Responding Promptly and Wholeheartedly to the Sign of Jonah, Wednesday of the First Week of Lent, March 1, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the First Week of Lent
March 1, 2023
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. Over the course of this homily, every 23 seconds another child will be 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 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.
  • 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 a sign of conversion. But 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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