Lenten Conversion at the Sign Greater Than the Sign of Jonah, Wednesday of the First Week of Lent, February 21, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the First Week of Lent
Memorial of St. Peter Damian, Doctor of the Church
February 21, 2024
Jonah 3:1-10, Ps 51, Lk 11:29-32

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• We’re now one week into Lent and the Church today gives us a powerful reminder of the individual and communal conversion that Lent is supposed to bring about in us. Pope Benedict used to remind us that Lent is not about a minor course correction in our life but about a big change of heart and ways. Today is a good opportunity for us to see if we’re on the trajectory of tinkering a little with our life or profoundly altering it.
• In the first reading, we encounter the Prophet Jonah, who was sent by God to the pagan city of Nineveh (modern day Mosul in northern Iraq and former capital of the neo-Assyrian empire) to preach massive conversion. “Forty more days and Nineveh will be destroyed!,” he exclaimed. The city was huge, taking three days to traverse in one direction, and yet Jonah didn’t have to announce “39 more days and Nineveh will be destroyed.” This pagan city heard the message immediately, believed God, spread it across the city, and converted, proclaiming a fast, vesting in sackcloth and sitting in ashes. The King himself divested of his royal garments and sat in sackcloth and ashes as well, proclaiming a total fast — “neither man nor beast, neither cattle nor sheep, shall taste anything; they shall not eat nor shall they drink water” — and commanding that both persons and animals shall be “covered with sackcloth and call loudly to God.” Most importantly, he decreed that “every man shall turn from his evil way and from the violence he has in hand.” All of this was in the hope that God may forgive them and that they may not perish. It was an unprecedented and total conversion — and God responded, because as we prayed in the Psalm, he never spurns a contrite and humbled heart.
• If that’s what the pagan Ninevites did at the beginning of the 40-day proto-Lent that Jonah had announced, how much more seriously should we Christians take this 40-day season of penance and conversion? If they responded so thoroughly to the message of Jonah, how much more shall we respond to the “greater than Jonah,” Jesus, who announced that same basic message to us? One week ago, he put ashes on our forehead and told us to “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” He reminded us that we are dust and unto dust we shall return. He proclaimed a fast that he called us to do it differently than all the rest. He summoned us to prayer, to almsgiving, to remedying our evil actions and replacing them with good actions. Have we responded as seriously as the Ninevites to this summons? Or are we thinking that we still have 33 days left…
• We may be tempted to respond to this summons by saying, “I’m not that bad!,” “I don’t have to repent from a life of crime or debauchery, or from harboring a cesspool of unchristian thoughts or desires.” But our individual conversion is only one part of Lent. There’s another aspect of it, which is communal reparation and conversion. Not everyone in Nineveh was as guilty as the others, but as a whole, Nineveh was a sinful city, and everyone, the good, the bad and the worse, even the innocent pets, repented. Likewise, not just for ourselves but for others we need to repent. Jesus said in the Gospel, “This generation is an evil generation,” and he can say that about every generation. There’s good in every generation, but there’s also evil in every generation. There are lots of great things in our culture, but much evil over which we need to repent. Two children every minute are legally executed in our country through abortion. We’ve allowed our hearts to harden toward immigrants. We’ve given into the pornification and vulgarization of our television and movie offerings. We’ve turned gossip into an art-form, which magazines and television programs totally dedicated to spreading gossip and rumor. We’ve legalized and are pushing pot, which is stinking up our city. We’re pretending as if various forms of extra-marital sex are sacraments rather that sins. We’re disfiguring the institution of marriage, which was part of God’s plans from the beginning, seeking to make marriage encompass a husband-less or a wife-less institution and rend asunder the union of one man and one woman God himself joined. And this is even before we comment on the sins associated with the daily rap sheet. We need to confront the fact that our generation is an evil generation, too, and we need to atone not only for our sins but for the sins of the world. Lent is a time not just of individual conversion but also of reparation for our sins and the sins of others, in which we turn to the Lord and beg for mercy.
• But it doesn’t stop there. Part of our call as Jesus’ disciples is to become a sign of Jonah for others, a sign of conversion, someone whose own conversion makes other people scratch their heads and wonder why we, with a greater reputation for living our faith, are fasting so much, or getting up early to pray, or really sacrificing what we have for others at this time. It can call them to conversion. We need to proclaim, against the wiles of the devil, that we don’t have all the time in the world before we’re going to “be destroyed,” before we’ll breathe our last. When the Ninevites heard that they had only 40 days left, they didn’t waste time in converting. We and others may actually have fewer days left — for we know not the day or the hour — and the time to convert is now. The greatest way we preach conversion to others is not by wagging fingers but by showing the fruits of our own conversion and the joy to which it leads as we are now able to share more in Christ’s own risen life. But like Jonah, we can’t run away from this mission of praying for the conversion of others and seeking it. The first reading began today, “The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time.” We know the first time he tried to escape the mission of calling others to conversion, because it was not a task to which he was looking forward. This morning it might be said that the Word of God is coming to us a 77th time or more.
• Someone who lived as this sign and agent of conversion in the midst of his age was St. Peter Damian, the doctor of the Church we celebrate today. His life was a cruciform one that helped many people of his age come to conversion. He was neglected as a baby because his older brothers told his mother the family couldn’t have another mouth to feed, but another woman in the neighborhood suckled him. Orphaned, he was placed in the care of an older brother who neglected him badly, but eventually he was rescued by another brother who was a priest, who provided for his education and set him on the trajectory one day to be a doctor of the Church. His life was a crucible but at the same time he learned the power and wisdom of the Cross. When Pope Benedict gave a catechesis on him in 2009, he spoke about the Cross in his life, beginning with the Hermitage in which he worshipped God: “One detail should be immediately emphasized,” Pope Benedict said: “the Hermitage at Fonte Avellana was dedicated to the Holy Cross and the Cross was the Christian mystery that was to fascinate Peter Damian more than all the others. ‘Those who do not love the Cross of Christ do not love Christ,’ he said; and he described himself as ‘Petrus crucis Christi servorum famulus Peter, servant of the servants of the Cross of Christ’ (Ep, 9, 1). Peter Damian addressed the most beautiful prayers to the Cross in which he reveals a vision of this mystery which has cosmic dimensions for it embraces the entire history of salvation: ‘O Blessed Cross,’ he exclaimed, ‘You are venerated, preached and honoured by the faith of the Patriarchs, the predictions of the Prophets, the senate that judges the Apostles, the victorious army of Martyrs and the throngs of all the Saints’ (Sermo XLVII, 14, p. 304).” Pope Benedict drew a lesson for all of us: “Dear Brothers and Sisters, may the example of St Peter Damian spur us too always to look to the Cross as to the supreme act God’s love for humankind of God, who has given us salvation.” That Cross, too, becomes a way of life. It certainly did for St. Peter Damian. Early in life, he would offer hospitality to the poor as a way of serving Christ and voluntarily embraced poverty to be close to them. This was a way of life he brought to the monastery with him and in which he formed so many others. He used to call himself Petrus ultimus monachorum servus, “Peter, the least servant of the monks,” which points to how he became great by becoming the servant of all, just as he early called himself not servus servorum Dei like St. Gregory the Great, “servant of the servants of God” but “Petrus crucis Christi servorum famulus,” “Peter, servant of the servants of the Cross of Christ.” All servants of God are servants of the Cross and he sought to become the least of all and the servant of all. As a doctor of the Church, by his words and example, he is meant to teach us all. St. Peter also shows us how faith in the power of the Cross translates into a way of life. What is he most well-known for today is his work to root out corruption in the Church and in the life of faith, the “bitter jealousy and selfish ambition,” boasting, lying, “disorder and every foul practice” that “does not come down from above but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.” Pope Benedict said in 2009, “He did not fear to denounce the state of corruption that existed in the monasteries and among the clergy, because, above all, of the practice of the conferral by the lay authorities of ecclesiastical offices; various Bishops and Abbots were behaving as the rulers of their subjects rather than as pastors of souls. Their moral life frequently left much to be desired. For this reason, in 1057 Peter Damian left his monastery with great reluctance and sorrow and accepted, if unwillingly, his appointment as Cardinal Bishop of Ostia. So it was that he entered fully into collaboration with the Popes in the difficult task of Church reform. He saw that to make his own contribution of helping in the work of the Church’s renewal contemplation did not suffice. He thus relinquished the beauty of the hermitage and courageously undertook numerous journeys and missions.” Beyond selfish ambition, one of the biggest corruptions he needed to root out was sexual license, especially homosexual activity, in monasteries and diocesan clergy, which is one of the reasons why so many today look to him as a patron to help root out all sins of unchastity in the Church. Having lived as a servant of the Cross of Christ, he became a sign of the greater than Jonah calling people to repent and believe in the Gospel.
• The sign Jesus gives to every “evil age,” to each epoch in need of repentance including our own, is the sign of Jonah. That’s first but not just a sign of conversion. It’s also a sign given by his passion, death and resurrection. Just as Jonah was thrown from the boat to calm the storm, so Jesus was tossed overboard to quell the tempest of sin. Just as Jonah spent three days miraculously in the belly of the whale before being returned to shore saved, so Jesus spent three days in the belly of the earth before his resurrection. The sign of greatest conversion is the Cross. When we behold Jesus on the Cross like the serpent lifted up in the desert, we see what our sins did to Jesus and what they do to us: they kill us. That’s why in the Sistine Chapel there’s a huge image of Jonah right above Michelangelo’s Last Judgment and the Crucifix on the altar where the Pope celebrates Mass. But we also know that in the sign of Jonah whom Jesus is there is his resurrection, a clear sign that if we enter into this path of conversion, if we die to ourselves in him, if we toss ourselves into the infinite abyss of his merciful love, then we will experience salvation, so that from living in an evil generation we may pass to living forever with the saints. That’s why at the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran, in the point-counterpoint series between Old Testament and New Testament scenes that fill up the nave, in counterpoint to Jonah’s being expunged from the whale on the third day we see the sculpture of Jesus’ resurrection. This points to the fact that the call to conversion is a call to life. The call to conversion is not principally about cutting out evil from our souls and helping all others in our culture to do the same; it’s principally about the life of joy that we will receive once we do.
• Today as we prepare to receive within us that “greater than Jonah,” we ask Him to help us to convert so fully that we, as his mystical body, may continue to be that sign of conversion and salvation in the midst of our own Nineveh so that they, too, may experience not destruction but mercy and life.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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