We lose touch with our biblical roots at our peril
The American poet Carl Sandburg wrote that when a nation goes down or a society perishes one condition may always be found—they forgot where they came from. One of the lessons Catholics have learned over the past fifty years since the Vatican Council is that we are not so much a people of the Promised Land (yet) but an Exodus people, a pilgrim people. The people of God, our ancestors, were, as the Book of Exodus tells us, brought out of slavery by God’s mighty hand and outreached arm. Their tradition was for them one of liberation and freedom. No wonder the Jews of Jesus’ time were offended and resented it when he told them he had come to really set them free. They said to him, “We are descended from Abraham, and have never been in bondage to any one. How dare you say ‘you shall be made free?’” (John 8:33) - a clear indication they had lost touch with what their Exodus freedom really meant. With the Exodus from Egypt was born the Hebrew people. They were not called to or given a freedom that was for their own enjoyment but were given this freedom so that they could in turn be the liberating sign of God's presence in the world. What they failed to understand is that the exodus experience is not guaranteed for any people by their past history and traditions, but that the journey out of bondage towards freedom will never be over for us until he Kingdom of God comes fully. For those who walk with the lord, Exodus is just as much a present experience as it is a glorious event in the past.
The short excerpt from the story of Jonah which we will hear this Sunday does not tell the whole story. Jonah despised the people he was sent to convert; he thought them unworthy of his time and effort. The story of Jonah and the whale is rooted in a time, after the exile, when God's people was intent on reconstructing their former way of life, re-establishing their tradition, starting to rebuild their temple and their land. The author of the book of Jonah wrote this story to combat the growing parochialism of the people who were increasingly concerned about themselves, and the story sought to provoke a sense of “catholicism” or “universalism” which reflected God's concern for all people. So the writer created this story of Jonah, the narrow minded man. Through this caricature, the Israelites were being offered a glimpse of themselves, their short-sightedness, their short comings, and their lack of memory that they themselves had been strangers, slaves, sinners in need of God themselves when they were under the hand of Pharaoh in Egypt centuries before.
Jonah's unwillingness, his efforts to thwart God's purpose, his annoyance at the repentance of that people and his dismay at God forgiving them are all woven together in the story which is in sharp contrast to this Sunday's Gospel, where Jesus promises his chosen ones that they will be fishers of men.
God's Word often reminds us of our beginnings. Once upon a time we had very little, and no great future. But people always have a hope of better things and better times. As scripture says, we put our hopes in Christ even before he came, not knowing how, when or in what way God would save us. Paul assures us that such hopes are not disappointed. But disappointment does follow when we move in the opposite direction, when our hopes turn from God to self, forgetting our origins in him, and in our ancestors who with Joshua at their head entered a land they had not tilled, having been saved at the Red Sea by the Lord’s own glorious triumph. Already the liturgical year is moving swiftly. Lent is not far away, and with it the glorious celebration of the Easter mystery. In these Sundays leading towards Lent we are invited to take as our model the figures of the gospel - Peter, Andrew, James and John - who like Jonah were invited to leave their nets, their self, behind and turn to faith in God. The result of their efforts was remarkably similar: the message was believed the world over. Paradoxically, in moving from self to God, in moving back to our biblical roots as the pilgrim people called to be the liberating sign of God in the world, they were given everything: fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, children, land....a hundredfold.
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