years, shaped by received attitudes, she refused to set foot in Japan. A friend eventually persuaded her, and she made her first trip there only in her thirties — after which she came to love the food, the cleanliness, and the refined, thoughtful design of daily life there, so much so that it is now a place she returns to every year. Preconceived prejudice often drives people to irrational decisions.
Jonah’s situation was more complicated still. Assyria was Israel’s enemy across generations, and between the two lay a deep accumulation of historical grievance. His compatriots had been slaughtered by the Assyrians, and as a prophet Jonah may already have foreseen that Israel would one day be destroyed by Assyria. What he carried was not only personal anger, but the trauma and fear of an entire people. So when God instructed him to go and preach in Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, the reaction at the bottom of Jonah’s heart was close to: “God, how could you?”
Three Layers of Resistance, Three Faces of the Self
The speaker identified three layers of resistance woven through Jonah’s refusal.
The first is jealousy and anger. She pointed to the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son in Luke: the younger son sins and returns, the father throws a feast, and the elder brother is filled with resentment. Jonah understood salvation the same way — salvation belongs to Israel; what claim do the Gentiles have? The logic behind this treats God’s grace like a cake of limited size: one more slice for you means one less for me. But Gia Yu asked: what if what is being shared is not cake, but air? God’s grace is not a zero-sum game.
“Tuna Part 1: Justice Belongs to God” had already noted that God’s justice and mercy are not opposites but two sides of one whole, run through by the love of God like the cross itself — and Jonah had forgotten that this love can never be diluted. Ephesians 1:4 tells us that God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world: this is grace, not qualification. These words carry a particular resonance for the BMCC community — many here have carried wounds of varying depth, inflicted by prejudice in the environments they grew up in or in the faith communities they belonged to. The speaker reminded the congregation that these wounds should not become our reason for directing the same prejudice at others; rather, they let us know God’s boundless love and grace more deeply.
The second is self-centredness. Jonah was a prophet greatly relied upon by Jeroboam II of Israel; his prophecy that the nation would recover lost territory had come true, and the whole country trusted him. Now he was being asked to walk openly into an enemy nation and announce that it would be overthrown in forty days — while knowing that God is loving, and that if they repented God would very likely relent and not send the disaster. That would amount to his own prophecy failing. He was afraid of losing face and losing his reputation, and that fear made him run, even deliberately boarding a foreign ship so his own countrymen would not recognise him. Gia Yu cited Philippians 2:3: “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility value others above yourselves.” Pride lets a person live inside a bubble of reputation and refuse to answer the call.
The third is self-righteousness. Jonah knew God’s attributes intimately — he even took the initiative to quote the Psalms to describe God’s mercy: “The Lord is merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” — and used this as his reason for refusing the call. He said: “I knew all along that you were this kind of God; that is why I fled in a hurry!” He went and sat outside the city, wanting only to prove himself right. He analysed how God works; he allowed his knowledge of God to remain at the level of the head, detaching from the prophet’s distinctive calling to walk with God and becoming, instead, a researcher. The sad thing is that this barrier of knowing made it impossible for Jonah to let his own narrow escape from death touch his heart. He sat in a shelter outside Nineveh waiting, determined to prove he was right — but all of it amounted to substituting intellectual knowledge for a real encounter with God.
Overthrown, or Turned Around?
There is a word in the book of Jonah, “overthrow” (Hebrew הפך, hafakh), which can mean “destroy” and can also mean “turn around.” Jonah announced: “Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.” Strictly speaking, his prophecy was fulfilled, and God did not lie — Nineveh was indeed “overthrown,” but the manner of its overthrowing was repentance, turning its face away from evil: a turning around into renewal and salvation, not destruction.
Another key word is “evil” (Hebrew ra’ah), which recurs through the first three chapters of Jonah and refers to the sin of the people of Nineveh. But by chapter 4 Nineveh’s evil has disappeared, because they have repented; in its place is the evil in Jonah’s own heart — his anger, his self-righteousness. God saw all of this, and yet did not give up on Jonah. God arranged a castor bean plant to shade him so the blazing sun would not burn him; then arranged for a worm to eat the plant, leaving Jonah exposed to the scorching sun and furious, and finally asked him: “You had compassion on a mere plant. Should I not care for those more than one hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left?” God’s shepherding was there all along, right through the storm of Jonah’s emotions.
Kenting in the Mountain Wind: A True Testimony
At the end of the message, Gia Yu shared a personal testimony of a brush with death. About a year ago, after a death in her family, nasal polyps left her with severe insomnia, which eventually triggered a relapse of her depression. In that period, lying down would block her nose completely and she could only rest sitting up; being unable to breathe naturally was extremely hard, and she truly wanted to die and give up on life. Unable to sleep in the middle of the night, and afraid of waking her partner, she would go out to the sofa and cry quietly while stroking the cat.
Later she travelled to Kenting with friends and, while riding a stand-up paddleboard, a seven-foot wave capsized her into the deep sea. She said she could not swim, and her life jacket — too large for her frame — could not support her sufficiently; the board leash also snapped on impact. In that moment underwater with nothing above her, she called out silently to God. Miraculously, she was carried by the waves onto a rocky shore, where she waited nearly an hour before being rescued.
She said that the night before the accident, unable to sleep, she had gone out onto the guesthouse balcony and for a moment thought about jumping off — because it was simply too hard. Like Jonah, who said to the sailors in the storm: “Throw me into the sea and the waves will be still, for this storm has risen on my account.” When Jonah truly fell into the sea, close to death, seaweed wrapped around his neck, and only then did he finally call out to God; in the belly of the great fish for three days and three nights, everything was stripped away, and only then was his heart truly broken open and transformed. “That deep sea was the space God prepared for me.” Just like this place, BMCC — a space where people can stop, reflect, and turn their thoughts back to God.
Chosen to Be Passed On
At the close of the message, the speaker invited the congregation to reflect: we have received grace freely — are we also willing to pass it on freely? She cited 2 Peter 3:8–9, reminding the congregation that God’s time is not like human time, and that God’s heart is for all people to come to repentance. She also quoted Mother Teresa: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with GREAT love.” To be chosen by God is not a privilege — it is a calling to become God’s messenger, an angel, joining the good work God is doing in the world.
BMCC is a home that welcomes everyone. Whether you are in the storm, in the belly of the fish, or sitting in a shelter outside the city and raging at God — there is a space here where you can stop, cry out to God, and be caught again by love. If you are still struggling, perhaps you might come one Sunday, and take a breath.
