3rd Sunday Year B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2015

The First Reading today gave us only a brief extract from the story of Jonah. The story is a sort of parable, told by an unidentified author – a humorous story, but one whose punchline was anything but humourous.

You know the main thrust of the story. An old-time prophet, Jonah, is commanded by God to preach doom to Israel’s brutal enemy, the Assyrians. Jonah does the opposite. He heads off, by sea, to the far end of the earth. But he does not get far. God sends a cyclone, and the boat goes nowhere. The storm gets worse. The superstitious pagan sailors assume that some god or other is angry. So they all pray like anything, but it does not work. God must be upset about someone on board. So they toss up to find out – and Jonah loses the toss.  Reluctantly they toss him overboard – and the storm stops immediately. Lucky for Jonah, a whale is passing by with its mouth open just at the moment that Jonah hits the water; and it swallows him alive.  Three days later, unable to digest him, the whale vomits Jonah out onto dry land, not all that far from Nineveh, the Assyrian capital. God tells Jonah to get moving. So he does. He goes off and preaches his threat of pending disaster. He then moves away a bit, makes a patchy shelter for himself from the sun, and sits hoping to see the fireworks. There are none. The Assyrians take the message seriously and reform. Jonah goes mad at God. All along he knew in his heart that God would be a “softie” and would change his mind.  And now these hated national enemies of Israel would be saved – and that was the last thing he wanted. God responded by giving him a short homily. And that was the end of the story.

The point of the story was to stir the listeners’ interest and then to leave them up in the air, wondering. What was the point? The author was addressing Jewish exiles recently returned to Israel from Babylon - many of them still hostile to their former captors, crooked on the people they found living now in their country, on their lands; and feeling very insecure. Most of them reacted, as frightened people usually do, by safeguarding their identity by drawing the boundaries ever more clearly. They very definitely wanted a “God on their side”, and not only that, but a “God against the others”.

It sounds not unlike a “crusade against the axis of evil”, the “war against terror”. Whatever the justification for due vigilance and concern about necessary safeguards in the world at the moment, there is always the danger of extending rejection of violent fundamentalist extremism to the non-violent and guiltless mainstream.

Today’s Gospel introduced Jesus’ early mission with his proclaiming “the Good News of God”. What is the “Good News of God”? that God will sort out our enemies eventually? In fact, Jesus will go on to reveal a God not unlike the one whom Jonah was crooked on - a God who “causes the sun to rise on the bad as well as the good, and the rain to fall on honest and dishonest alike”. Indeed, precisely in that context, Jesus would add, “Be merciful as your heavenly Father is merciful”. 

On a more personal note, how would you feel when you got to heaven if you found someone you strongly dislike, someone whose attitudes and actions you deeply disapprove of, already there, and perhaps even slightly higher than you? If we could not enthusiastically rejoice, in fact we would not be in heaven. We would still be in Purgatory. We shall experience heaven only when we have shed the last vestige of self-preoccupation and self-importance, and have learnt to love everyone just as God does – totally, without reservation or conditions, and with vibrant enthusiasm.

The parable about Jonah was on to something – the Good News of God!