The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
January 25, 2015

Click here to listen to this homily (mp3 file)  

     Pick a patron.  There are more than enough to go around in today's readings.  A patron saint for each one of us, I should think.  There is Jonah, the reluctant, runaway prophet; there are all those people of Nineveh, sinful but repentant; there are the Galilean fishermen who became followers of Jesus:  Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, and James and John, the sons of Zebedee.  Pick your patron.  Chances are that one of these would make a good one.  Chances are that there are hints of your story and mine in each one of their stories.

     For the second Sunday in a row, the Church is asking us to reflect on God's call in our lives.  Last Sunday we had the young Samuel, a mere boy, hearing God's mysterious and insistent call in the night.  And we had the first apostles, irresistibly attracted to Jesus, the young Rabbi from Nazareth, who invited them simply to "Come and see."  And now we have Sunday number two devoted to the call.  We ought to pay attention, for we, too, have been and are even now being called by God.

     And, my friends, we receive our call in some notable company for this is a call that has been received before, countless times down through the ages: received, struggled with, run away from, rejected, accepted (however haltingly), accepted, affirmed, embraced -- and sometimes, amazingly, all of this by the same person!

     Take Jonah.  It’s hard to imagine a more reluctant recipient of God's call than this cowardly, temperamental fellow. I hope it doesn’t sound too irreverent but, fictional character or not, Jonah was a flake! He is ‘exhibit A’ for how God uses flawed instruments to carry out his great work.

     The Jonah story we heard today is not the whole story.  It’s more a “tweet” of the story -- the ‘twitter’ version.  The opening words of the reading should really have been "The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second time" because there had been a first time – when God had said to Jonah, "arise and go to Nineveh and proclaim that I am about to destroy it for its wickedness."

     The difference between Jonah’s first and second calls from God was that the first time God told him to go to Nineveh, Jonah went and boarded a ship to take him as far as possible from Nineveh!  But God had his way.  God always does.  And so (you know how story goes), a fierce storm blew up on the sea, Jonah was thrown overboard by his shipmates because they suspected that he was somehow the cause of the storm, and then a very large -- and very cooperative -- fish swam by, swallowed Jonah alive, ferried him around for three days and nights, and then spit him out on dry land.

     As fate would have it (or rather, as God would have it), Jonah had a conversion experience while camping out inside the belly of the big fish. Wouldn't you! So, once he was back on land, he set out for Nineveh to do the doomsday preaching he had so dreaded.  The rest of the story is what we heard in today's first reading.  To Jonah's utter amazement, the people of Nineveh who, in the eyes of the Jews, were beyond redemption -- they were Assyrians, after all, their hated enemies and conquerors -- actually listened to Jonah’s preaching and repented.  Even the king put on sackcloth and ashes and so, too, as the story goes, did the lowly cattle in the fields.  Now I ask you:  if that’s not repentance, what is?!

     The Jonah story may be fanciful but it’s a great story of God’s call, of human resistance, and of the triumph of grace.  It’s an amusing and edifying story, and it would be even more edifying if it ended right there.  It didn’t.  Jonah, true to form, got angry and upset with God.  Why?  For letting the Ninevites repent. Jonah had been hoping for fireworks -- fire and brimstone rained down on Nineveh!  Do you ever wonder why God puts up with such human silliness?  But we should probably be grateful God does because we contribute enough silliness of our own from time to time….

     So much for the Jonah story.  Did you pick a patron there?  Did you hear any of your story?  In Jonah's resistance to God's call, perhaps, or maybe in his conversion, or maybe in his anger at God’s mercy, letting people off the hook so easily when they really should have paid through the nose?  Or maybe you identified with the people of Nineveh: sinful people but infinitely worthwhile to God whose mercy is greater than the greatest of sins.

     Then there's today's Gospel.  It presents us with more potential patrons to pick from: Peter and Andrew, James and John.  Each of them received a personal call from Jesus.  But maybe you find these four apostles a little unreal, leaving their nets as they did, and their fathers and mothers, their homes, their very livelihood -- leaving all at hearing a couple of words from an itinerant preacher from Nazareth, "Follow me."

     How are we ever to find our stories in theirs?  Weren't they just a little too heroic and selfless in leaving everything behind to follow Jesus?  Yes, but remember the rest of the story.  Remember Simon Peter whose good intentions tended to outdistance his performance and who, when the chips were down and his life and livelihood hung in the balance, forgot his call and denied -- not once but three times -- that he ever so much as knew the Master.  Is that a part of your story?  I think it’s part of all our stories.  And so is the story of James and John, the sons of Zebedee and of Mrs. Zebedee, who was so very ambitious for her sons, but only, I have to think, because she knew their ambition, knew what they secretly wanted for themselves.

     So, my friends in Christ, pick your patron.  Who will it be?  Jonah?  Peter?  James?  John?  Pick your patron.  And to remind you of your choice, you can always go out on our front steps and meet most of these folks there captured in bronze.  Jonah, climbing out of the whale’s mouth is there on a door handle; so is Peter, who would have sunk in the waters of unbelief were it not for the rescuing hand of Jesus. And Peter is there a second time – in one of the doorstops, dissolved in tears as the cock crow after denying the master; and James is there, too: our patron, dropping his nets to begin a whole new kind of fishing with much higher stakes.

     Pick your patron: they’re all out there in bronze. There’s not a plaster saint among them!  Any more than there is among us. Each had to struggle with God’s call much as we do. We should thank God to be in such good company...!  

     Father Michael G. Ryan