Wednesday – 1st Week of Lent – A

At the very same time, the great superpower rising in the east was Assyria, and the capital of Assyria was Nineveh. Now, Nineveh was not just another pagan city to an Israelite. Way back then, Nineveh represented military terror, cruelty, idolatry, imperial domination. The Assyrians were infamous in the ancient world for flaying their enemies alive, deporting entire populations, public displays of torture. Within a few decades of Jonah's lifetime, Assyria would invade Israel, destroy Samaria, and scatter the ten tribes. So when God commands Jonah in the Book of Jonah, chapter three, “Set out for the great city of Nineveh” (Jonah 3:2), this is the equivalent of telling an Israelite prophet, go preach repentance to your future executioners.

However, Jonah at first resists and goes the other way, gets on a boat, and instead of going to Nineveh, he heads to Tarshish. And he does so not out of cowardice, but because, as he himself explains at the end of the Book of Jonah, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love” (Jonah 4:2). In other words, he feared that God would forgive Nineveh. And so Jonah wants justice, but God wants repentance. Jonah wants Nineveh destroyed. God wants Nineveh converted. How often do we seek to annihilate our enemies? How often do we feel we would be happier if somebody didn't show up to work the next day? How often do we easily rid ourselves of the gift of human life for our own comforts, for our own ways of thinking, or merely out of vengeance and out of anger? This is why God's ways are not our ways. God desires that none of his children, sons, and daughters be lost, but it depends on their freely given cooperation with his mercy, receiving his mercy.

So when God sends the big fish and Jonah is swallowed in the belly of the whale and spat up on the shores of Nineveh, we see what happens. Nineveh repents with fasting, sackcloth, ashes, moral reform, turning from violence, which is exactly what the Church calls us to do in Lent: prayer, fasting, repentance, conversion of life. In other words, God made of Jonah a sign to the Ninevites. So spectacular was this event of him arriving to their shores in the belly of a whale, that it moved even the heart of the king of Nineveh. And we're told that “When the news reached the king of Nineveh, he rose from his throne, laid aside his robe, covered himself with sackcloth, and sat in the ashes... When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, God repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out” (Jonah 3:10). My brothers and sisters, if only every nation in the world would humble itself before the Lord our God instead of demanding signs. This is what happens in the Gospel of Luke today, where Jesus says, “This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be to this generation." (Luke 11:29). How many signs does God send us personally, individually, beckoning us to repentance, to conversion? Well, he is sending us another sign: this forty-day period of Lent is a sign to us that God still cares. God still wants us to repent, put on sackcloth, sign ourselves with ashes, and turn from our evil ways. Go to confession. Humble yourself, yes, before the priest who is a stand-in for Jesus; through the priest's hands, Jesus's mercy flows to you, and you walk out of that confessional without a sin on your conscience, like Nineveh, to begin anew, but in the grace of the Lord. May Almighty God, through the intercession of all the angels and saints, especially the Queen of Heaven, bless you this day and give you the gift of repentance in your heart and in your mind, so that we can engage in ongoing conversion every day, out of love for the Lord. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.