Year 1: Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: Romans 1:1-7; Psalm 98:1-4; Luke 11:29-32

If the sign of Jonah the Lord referred to in our Gospel this evening is His resurrection from the dead after three days in the tomb, then the Lord extends this sign to us through the Eucharist. In this context, let us not forget that Jonah’s ministry to the Ninevites began after his three-day sojourn in the belly of “a great fish.”¹ This is true, too, of Christ’s ministry.

Pentecost, the beginning of the Church, the birth of the Body of Christ, is when the Gospel began to spread beyond the confines of what was then the Roman province of Palestine. This is when, like Jonah’s proclamation, the basic kerygma began to be preached to Jew and, shortly, Gentile alike: “Repent and believe in Gospel!”

Unlike the Israelites, first with the prophets and later with Jesus, the Ninevites repented upon hearing Jonah’s preaching. But, as the Lord says, referring to Himself, “there is something greater than Jonah here.”² Yet, at least in this scenario, He sensed no urge to repent, just the desire for a spectacle. But no repentance means no faith.

For an adult, being baptized without repenting, without changing your life, is like trying to run a marathon and then trying to train for it. While there are usually other factors, this is a major reason why so many adult converts, most of whom were not even taught the five precepts of the Church, fall away fairly fast.

Hearing the Gospel requires a response. This Good News requires a definitive yes or no. If yes, repentance is required. Apart from this, one is just going through the motions, perhaps acting based on some kind of religious sentiment.

Especially now, many people want to understand before s/he believes. But love is never without risk! According to an insight Saint Anselm of Canterbury wrote down long ago: you don’t understand in order to believe, you believe to understand.³ One repents to believe. To conceive of faith as mere belief is to reduce it to dust. Repenting is what it means to walk by faith and not by sight.

Jonah and the Whale, by Pieter Lastman (Dutch), 1621, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, Germany

To summarize an insight by John Calvin, who got many things right and few fundamental things quite wrong: all true knowledge of God is born out of obedience.⁴ Or, as C.S. Lewis pointed out: “Obedience is the key that opens every door,” including the door of belief.⁵

As Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote:

It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact… Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but the miracle from faith⁶

Yet, like those who sought a sign from Jesus, it’s easy to want to walk by sight and not by faith. And so, they demand a sign. Not being able to grasp the sign of Jonah when it is presented to you should not lead you to demand a better or more convincing sign. After all, you’re encountering someone greater than Jonah, even greater than King Solomon in all his splendor.

Hence, your “Amen” before receiving the Body and Blood of Christ should never be thoughtlessly uttered. This moment is always an encounter with the Risen Lord. In that moment, you behold the very sign of Jonah about which Jesus spoke.

Rather, your “Amen” should be a firm statement that you believe, even if you don’t understand. It should also be a firm commitment to repent, to allow yourself to be increasingly conformed to the image of Christ. This is the “obedience of faith” set forth by Saint Paul.⁷

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1 Jonah 2:1.^↩
2 Luke 11:32.^↩
3 Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, trans. M.J. Charlesworth (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), 1.^↩
4 John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Book II. Chap. 8, “Exposition of the Moral Law.”^↩
5 In Thomas A. Tarrants. “Obedience: The Key That Opens All Doors.” from Knowing and Doing, Winter 2011.^↩
7 Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov, Part I, Book I, Chapter 5, “The Elders.”^↩
7 Romans 1:5.^↩