3rd Sunday Year B - Homily 6

 Homily 6 - 2021

As far as I can remember, I have never in all my life preached on the Book of Jonah — but I want to today. It is a quite short book and takes no time to read — less than three pages in my bible. It does not seriously pretend to be history. Rather, it is a good-natured short-story, with a clear moral — though many of us know little more about it than Jonah’s adventure with the whale.

The gist of the story is that God sent Jonah to the king and people of the distant capital of the oppressive Assyrian empire, Nineveh, with the mission to preach their destruction unless they radically changed their destructive ways. Jonah had no desire to go, because he knew that God was “a God of tenderness and compassion”, as he put it, and would pardon the nation if they did repent. Jonah preferred to tell them nothing. As the cruel enemies of his own people, he wanted them to be destroyed. So he caught a ship and headed off to go as far as he could in the opposite direction. God arranged a storm at sea to happen. Jonah was thrown overboard; and an accommodating whale swallowed him, only beach itself on dry land three days later and vomit him out. God sternly repeated his commission.

Jonah was in a fix. But by now he was frightened of God, so he went to Nineveh and reluctantly preached his message — one sentence, eleven words, as we heard in today’s First Reading: “Only forty days more and Nineveh is going to be destroyed”. True enough, the king took the message seriously, ordered everyone and everything to do penance. And God did relent — just as Jonah had feared.

In some ways, Jonah’s story reminds me of the pandemic. There are a number of people resisting cooperation, who are unwilling to sacrifice their freedoms and familiar comforts, even if not sticking to the restrictions unnecessarily puts themselves and others at risk of infection and consequent death. This creates problems for civic leaders. The only way for them to satisfy the sceptics would be to do nothing, or too little — as has happened in the United States, England and elsewhere. Yet the more successful the inconvenient imposition of quarantine, lockdowns, closed borders, etc. has been [as here in Australia], the harder it has been to convince the sceptics that the dangers are real, and dangerously so.

And now comes the issue of the vaccines. The longer the use of a vaccine is delayed, the longer people remain in danger of infection from this present virus and further mutations that could develop. The sooner the vaccines can be brought into operation, and the more general their use, the safer the whole community will become. Whether we like it or not, we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. To take the vaccine is our responsibility, not only for our own life and health, but for the health and lives of others.

For that reason, Pope Francis, speaking from his experience in Italy [which has been significantly different from ours], has clearly said that we have a moral responsibility, for our sake and for the sake of our world, to consider getting vaccinated, and as quickly as possible. Both he and Pope Benedict have already publicly done so, hoping their example might encourage others.

May the story of Jonah, the classical anti-hero, warn us it's dangerous to mess with God!