As we monks know, Saint Benedict warns against obedience that is cringing or sluggish or half-hearted, or that is carried out with grumbling or any reaction of unwillingness. According to these criteria Jonah’s obedience was not pleasing to God. And yet, as we have been hearing these last few days, the Lord was able to use Jonah’s reluctant obedience to convert and save the people of Nineveh. In this we see, once again, that wherever possible God will never use us simply as a means to some desired end that he has in view. For at Jonah’s first refusal to warn the people of Nineveh, God could surely have found someone else more willing to carry out his plan for these condemned people. But, instead, he persevered in his choice of Jonah because he wanted to use this experience as a means of expanding Jonah’s fundamentally good heart to embrace even those he considered his enemies. Jonah should thus give us hope in the face of our own imperfect obedience and encourage us to allow God’s grace to transform our obedience so that is becomes the practical expression of our love for the one who proclaimed: I have come not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.