He wasn't angrythat God was cruel.

Jonah's reaction to the largest revival in scripture is to lose his temper. Isn't this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I fled — I knew that you are a gracious God, and merciful, slow to anger. He is not angry that God is cruel. He is angry that God is kind. So he goes out east of the city, sits down on a rock, and waits to see if it burns anyway. Jonah 4 : 1–3

He is asked one question out there — is it right for you to be angry? — and does not answer it. And instead of an argument he is given a plant. It comes up out of the dry ground overnight, and by the time he wakes it is over his head and still going, huge ribbed leaves unrolling above him in the heat. Jonah 4 : 4–6

And here is the only moment in four chapters where Jonah is happy. So Jonah was exceedingly glad because of the vine. He touches the leaves. He looks up through them at the sun. The man who has spent the whole book furious about mercy is absolutely delighted to receive some, and does not notice that this is the joke. Jonah 4 : 6

He settles in. Bread in his lap, waterskin at his side, back against a rock in deep green shade with the desert glaring away outside it. He did nothing to earn the vine, did not plant it, did not water it, and was not asked whether he deserved it. It simply arrived because somebody decided he should be comfortable. Jonah 4 : 6

He had already built himself a little booth out there — sticks and cloth, the kind of thing you throw up for a few nights — and now the vine covers the whole of it. He sleeps under it with his hand tucked under his cheek. He is, remember, still waiting for a city of a hundred and twenty thousand people to be destroyed, and he is sleeping very comfortably. Jonah 4 : 5

And then, at dawn, the sentence this book will be remembered for: God prepared a worm. Not an army, not a storm, not a fish this time. One small pink worm arrives at the base of the stem, looks up at it for a second — and it has a face, and the face is not unkind — and then gets to work. Jonah 4 : 7

It does not take long. The tendril that had wound itself round his staff while he slept goes slack. The green drains out. And by the time the sun is properly up the whole enormous thing has gone the colour of ash, leaf by leaf, over a man who is still asleep underneath it and has no idea. Jonah 4 : 7

He wakes into a grey cage. Dead leaves are falling on his shoulders and catching in his beard, and the whole shelter has turned to grey rope over his head. And the look on his face is real grief — the genuine article, for a plant that was not there two days ago and that he had nothing whatever to do with. Jonah 4 : 8

Then the wind. God prepared a sultry east wind — the scorching one that comes off the desert and takes the moisture out of everything, and it comes across the flat ground driving sand through the dead sticks of what used to be his shade. There is nowhere to go. He has built his whole position out here on a plant. Jonah 4 : 8

And the sun beats on his head until he faints, and he asks in himself to die, and says it is better for me to die than to live — which is the second time he has said it in one chapter. He would genuinely rather be dead than watch his enemies be forgiven. The book does not soften this and does not apologise for it. Jonah 4 : 8

Is it right for you to be angry about the vine? And Jonah, sunburnt, wrecked and beyond caring what he sounds like, says: it is right for me to be angry, even to death. Over a plant. He has just been shown, in about thirty hours, exactly how it feels to lose something you did not make and did not deserve and had grown very attached to. Jonah 4 : 9

You have been concerned for the vine, which you didn't work for or make grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night. Shouldn't I be concerned for Nineveh — that great city, with more than a hundred and twenty thousand people in it who can't tell their right hand from their left — and also much livestock? And that is the end. Jonah never answers. Jonah 4 : 10–11