putting on Sackcloth

Wednesday March 4

Readings: Jon 3:1-10; LK 11:29-32

In today’s readings, we are introduced to Jonah the prophet.  Most of us know the part where Jonah was in the belly of the fish for 3 days and probably saw this depicted in cartoon form as a kid.  Cute story.

Yet in the gospel, Jesus seems to indicate that this is the only “sign” that’s going to be given to us to understand God’s kin-dom.  So if we don’t understand this story, we might risk missing a central part of Jesus’ understanding of things. 

We could write a whole book on the prophet Jonah (and some have), but since these are supposed to be “brief, daily reflections” I will just stick with what’s going on in today’s reading.  But it is really worth going back and reading the WHOLE story sometime. 

In the first reading, the story picks up with Jonah preaching to the people of Nineveh, “Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed.” Apparently God didn’t like what God saw going on there, so God sent Jonah to warn them.

And guess what happened?  We’re told that the people, “proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth.”  This means that they repented and changed their ways.  Even the folks at the highest levels turned things around.  No questions asked.  No bargaining.  No hemming and hawing.  We are not told the exact nature of the evil of Nineveh, but the king speaks to the “violence” of the place that somehow gets addressed.

Nineveh had been known historically to have been a militaristic and oppressing nation.  And in the biblical imagination the word “violence” was often used to signify when the strong exploited the weak.  This makes me think a lot about Martin Luther King’s words, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”  That was probably Nineveh – a place governed by racism, materialism and militarism.

And it is our reality today.

In the gospel, we see a very different reaction of the crowds to a prophet. The people around Jesus want a sign.  They want proof.  They want to know if they really need to change their ways.   It’s not that they don’t get Jesus’ message.  My sense is that they understand it and don’t want to do it.

This raises the question for me of what happens when feedback (spiritual or otherwise) comes our way.  Do we consider it, accepting that we were out of line somehow and turn our lives around?  Or do we question the person giving us feedback, dig in a little deeper and keep doing what we’re doing?

How about if our racism or sexism or homophobia is brought to light?  Do we repent and seek to change or do we get defensive, question the questioner or sidetrack the conversation?

None of us walks on a straight path.  We all veer off, and feedback will come our way to enlighten us, guide us back and reorient us in our relationships.  When this constructive feedback comes our way, will we seek to embrace it or will we find some reason to ignore it?

Today’s Psalm says, “A heart contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn.”  To be humbled is to get close to the ground (the humus). It is to cultivate a heart that is open.  Lent is a time to get close to the ground (literally) so that we may hear some hard truths about the world that we live in and how we are in the world.  We take these truths in so that our world will not be destroyed – not so much by God – but by the consequences of the ways in which we have chosen to live.