Third Sunday of Ordinary Time
We always associate the Bok of Jonah with that whale! It's a great story. That excerpt we have there today - from chapter 3 - is misleading. It seems as if Jonah responded promptly to the command of the Lord to go to Nineveh and do repentance. The story was not so simple. Well, chapter 1 of Jonah starts with the Lord calling the man to go to Nineveh and prophesy. Jonah does a runner from the Lord, he jumps on to a ship, and more or less tells the Lord to go and do his own preaching. Nineveh was the capital of the Kingdom of Assyria, the great empire that had swallowed in one great gulp the twelve tribes of Israel. In present day Iraq, on the river Tigris, it was notoriously corrupt, a great trading post between east and west. Excavated in the 19th century by the French and the British and archaeological evidence confirms that it was fabulously rich. "It was indeed a great city beyond compare..." as the author today states. If you could convert Nineveh you could convert anywhere. No wonder Jonah did a runner and jumps on to that ship!
But then a terrible storm blows up and threatens the ship. The others aboard conclude that God is coming after Jonah, so they throw him overboard. That's when the whale gets him, at the beginning of chapter 2. Jonah prays, the whale coughs him up, and, in chapter 3, God directs Jonah a second time to go to Nineveh and preach repentance. In the fourth chapter, Jonah expresses bitter disappointment that Nineveh repented and God did not destroy the city! God rebukes Jonah for his smallness of vision, and the story ends.
The book of Jonah was actually written after the Jews' exile. Some of them were quite nationalistic, and filled with a smug sense of superiority over other nations. Like Jonah, they wished God would destroy the nations perceived as enemies. And that is the point of the story of Jonah: it is a rebuke to the smugness of the newly liberated Jewish nation.
The situation in Corinth (6 centuries later) is quite similar to Nineveh. Corinth too was a great trading centre, east and west met there. It had too ports and it was a very cosmopolitan place. It was notoriously immoral. They were not observing the rather strict ideals laid down by Paul for relationships, especially sexual relationships. Paul puts all things in context: the world is ending soon. Paul is apocalyptic in his urgency: "Our time is growing short....the world as we know it is passing away."
In our gospel extract, Jesus is now preaching in a new context: with the arrest of John, Jesus becomes acutely aware of Herod's growing determination to snuff out this movement. He preaches with a new-found urgency: "The time has come, and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News."
Those who first responded to that invitation were fishermen. (In time other professions will have representatives). It has been the traditional assumption that Jesus called poor fishermen as his first helpers. "Follow me", he said, "and I will make you into fishers of men." But some contemporary scholars have called into question the traditional assumption that they were poor people, that they were for all practical purposes vagabonds. The biblical scholar, Raymond Browne, has written to the contrary. He has argued convincingly that, in the area around the Sea of Galilee, fishing was a very lucrative business. The business was organised around families and clans. Many of these families had grown enormously wealthy in the trade. Compared with shepherds and herdsmen, for example, fishermen were in a very different economic league indeed.
The biblical evidence we have of the call of the disciples would fit in with Browne's pattern. The scriptures make the point that these men abandoned family businesses. "Leaving their father Zebedee in the boat with the men he employed, they went after him." This wasn't a question of throwing the two fish back into the sea and trying out something else. This represented a whole change of lifestyle, a conversion as radical as that demanded of the Ninevites and or the Corinthians. And that change is brought about by the forceful conviction of the preacher, Jesus himself. And the skills that were required in their original profession will stand them in good stead in their new way of life: the patience and the hope that characterises every successful fisherman will be required too in their new profession as 'fishers of men'. That same patience will be required of every Christian, because the conversion Jesus demanded is not a one-day wonder, but a project that lasts a lifetime.