The Unlikely Prophet Jonah as a Model for Us in Lent

In the traditional Roman Rite, the Epistle for today recounts the preaching of the prophet Jonah to the Ninivites, and their subsequent repentence (chapter 3); it is repeated as the tenth prophecy of the Easter vigil. When is the last time you read this little book, the second shortest in the Bible after the single chapter of Obadiah? It’s one of the most vivid short stories in the Old Testament, with many colorful and even humorous touches to it (in that regard, rather like the book of Tobit). [1] I think of this book in Lent because Jonah is truly a model for us of God’s grace triumphing over human weakness and sin.

Jonah shows us many typical weaknesses: running away from God’s calling; refusing His demands; sleeping instead of staying vigilant; moaning in self-pity; feeling angry with God’s will; having a mean spirit about God’s generosity and mercy towards others. Basically, all the most petty reactions we can have in the face of God are demonstrated by Jonah, and yet God does not give up on him, but keeps pursuing him, keeps giving him the grace to get up again after a fall — the grace of continual, albeit painful, conversion. Jonah’s conversion, moreover, does not go in a straight line from victory to victory, but in a crooked, wavering line, from failure to success to failure again. He is a man who breaks down more than once and seems to be, so to speak, discontented with the role God has assigned him, or the results he gets in his work.

He is, in this way, utterly typical of ourselves. We often do not like the role we are assigned in the drama of history. It reminds me of auditioning for plays or musicals in high school. There were only a few really glorious parts you could get, and the rest were scrappy and trivial, like those of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz in Hamlet. We often feel like we’ve been given the scrappy, trivial parts of the drama of life, not the glorious ones in which we flatter ourselves we could really shine with all our talents.

Notice, too, how slow Jonah is to get the point. God has not treated him gently. He seizes him, throws him into the ocean, abandons him to a whale’s belly, and then rescues him from the same beast. And yet, after all this, Jonah is still not submissive to God’s will, he still kicks against the goads (cf. Acts 26, 14), complaining that the Ninevites will be spared on account of their repentance, complaining that his cherished gourd plant has been wasted by a worm. It reminds one of the Jews who saw the raising of Lazarus and yet still could not put their faith in Jesus, but plotted His death.

“Jonah was very happy over the plant” (4, 6). Isn’t this just like us, too? Here is Jonah, whose rather dull preaching (at least from the scraps recorded of it) has, by God’s grace, resulted in the repentance and rescue of thousands of souls, feeling very happy about a plant, instead of feeling very happy about Nineveh. Don’t we find ourselves growing attached to little things, and growing upset when they are not available — a certain kind of tea or coffee, a particular schedule for the day, the friendly words of a certain person we like — and forgetting about the immense blessings that Almighty God is pouring out on us and on our neighbors every day? How often do we think about the indwelling of the Most Blessed Trinity in the soul of the just man? If you are in a state of sanctifying grace, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are making their home within your immortal intellectual soul. You are greater than the greatest temple built by human hands. Now: what was that complaint of yours?

As in the stirring poem The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson, God relentlessly pursues Jonah because He loves him and knows that he can actually change, or better, be changed. God will not let Jonah’s limited personality, his flaws, his disobedience, get the better of him, be the final word on his tombstone. No, in some sense Jonah is going to be a saint in spite of himself, because God is the one who accomplishes this work in us. As we read in the Psalms, “It is He who made us, not we ourselves” (Ps 99, 3). Men do not make themselves saints, it is God who makes men saints. This we must cry out against all the manifest and subtle Pelagianism of our times.

Yet there is something required of us — the willingness to be seized by God and shaped by Him, the willingness to be clay in the potter’s hands. Whatever might be said against old Jonah, he finally surrendered to God. Though he grumbled about it, he let the Almighty shape him. The book of Jonah ends with a question; it does not tell us how Jonah answered it. We can presume that God is successful in making his point, and that Jonah, too, is mastered by the divine patience. He learns who God is, and what, therefore, he himself has to be. God has not abandoned him up to this point, and God will not abandon him now. Jonah will become a saint because he is not going to keep himself fixed in a stance of resistance and rebellion, like Lucifer, but is willing to learn and to change.

That is why we are all fortunate to be men and not angels. If we were angels, we might have been Lucifers. If we are men, we can be Jonahs. Even Judas, as we know, could have repented, and his tragedy consists precisely in his chosen failure to do so. Peter, who did something no less evil than Judas, repented and went on to become a martyr, a perfect witness, one who followed Christ perfectly. As angels, one act of rebellion would be our everlasting death. As men, a daily act of repentance will be our everlasting life. Let us not lose this chance to gain life — the Lord is a cheerful giver who readily gives life. Let ours be the prayer of Jonah deep within the belly of the whale:

When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord;
My prayer reached you in your holy temple.
Those who worship vain idols forsake the source of mercy.
But I, with resounding praise, will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed, I will pay: deliverance is from the Lord. (2, 8-10)

Amen.

NOTE

[1] It was Fr. Paul Murray’s book A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment (Columba Press, 2002) that first drew my attention to the elements of humor in Jonah. It helped me to realize, moreover, that sometimes a false (puritanical) reverence we bring to the Bible prevents us from seeing the genuine humor present in so many passages.

The Unlikely Prophet Jonah as a Model for Us in Lent

When is the last time you read the little book of the prophet Jonah? It’s one of the most vivid short stories in the Old Testament, with many colorful and even humorous touches to it (in that regard, rather like the book of Tobit). [1] I think of this book in Lent because Jonah is truly a model for us of God’s grace triumphing over human weakness and sin.

Jonah shows us many typical weaknesses: running away from God’s calling; refusing His demands; sleeping instead of staying vigilant; moaning in self-pity; feeling angry with God’s will; having a mean spirit about God’s generosity and mercy towards others. Basically, all the most petty reactions we can have in the face of God are demonstrated by Jonah, and yet God does not give up on him, but keeps pursuing him, keeps giving him the grace to get up again after a fall — the grace of continual, albeit painful, conversion. Jonah’s conversion, moreover, does not go in a straight line from victory to victory, but in a crooked, wavering line, from failure to success to failure again. He is a man who breaks down more than once and seems to be, so to speak, discontented with the role God has assigned him, or the results he gets in his work.

He is, in this way, utterly typical of ourselves. We often do not like the role we are assigned in the drama of history. It reminds me of auditioning for plays or musicals in high school. There were only a few really glorious parts you could get, and the rest were scrappy and trivial, like those of Guildenstern and Rosencrantz in Hamlet. We often feel like we’ve been given the scrappy, trivial parts of the drama of life, not the glorious ones in which we flatter ourselves we could really shine with all our talents.

Notice, too, how slow Jonah is to get the point. God has not treated him gently. He seizes him, throws him into the ocean, abandons him to a whale’s belly, and then rescues him from the same beast. And yet, after all this, Jonah is still not submissive to God’s will, he still kicks against the goads (cf. Acts 26:14), complaining that the Ninevites will be spared on account of their repentance, complaining that his cherished gourd plant has been wasted by a worm. It reminds one of the Jews who saw the raising of Lazarus and yet still could not put their faith in Jesus, but plotted His death.

“Jonah was very happy over the plant” (4:6). Isn’t this just like us, too? Here is Jonah, whose rather dull preaching (at least from the scraps recorded of it) has, by God’s grace, resulted in the repentance and rescue of thousands of souls, feeling very happy about a plant, instead of feeling very happy about Ninevah. Don’t we find ourselves growing attached to little things, and growing upset when they are not available — a certain kind of tea or coffee, a particular schedule for the day, the friendly words of a certain person we like — and forgetting about the immense blessings that Almighty God is pouring out on us and on our neighbors every day? How often do we think about the indwelling of the Most Blessed Trinity in the soul of the just man? If you are in a state of sanctifying grace, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are making their home within your immortal intellectual soul. You are greater than the greatest temple built by human hands. Now: what was that complaint of yours?

As in the stirring poem The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson, God relentlessly pursues Jonah because He loves him and knows that he can actually change, or better, be changed. God will not let Jonah’s limited personality, his flaws, his disobedience, get the better of him, be the final word on his tombstone. No, in some sense Jonah is going to be a saint in spite of himself, because God is the one who accomplishes this work in us. As we read in the Psalms, “It is He who made us, not we ourselves” (Ps 99:3). Men do not make themselves saints, it is God who makes men saints. This we must cry out against all the manifest and subtle Pelagianism of our times.

Yet there is something required of us — the willingness to be seized by God and shaped by Him, the willingness to be clay in the potter’s hands. Whatever might be said against old Jonah, he finally surrendered to God. Though he grumbled about it, he let the Almighty shape him. The book of Jonah ends with a question; it does not tell us how Jonah answered it. We can presume that God is successful in making his point, and that Jonah, too, is mastered by the divine patience. He learns who God is, and what, therefore, he himself has to be. God has not abandoned him up to this point, and God will not abandon him now. Jonah will become a saint because he is not going to keep himself fixed in a stance of resistance and rebellion, like Lucifer, but is willing to learn and to change.

That is why we are all fortunate to be men and not angels. If we were angels, we might have been Lucifers. If we are men, we can be Jonahs. Even Judas, as we know, could have repented, and his tragedy consists precisely in his chosen failure to do so. Peter, who did something no less evil than Judas, repented and went on to become a martyr, a perfect witness, one who followed Christ perfectly. As angels, one act of rebellion would be our everlasting death. As men, a daily act of repentance will be our everlasting life. Let us not lose this chance to gain life — the Lord is a cheerful giver who readily gives life. Let ours be the prayer of Jonah deep within the belly of the whale:

When my soul fainted within me, I remembered the Lord;
My prayer reached you in your holy temple.
Those who worship vain idols forsake the source of mercy.
But I, with resounding praise, will sacrifice to you.
What I have vowed, I will pay: deliverance is from the Lord. (2:8-10)

Amen.

NOTE

[1] It was Fr. Paul Murray’s book A Journey with Jonah: The Spirituality of Bewilderment (Columba Press, 2002) that first drew my attention to the elements of humor in Jonah. It helped me to realize, moreover, that sometimes a false (puritanical) reverence we bring to the Bible prevents us from seeing the genuine humor present in so many passages.

In the Liturgy, Man is Most Active—and Most Receptive

For this feast of St. Pius X on the traditional Roman calendar and St. Gregory the Great on the new calendar (two great pontiffs whose legacies are fittingly thus intertwined), it seemed appropriate to offer a meditation on a fundamental principle of liturgical theology.

Although liturgy is the greatest act of man, it is never an act of man by himself, but always and essentially the action of Christ the High Priest, true God and true man, who allows and enables us to participate in His theandric action, His all-sufficient Sacrifice for the salvation of the world. This being so, liturgy is a peculiar kind of action, one in which man is also most passive, in the sense of being utterly receptive to the gift God wishes to give him, through the hands of the Church.

If we were to fall into a way of thinking about the liturgy as a kind of workshop, an evolving sphere of self-expression, a communal celebration of the here and now, then we would be truly guilty of Pelagianism. We would be making ourselves the central agents or actors—activists instead of imitators of the Virgin Mary who received the angel’s greeting, gave her consent to the divine initiative, and conceived by the Holy Spirit to bring forth the ultimate gift to mankind: the Son of God, in flesh and blood. The liturgy and its music have and must have this Marian dimension of receptivity, a virginal intention to stay untainted by the profane world and a faithful mothering of the Word-made-flesh.

One important expression of our Marian receptivity is that we receive the liturgy from the Church and her Tradition, we do not create it, and we follow her rubrics and rules, not our own. Although duty has been given a bad name by Immanuel Kant, rightly understood it remains a fundamental reality of Christian life. It is our duty, as Catholics, to follow the Church’s doctrine and discipline concerning the liturgy (especially the Mass). For example, when it comes to sacred music for the Ordinary Form, we must follow the full and clear teaching of the Second Vatican Council, the General Instruction on the Roman Missal, and other documents such as Sacramentum Caritatis that have made clear how we should be singing the Ordinary and the Propers, giving Gregorian chant the foremost place in the repertoire. There are norms, rules, standards, because the public worship of the Church does not belong to us, it belongs to her Master, the Lord she worships.

Recently I read this moving passage from Martin Mosebach’s endlessly insightful Heresy of Formlessness:

Many people regard the rubrics as the most distinctive—and most problematical—feature of the old Missal. . . . . Rubricism stands for a liturgy where all subjectivism, all charismatic enthusiasm, all creative inventiveness has been condemned to silence. . . . Public prayer, not the prayer of the individual but of the Church’s whole Mystical Body, possessed a binding quality that, in an atmosphere of emancipation from all pressure whatsoever, could be felt as a kind of dictatorship. Now, however, after more than a century of the destruction of forms in art, literature, architecture, politics, and religion, too, people are generally beginning to realize that loss of form—almost always—implies loss of content. . . . Formerly, seminarians learned rubrics so well they could perform them in their sleep. Just as pianists have to practice hard to acquire some technique that is initially a pure torture, but ultimately sounds like free improvisation, experienced celebrants used to move to and fro at the altar with consummate poise; the whole action poured forth as if from a single mold. These celebrants were not hemmed in by armor-plated rubrics, as it were: they floated on them as if on clouds.

Along the same lines, Ryan Topping, in his book Rebuilding Catholic Culture, has this to say about rubrics:

If you no longer see yourself as the servant of a tradition, but as its master, no longer believe that the rubrics veil a mystery, that the soul requires truth to be wrapped in the garment of beauty, then reasonably you are likely to treat the Mass more as a gathering of friends than as a sacrifice of God.

Is this not precisely what has happened, in spite of the noble witness and teaching of Pope Saint Pius X and many of his holy successors?  There is such sanity and sanctity in these words of Dom Mark Kirby of Silverstream Priory:

To begin with the liturgy is not to set about tinkering with it; it is to submit to it, as it is. To begin with God is not to engage in a critical analysis of theology; it is to fall prostrate saying, “The Lord he is God, the Lord he is God” (1 Kings 18:39). To begin with adoration is, in the inspired words of the Cherubic Hymn of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy, “to lay aside all earthly cares” in homage to “the King of Kings who comes escorted invisibly by Angelic hosts.” 

It almost sounds like an examination of conscience that we might pursue: do we truly begin with liturgy as something first, something that preexists us and will continue long after we are gone, rather than something we master, manufacture, produce, shape at will? Do we submit to the liturgy, not as we think it should be for “modern man,” but as it has come down to us from holy tradition, passing relatively unchanged through centuries of doubt, dismay, and disaster like a strong ship sailing over the churning waves of a stormy sea?  Is our most characteristic action to fall prostrate before the mystery and majesty of God as He deigns to reveal Himself in the ritual words, actions, and signs that He has left among us?

Traditionalists might have a tendency to think that such questions need not be put to them, as if they are automatically “covered” by their faithful adherence to traditional forms. I think this is an incorrect and perhaps spiritually dangerous assumption. We, too, need to be sure that we are following the full teaching of Holy Mother Church in all that pertains to our offering of public worship. For example, in our zeal to set aside a widely prevalent superficial understanding of active participation, are we zealous to embrace and promote Saint Pius X’s clarion call for the active participation of the people in the singing of the Gregorian chants of the Ordinary of the Mass and the responses that belong to them in a High Mass? Are we careful, as we sift the good results of the liturgical movement from the bad, not to throw out the baby with the bathwater? Would St. Pius X, Pius XII, and John XXIII, among others, recognize us as their children, as the ones who have finally taken their magisterium to heart and made it shine forth more brightly in the world, for the spread of the light of Christ?

St. Pius X and St. Gregory the Great, pray for us.