Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
Original Manuscript:
This is an interactive manuscript. To follow links, click the highlighted words below.
Interestingly enough with our Gospel today, this past Sunday in Christian Formation we talked a little bit about Jonah. In that conversation, we talked about how Jonah, in going to the Ninevites, was prophesying to his enemies, the enemies of Israel even. In his prophecy, God wasn’t offering redemption to the Ninevites. God, instead, was foretelling destruction.
When the Ninevites heard this, they went into mourning. They repented their previous ways. Even though God hadn’t offered it, God still provided them salvation.
Jesus, as we hear in the Gospel, is greater than Jonah. If the Ninevites, who got a prophet who was so unwilling to go to them he had to be swallowed by a great fish (or a whale) and spit up on to the shore of Nineveh just so he could do what God had given him to do, were able to listen, how much more should we who have Jesus?
The people Jesus spoke to in today’s Gospel were clearly not ready to listen. The people who put Jesus to death weren’t willing to hear either. There are many still in our world now who won’t listen to God like the Ninevites did. We must ask ourselves, “are we willing to listen to Jesus now?”