Word to the Wise
Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - Wednesday in the 27th Week in Ordinary Time
[Jonah 4:1-11 and Luke 11:1-4]WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 2017 ST. JOHN XXIII [Jonah 4:1-11 and Luke 11:1-4] "You are concerned over the plant which cost you no labor and which you did not raise; it came up in one night and in one night it perished. And should I not be concerned over Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot distinguish their right hand from the left, not to mention the many cattle?" [Jonah] Jonah is one of the most colorful characters of the Old Testament. His adventures begin when he tries to run away from God. He gets on a boat, God sends a storm, the sailors throw him overboard, he's swallowed by a "whale," spit up on the beach and finally does what God says. Then he sulks because the Ninevites repent and God relents and finally sulks about the plant that shaded him while he sat sulking. The ironic thing is that Jonah is the only "successful" prophet. Nineveh repented! The ultimate lesson seems to be that we can't run away from God, and our job is to do what God says and leave the results to God. That can be a tough one to learn. I cannot let the celebration of the feast of St. John XXIII go unnoticed. What he did had a tremendous impact on the church and certainly on my life. For many of the students I encounter, Vatican II is as much history as Trent! They know St. John Paul II! There are times when we are like Jonah, sulking about what has happened to the church, but John XXIII was a prophet and those folks can make us awfully uncomfortable until we see the workings of God in them. AMEN
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