Someone said, "You can't steal second base with one foot on first." Athletes have to learn to risk, to take that first step. That quality of risk highlights the Christmas readings.
The Magi had to risk in taking their first step away from their comfortable surroundings in the East to follow the star that lead to Jesus. Jesus took the greatest risk of all in putting aside the divine trappings as Son of the Almighty and wrapping himself in the flesh and blood of our human nature.
Today we see God calling us to follow him. In the first reading the man is Jonah; in the Gospel, the men are James and John, Peter and Andrew. These men risked in leaving their families and home country to set out to do God's will.
Jonah is our first apostle, a most reluctant apostle. The first reading gives us only a short form of the Jonah story. To understand Jonah we have to know the whole story.
Jonah was an Israelite. God called him to preach repentance to the Ninevites. The Ninevites were enemies of the Jews; and the last thing Jonah wanted was for God to have mercy on them. Jonah took a ship going to Tarshish, in the opposite direction of the land of the Ninevites. A storm blew up; Jonah knew it was his fault. He told the sailors to put him overboard. They did, and Jonah was swallowed by a whale. After three days the whale belched Jonah up on the shores of Ninevah, the very land God had called Jonah to. God gave Jonah a second call to go preach to the Ninevites.
Reluctantly, Jonah dragged him-self through the streets of Nineveh. It took him three days to walk through the city. His sermon was not long. He said, "Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed." Strangely, Jonah's sermon was most effective, for the whole city, from the king on down to the cattle fasted...and God had mercy on the city.
Now Jonah was really frustrated; this is just what he didn't want...and precisely what he figured God might do. The Israelites knew God to be unpredictable; God was always having mercy where he should have (at least according to the Jews) punished the enemies of the Jews. Jonah was so frustrated he went and sat beneath a castor oil plant to escape the heat of the sun. God sent a worm to destroy the plant; Jonah, really irked at God by now, told God so. God said, ""Do you do well to be angry for the plant?" Jonah said, "I do well to be angry, angry enough to die." And the Lord said, "You pity the plant, for which you did not labor, nor did you make it grow, which came into being in a night, and perished in a night. And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?" (Jonah 4: 9-11)
We quote the Jonah story at length to show how one apostle called by God reacted. Perhaps we can relate more to Jonah than we can to the apostles Jesus called. In the gospel it says Jesus walked by and simply said to Peter, James and John "Follow me" and they did. We probably can't imagine ourselves making such an immediate and difficult commitment. Peter was a rather well-to-do fisherman with a house big enough to accommodate his extended family; later we see Jesus healing Peter's mother-in-law in Peter's house. James and John got out of the very boat they were in, leaving their father and probably a lucrative fishing business to follow Jesus.
No, we probably feel more like Jonah. We often know God is calling us, but we don't want to go. We have excuses. Maybe God's calling us to deal with people against whom we're actually bigoted...who wants that kind of duty?
Poor Jonah, poor us. There's a world out there waiting to be saved, and we don't want to leave our TV sets, our barca lounger. We, like Jonah, can't imagine God would want to save "those" people...and so we feel comfortable in running away from the task. But thank Him, God, who gives us a second chance, as He did Jonah. God is patient with our reluctance and bigotry and calls us a second time to do His bidding.
The example of Jonah shows us that it's not really our work that is productive, but the Holy Spirit working in us. As we said, Jonah was the most reluctant prophet in the world. Yes, he finally did trudge through the streets of Nineveh, but he was no Billy Graham. He simply mouthed the message God gave him: "In forty days Nineveh will be destroyed." But the power in the message came from God--something preachers should remember--and the whole city was saved by doing penance in sackcloth and ashes.
The English poet, Francis Thompson, wrote a poem about how God pursued him down through the years of his life of alcoholism. Thompson compared God with a hound, The Hound of Heaven. His poem begins:
- "I fled Him down the nights and down the days ;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears;
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated,
Adown titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase ,
And unperturbed pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat, and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet --
'All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.' " (1)
The gospel shows us Jesus calling four of his apostles. They follow Jesus immediately, something that may puzzle us. We might ask, "Don't they want to talk it over? Don't they want to go home and discuss it with their wives and family? How can they be so quick to follow?"
The immediacy of the apostles' reaction may be a whole process of reflection and discernment that is telescoped by Mark into one passage of immediate call and following. Mark wanted to highlight the total commitment of these apostles.
- In her book An American Childhood, Annie Dillard remembers learning how to play football with the boys in the neighborhood--and loving it. "You went out for a pass, fooling everyone. Best, you got to throw yourself mightily at someone's running legs. Either you brought him down or you hit the ground flat out on your chin, with your arms empty before you. It was all or nothing. If you hesitated in fear, you would miss and get hurt: you would take a hard fall while the kid got away or you would get kicked in the face while the kid got away. But if you flung yourself wholeheartedly at the back of his knees--if you gathered and joined body and soul and pointed them, diving fearlessly--then you likely wouldn't get hurt, and you'd stop the ball. Your fate, and your team's score, depended on your concentration and courage....You have to fling yourself at what you're doing, you have to point yourself, forget yourself, aim, dive." (3)
Jonah had a great problem with bigotry. Even Jesus' apostles had a bit of a problem. Paul, as a zealous Jew, wanted to kill all Christians. James and John, the "sons of thunder," in passing through Samaritan territory, asked Jesus if they should call down lightning from heaven to strike down the Samaritans, who were forbidding Jesus and his apostles passage to Jerusalem.
So even good people can be prejudiced. We must remember that you can never convert someone you hate. Hatred must first alienate, as we see our government did when it called the Russians "the evil empire"; or when the Iranians called us "the great Satan," we can be sure they're not out to convert us.
- "...a man, a US pilot in the Vietnam war, [told] of his experience, bearing down on a Vietnamese village to drop his bombs, pushing through the clouds, catching a glimpse of a church. It must have been Sunday because [he said] I could see a crowd of people entering the church in the village. It was only a glimpse, but I could see it clearly. They were Christians.. Nobody ever told me that Viet Nam was a Christian country. It could have been my hometown, my Catholic church. They looked just like us. They worshipped the same way we worshipped. Nobody told me.'" (4)
Jesus calls us all to follow him. We do not want to be reluctant, like
Jonah, but we want to thank God that He even calls us twice, gives us a
second chance, to follow him...to follow him, even, as the apostles found
out, to the cross, but also, then, to resurrection.
1) Francis Thompson, "The Hound of Heaven, in Terence L. Connolly, S.J.,
ed., Poems of Francis Thompson (rev. ed.; New York: D. Appleton-Century@1941) 77.
2) Gerald Osterveen, "Pastoral implications," Lectionary Homiletics 11 (2):
25 (Lectionary Homiletics, 13540 East Boundary Road, Bldg. 2 Suite 105,
Midlothian VA 23112) Jan 2000.
3)"Tackling commitment," Connections, Third Sunday of the Year (7 Lantern
Lane, Londonderry, N.H. 03053-3905) Jan 2000.
4) "Relating the text," Pulpit Resource, 28 (01): 18 (Logos Productions
Inc., 6160 Carmen Ave. E., Inver Grove Heights MN 55076-4422) Jan 2000.
(Comments to Jerry at padre@tri-lakes.net. Jerry's book, Stories For All Seasons, is available at a discount through the Homiletic Resource Center.)