THIRD SUNDAY OF YEAR "B"

THIRD SUNDAY OF YEAR   Cycle  B

Jonah 3, 1-5,10; 1 Cor 7,29-31; Mark 1,14-20

Repentance, Detachment, Faith

Talk about being a Jonah. Jonah is a ticket to bad luck. If an accident takes place, there must have been a Jonah around. The original prophet Jonah was an angry man. God told him to go to Nineveh in Assyria and preach repentance. But Jonah the Jew was a narrow nationalist and wouldn’t lower himself preaching to a town of pagans, dirty, smelly uncircumcised people. Nineveh was the capital of Assyria, a by word for cruelty and violence. Even the prophet Nahum said it was (and I quote) “a bloody city, full of lying and looting.” Jonah, sent to call Nineveh to repentance, would rather God destroyed the city, a bunch of nasty of foreigners. One feature of a narrow nationalism is the assumption that God is on our side and that he should smite our enemies, and he will. That formula is still being applied today. “Kill them all to solve your problems”  It was used in Rwanda where 800,000 fellow humans were systematically massacred in the space of 18 months. Hutus and Tutsis, most of them baptised Christians, killed each other in a frenzy of mutual hatred. Interestingly, the massacres were carefully planned with the help of native Roman Catholic priests. So kill and be at peace.  To lift the gloom, let me tell you about the man who placidly went to confession and said, “It is 22 years since my last confession.   I have no sins to confess.” The priest was baffled. “You must be having some sins. Don’t you have some enemies ?”  The man answered, “No not at all. I killed them all.”

So to come back to our Jonah. He didn’t want the Ninevites to repent. But God wanted them to; wanted to show them mercy. The author of the book of Jonah wants to show us that God’s mercy crosses boundaries, be they national, religious or ethnic. In the end it is not just Nineveh that repents. It is also our poor angry Jonah, who learns at last that mercy is greater than judgement, and that God accepts the repentance even of Israel’s enemies, whom he also loves.  So the story of Jonah has a happy ending.

In the New Testament we learn how the disciples are called from one form of life to another. They are called in a way that radically interrupts their present way of life. Jesus just marches up and says to them: “Follow me.” They follow him at once, leaving family, friends and work.”  Here the call is to a rupture with the old life, with their place in the world.

Some of our faith experiences confirm and even deepen our perception of the good things in our life  -  our loved ones, our search for justice, our enjoyment of feasts and parties, art and music. Faith does not demand a sudden break with these, necessarily. It does invite us to link them to God. Faith invites us to discover how all these things can be integrated into our total self-giving to God.  Yet there are times when the Gospel seems to demand change, rejection of certain features of our lives. Discipleship can be both confirmation and loss.

In today’s 2nd. Reading St. Paul stresses the loss. He is convinced that the present  world has little time to run, so he recommends his hearers to keep their distance from engagements with the world  -  marriage, buying and selling, and so on.  While today we may see the end of history still a little way of  -  especially as we have survived the millennium  -  we can still learn from Paul.  Faith does require that we recognise that we will lose everything, all that we have and those we love, but if we hold on to that Resurrection Faith, all will be recovered in a new, transcendent and eternal way. It requires a certain surrender of these goods; as Jesus said, “Seek first the kingdom of God.” Once we seek that first and foremost, the other goods of our lives will become part of that end, part of our sharing in that kingdom already here on earth.

PRAYER        Lord Jesus, you are the good news. You are the key to existence. You are the cornerstone of my life. You are the inexpressible joy and fullness of life. Fill my heart with a living sense that the Gospel is the best news I can hear, and grant me the grace to embrace it today.

Today is the Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, Presbyter, Religious and Doctor of the Church.

Born near Aquino (Italy) about 1225, Thomas became a Dominican in 1244, and died on his way to the Council of Lyons in 1274. Educated in Monte Casino, Naples, Paris, and Cologne, he is regarded as one of the greatest theologians in the history of the Church. Even though Aquinas’ writings faced ecclesiastical opposition in his time, the substance of his life’s work has endured as an authentic exposition of Christian teaching and carries unique official approval. He is remembered for his modesty, the prayerfulness of his personal life, and the abiding influence of his thought.