(Third Sunday of the Year (B):
This homily was given on January 23, 2012 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Third Sunday 2012]
I heard a story recently about a
Catholic school teacher who wanted to teach her students a lesson about
forgiveness. So she asked them to bring
two items to class one day: the first was a large, sturdy plastic bag; the
second was a sack of potatoes from the local grocery store. And for every person they could think of whom
they refused to forgive, they were instructed to take one potato out of the
sack, write the person’s name on it, and then place it in the plastic bag.
Well, unfortunately some students
ended up with plastic bags that contained several potatoes. I say “unfortunately,” because the teacher
then told them that they would have to carry their potatoes around with them
for a whole week! She said, “You have to
take them everywhere you go, and keep the bag over your shoulder whenever
possible. You have to take them with you
when you go to visit your friends, when you do your chores, when you play, and when
you eat. You even have to put them
beside you in bed when you sleep.”
Well, as you might imagine, those
young people learned a very important lesson about forgiveness—by first learning a very important lesson
about the consequences of unforgiveness!
Carrying around a bag of potatoes
all week made those students miserable—which is exactly what unforgiveness does
to us when we allow it to enter our hearts and take root there. In addition to being a sin (and potentially a
very serious one!), refusing to forgive other people drags us down mentally and
emotionally. As many of you will recall,
Jesus made this point in Matthew 18, when he told a parable about a man who was
forgiven a huge debt by his master, but who then refused to forgive the debt of
a fellow servant, who owed him a much smaller amount of money. When the master found out what his
unforgiving servant had done, the Bible says he “handed him over to the
torturers until he paid back what he owed.”
I once heard a preacher mention this text in a sermon, and he commented
on it by saying, “Do you know what ‘the torturers’ are? The torturers are: depression, anxiety,
confusion, anger and the like. These are
the things that literally torture us
when we refuse to forgive other people in our lives.”
One man who would certainly agree
with this is the prophet—or, more properly, the reluctant prophet—Jonah. We
heard a short excerpt from his story in today’s first reading. Your assignment for the week, by the way, is
to open your Bible sometime during the next 7 days and read the rest of the
Book of Jonah. Read it from beginning to
end.
“But, Fr. Ray, I don’t have time
to do that.”
Oh yes, you do! The Book of Jonah is one of the shortest
books in the entire Bible! It’s less
than 3 pages long in most versions of Sacred Scripture—and that includes the
introduction!
So don’t tell me you don’t have
time.
The verses we heard this morning occur
in the middle of the book. Here the Lord
commands Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh and preach a message of
repentance. And Jonah goes—which he did
NOT do at the beginning of the book when God called him the first time! In fact, after the initial call he received
Jonah got on the very first ship that he could find that was headed in the
OPPOSITE DIRECTION, away from Nineveh!
Why, you ask?
Because
Jonah hated the Ninevites, that’s why!
Nineveh was the capital city of Assyria, which, at the time, was Israel’s
arch-enemy. Jonah knew the Lord was not
only just; he knew the Lord was also forgiving
and merciful. And he had a sneaking suspicion that if he
went to the Ninevites and told them to repent—and they did—then God would not
allow their city to be destroyed.
But
Jonah wanted the place destroyed!
He wanted to see the city of Nineveh go up in flames! He wanted to see it “fry” like Sodom and
Gomorrah had many years earlier!
So he ran away (actually, he
sailed away—on a ship that was headed west toward Tarshish).
God said, “Not so fast, Jonah!”
and he threw the ship into a terrible storm.
Jonah was tossed overboard in the middle of it and swallowed by a
gigantic fish (which is sometimes referred to as a whale).
After spending 3 days and 3 nights
inside this whale’s belly, God commanded the creature to spew Jonah up onto the
shore—which is where today’s first reading picks up the story.
The Lord said, “Ok Jonah, let’s
try this one more time. Go to the people
of Nineveh and tell them that unless they repent within 40 days their entire city
will be destroyed.”
Now, to his credit, Jonah did
learn his lesson. He learned that it was
probably not a good idea to disobey God a second time! So, as we heard a few moments ago, he went to
Nineveh—albeit begrudgingly—and he delivered the message the Lord told him to
deliver.
And, almost immediately, the
whole place repented—which, of course, was precisely what Jonah did NOT want to
happen!
At that point, he allowed the
‘torturers’—the torturers that Jesus talked about in Matthew 18—to enter his
heart full force, in particular anger and depression.
He whined; he pouted; he sulked;
he told God that he had a “right” to be angry (I’m not sure where that right
came from, but Jonah insisted that he had it).
And it got so bad that he
eventually prayed for death! He said, “I
can’t deal with this anymore, Lord, so please take my life.”
He had the choice between forgiveness and freedom on the one
hand, and unforgiveness and torture on
the other; and, sadly, he chose the latter.
In fact, Jonah was more concerned
about a dead plant (which died while he was sulking
under it one day) than he was about the thousands of people in Nineveh, all of
whom would have died had they not repented.
The Lord said (and here I quote):
“[Jonah], you are concerned over [this] plant which cost you no labor and which
you did not raise; it came up in one night and in one night it perished. And should I not be concerned over Nineveh,
the great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand
persons who cannot distinguish their right hand from their left, not to mention
the many cattle?”
Now that, my brothers and
sisters, is where the story ends. What I
just read to you are the final words of the Book of Jonah.
Which leaves inquiring minds like
mine to wonder: What happened? Did Jonah
eventually change? Did he allow God’s
words to soften his heart? Did he
finally forgive the Ninevites and free himself from his anger and depression?
Or did he stubbornly cling to his
unforgiveness and allow the torturers to continue to kill him, slowly, from the
inside out?
We don’t know. The Holy Spirit, through the inspired author
of this book of Scripture, hasn’t told us—which is not a mistake or a coincidence.
The Book of Jonah ends the way it
does, I believe, because God doesn’t want us to focus on Jonah’s situation all
those centuries ago; he wants each of us
to focus on our situation right now!
He wants us to read this short and very entertaining story, and then reflect
on how we’re currently responding to the people who hurt us at work or at
school or in some other location—or even within our own families.
You see, whether we realize it or
not, the choice Jonah faced all those years ago is the same one we face
whenever someone offends us now: forgiveness
and freedom or unforgiveness and the torturers.
Let’s pray at this Mass that making
the right choice—the choice to forgive—will
always be a lot easier for us than it was for poor, old Jonah.