But it is really not so easy. When you think about it, many of us are not so different from Jonah. We don’t want to pretend. We don’t want to just go through the motions. Rather, we want to come to personal turnarounds worthy of the name. And so we will wait until that special moment comes. But the Bible knows that for most people that moment will never arrive and so it provides set times to improve regardless. Yom Kippur is one of those set times.
Perhaps we can now better understand why we read Jonah’s story on Yom Kippur.
Given the above, the message may be pretty straightforward: Don’t worry about integrity, just say you’re sorry and do the best you can. For many of us, this may sound fairly uninspiring. It sounds like it shouldn’t be good enough – and that’s exactly what Jonah thought. But the big news is that God thought otherwise.