“He preached in these words, ‘Only forty days more and Nineveh is going to be destroyed.’ And the people of Nineveh believed in God.” (Jonah 3:4-5)
Why was Jonah’s preaching so effective in today’s first reading?
His words were simple, but they were strengthened by his witness: he had come alive from the belly of a whale after three days – surely God was with this man!
In the Gospel, Jesus’s preaching was also instantly effective: He too was emerging from mortal danger, since His cousin and fellow preacher, John the Baptist, had just been arrested and would soon be killed.
Jesus’s listeners would have known what risk He was taking in order to keep preaching, and the strength of His conviction was contagious. This effect was even more awe-inspiring when Jesus emerged, not after three days in a whale but from Death itself.
In this Gospel, His message was both simple – ‘the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News.’ (Mark 1:15) – and profound: He was initiating a new Kingdom, one that involved an interior change (the word “repent” literally means “change of heart”).
He then called four fishermen to become “fishers of men”, implying another way to conceive of what it means to follow Him: to be a disciple of Jesus is to be caught like a fish.
The fish is taken out of its dark world, onto a new one, from a kingdom of darkness to one of light; it must die and be changed into food for others, into a gift of self. It is caught by nets; we are caught by words, the words of the Gospel.
Let’s repair our nets, as James and John were doing when Jesus called them, by meditating on the words of the Gospel, assimilating our words to them.
Let’s rely on the power of our sufferings to make our words effective, as Jonah and Jesus did.
Above all, let’s be caught again and again by Jesus’s words, and be transformed again and again into food for others in his Kingdom.
Photo: Pulling the nets in at the freshwater Lake Tiberias, or Sea of Galilee, in north-eastern Israel. (Photo by Chalil Raad/Three Lions/Getty Images.)
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