Shunning responsibility

Todays’ readings: Jonah 3, 1-5.10; 1 Cor. 7, 29-31; Mark 1, 14-20.

Our big cities seem to present us with unending stumbling blocks when we speak of the possibility of bringing faith to modern or postmodern culture. But, maybe the problem is with us not with people out there. The burden is not on a culture that has changed but on us to explore new methods of bringing the Gospel to people.

In the book of Jonah, Nineveh tells not only the story of a city in moral ruin, but also the story of God’s relentless optimism about his creation. In today’s reading it is the second calling Jonah received from the Lord to go to Nineveh, because there had already been a first calling Jonah had resisted.

Nineveh was a great pagan city, not an Israelite city where Jonah could have played at home.

So Jonah’s attitude was judgmental, maybe he thought people there were beyond redemption. But it turns out that no one is beyond redemption for the Lord. This is a great message indeed for the times we live in when we no longer play home in our big cities and when we may be more keen to safeguard doctrine than people.

Though Jonah’s story may sound like a legend to some, it carries a lot of truth and weight. It is about a prophet who runs away at the thought of having to face the people of Nineveh.

While Jonah is a fugitive, God remains all the time there with him, not to coerce him but to gradually and lovingly make him realise what best he could do.

When Jonah regains passion in his heart for the people, then the way is wide open for people to let God in.

In his letter to the Corinthians, St Paul writes that “our time is growing short”. If there is passion in our hearts as believers, then there should be a sense of urgency in what needs to be done.

Urgency may be the dominant feeling where we are cornered. But it may also be dominant when we have our priorities right. Being cornered makes you take drastic measures of which you may not be at all convinced. But urgency from the biblical perspective is more the result of God’s love urging us to proclaim his love everywhere and without fear.

The sense of urgency that transpires from the three readings today is not meant to instil fear in us, but rather to make us reconnect with our roots, with our conscience, and with what destroys hope in the hearts and lives of people.

The worst that can happen to us at such a point in time is to escape in useless forms of solitude, or in an arid spiritualism or in despair. We can never afford to give in to futile talk about a world coming to an end this year or next, or in useless versions of history that verge on the apocalyptic.

God is not there waiting to make us repay, but He waits patiently till we make full circle back to where we belong. The words of Jesus that “the time has come” only mark the beginning of what was to be the adventure of the Church in time starting with the proclamation of the Apostles.

From the human standpoint, time seems to be running out on many counts. But the time of God offers a different perspective of reality and it gives meaning to all our efforts to make our cities hospitable and more respective of human dignity.

St Paul’s advice for those who have to deal with the world not to become engrossed in it, has nothing to do with shunning responsibilities. It only lays down clearly the challenge ahead of us today to reconcile politics with faith, our political will to create a better world with a down-to-earth sense of the provisional.