We heard from the prophet Isaiah yesterday telling us about how God’s will and God’s holy word are to be planted as seeds in our lives. Today, we hear a story from the book of Jonah, of how Jonah was sent to the great city of Nineveh to call the people there to repentance. Nineveh was not just any city. It was the capital of Assyria, the nation that had destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and held the southern kingdom of Judah as a vassal state for almost one hundred years. Assyria was a brutal occupying force that forever changed Israel's future. Jonah is called out by God to go and prophesy to the capital city of Israel’s enemy. You can imagine that Jonah did not cherish that role.
We could berate and criticize Jonah for his little faith and for his reluctance to accept this call from God. However, we could try to identify with Jonah for a moment rather than criticize him, to empathize with the seemingly impossible mission to which God has called him. The message we receive from our own modern secular world is that we cannot make a big difference in the world, that we might as well just fall in line and make the best living we can for ourselves and our family. Our calling from God and our values may tell us we need to head East to Nineveh, but we all too often turn around, walk away, and get on the boat with Jonah as a means of escape. Perhaps we find it too difficult or too lonely to walk the path of faith, to choose that path over the ways of our secular world. And by running away, perhaps we find ourselves in the belly of the whale, or out of touch with our calling from God, or very distant from our faith.
We are called to reflect upon those things that we try to flee in our life of faith, things that we are being called to do by God, but we are scared or uninterested or just don’t have the inclination to do what God is asking us to do. The story of Jonah give us a lot to think about on our Lenten journey.
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