My dear brothers and sisters, in today's readings we hear about the prophet Jonah and the parable of the Good Samaritan that fell from the lips of our Lord himself. These stories embody themes of God's mercy, justice, and the call to love others—even if they don't belong to our creed, nation, or beliefs.
The Lord is asking us to extend our vision beyond the standards of the world and to embrace others as he asks us to embrace them: as our brothers, our sisters, our neighbour—to love all.
In the Gospel, our Lord speaks of the Samaritan. We know that Samaria was an enemy of the people of God. They considered the Samaritans an evil people, and believed that if you mingled with a Samaritan, you would be made unclean. And yet, it is a Samaritan who helps a Jewish man who was beaten, robbed, and left to die by the side of the road. His own countrymen passed him by—one excuse after another—even a priest.
And yet this Samaritan, a man who didn’t belong to the people of God, had the compassion in his heart to extend a helping hand to his fallen neighbour.
In the first reading, from the Book of Jonah, we are told that the word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai: “Set out for the great city of Nineveh and preach against it. Their wickedness has come up before me.” But what does Jonah do? Jonah made ready to flee to Tarshish—away from the Lord.
He feared this command to go to a different people and preach to them the Word of the Lord. And sometimes, we too fear what can happen to us when we choose good over evil, right over wrong, light over the darkness of our hearts, our lives, and our cultures. But the Lord is saying that any man or woman beneath the sun is our brother and sister—worthy of salvation.
In other words, by the very dignity of being children of God, they have infinite worth. Therefore, we should try to extend God's saving plan to all—to invite everyone to repentance, even when it is difficult.
So Jonah did what most of us would do before this commandment of God—he fled, and did his own thing. He tried to flee to Tarshish. However, the Lord upset the sea; he hurled a violent wind upon it, and in the furious tempest that arose, the ship was on the point of breaking up. Eventually, the Lord sent a large fish who swallowed Jonah whole, and Jonah remained in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
This is the image that our Lord himself takes upon his lips when he describes the sign that will be given to the evil generation of his fellow countrymen who did not believe in him. They wanted a sign, but he said the only sign that would be given to them would be the sign of Jonah: “For just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights, so too shall the Son of Man be in the belly of the earth before he rises again from death.”
Jonah is spewed out onto the shores of Nineveh by the great fish—almost cleansed, renewed, reinvigorated. He goes to that people and preaches to them the Word of God—repentance, goodness, and penance. And lo and behold, from the highest to the lowest, from the king to the beasts, all of them fasted; the entire people of Nineveh put on sackcloth and did severe penance. And Nineveh was spared.
My dear brothers and sisters, we too are called to do penance—the penance that Our Lady stressed in Lourdes, infallibly in all her apparitions. But what is penance? What is penance worthy of the Lord? What is the kind of sacrifice the Lord wants to see us engaged in?
The kind of penance he would like to see is one that helps us to change our ways, to transform our minds and our hearts, and to ultimately think more of others—penance for others, penance for the souls in purgatory, penance for the sins of this world.
And if you are a priest and listening to this, as I myself am a priest, we can do penance for our fellow priests—those who have scandalized God’s little ones, and our fellow priests who continue to be attacked by the evil one, disillusioned, hypnotized by the ways of the world, when the Lord has called us out of the world.
My brothers and sisters, on your venture to do penance, may Almighty God bless you, and may Our Lady intercede for you.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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