Homily of Bishop John T. Steinbock

In the first reading we heard of the preaching of Jonah in the city of Neneveh and how the people repented at his preaching, and God did not carry out the destruction he had threatened. We all remember the story of Jonah being swallowed by the whale, but the point of the story is lost if we don’t remember how Jonah got into that predicament.

God asked him to go to Nineveh and preach repentance to the people. But Jonah was a reluctant prophet. He did not want to go because he hated the Ninevites. They were enemies of the Jewish people and he did not want them to come to repentance and so he fled by boat in the opposite direction of Nineveh.

We might remember how a storm came up and the boat was about to sink, when the crew found out that Jonah was fleeing from God and they threw him overboard as they figured he was the reason for the storm. The large fish that swallows Jonah spews Jonah on shore, and Jonah eventually obeys God’s command and preaches in Nineveh and they come to repentance. The story certainly speaks of God’s great mercy and love for all peoples, not just the Jewish race.

But there is another important lesson in this story and that is Jonah’s reaction and his hatred of the Ninevites. Jonah represents those people who are petty, hold grudges, selfish, think of themselves and do not include everyone in this world as their brothers and sisters, and who are not open to God’s ways, who seek their own will and not God’s will.

God is big; we tend to be petty

God is forgiving; we tend to hold on to our grudges

God is loving of all; we tend to choose those whom we will love or not love.

God respects all peoples; we tend to limit those whose lives we respect

God is far different from Jonah and far different from us. The sign of how different God is, is Jesus on the cross. His died for all; he died for all sinners; he died for all peoples of every time and every place. He extended his arms on the cross to embrace everyone in this world, rich and poor, born and unborn, citizen and foreigner, documented and undocumented; those guilty of serious crimes and the victims of serious crimes; those productive in society and those not able to contribute positively to society; those who sleep in beautiful homes and those who sleep in the streets; our soldiers who are sacrificing their lives in Iraq, and those who live in Iraq and even those fighting against us in Iraq.

We are celebrating Respect Life Sunday. Just as God called Peter and Andrew, John and James in the Gospel today, he calls each and every one of us to proclaim the kingdom of God. We proclaim that kingdom by witnessing to this universal, all encompassing love of God for everyone.

Our witnessing will not have the effectiveness God wills for us, unless we witness to the respect we are called to have for all human life, and witness to the sacredness of every human life. And this is challenging because we are members of our society and we are influenced tremendously by the pressures of our society to limit our love and respect and forgiveness. We live in a violent society that sees violence and death as a solution to so many of our personal and societal problems—abortion, euthanasia, suicide, capital punishment, preemptive war and military action over patient and difficult diplomacy. And many of these attitudes are encased in our law and our culture and leads to all the more violence, manifested in spousal and child abuse, crime in our neighborhoods, the gang culture, and on and on.

We should pray very much for our legislators, we should pray very much for those women who feel forced to choose abortion because of pressures in their personal lives, we should pray very much for those who provide abortion, and on and on and on.

But we must also look into ourselves to see if we are living according to the kingdom of God totally and completely in our lives. Do we limit those that we choose to love and respect, care for, and help?
Where are we with capital punishment? Are we witnessing to God’s love for both the victims and the perpetrators?

Where are we with migrants who are here without documentation? Are we witnessing to God’s love for them, speaking up for them in public discourse, seeking to help them, especially those who are hard working people and who are only here trying to provide a good life for themselves and their families?

Where are we with the abuse of prisoners and disrespecting human rights and of life itself which is often a part of the policy in waging this war that are in?

Where are we with the public discourse on embryonic stem cell research? These human embryos are human and to destroy them for research is not living by our call to respect all human life.

Where are we with forgiving others who have hurt us? Are we holding onto grudges? Are we limiting our love? Are we, like Jonah, actually trying to flee from God, not hear God’s voice in relation to certain issues, so we can feel free to pick and choose whom we love and respect and forgive?

If we are going to proclaim the kingdom of God and lead people to respect for life, and fight against the great evil of abortion in our nation, we must first look into our own selves and be sure that our witnessing is to God’s all encompassing love and not our limited human love, or our society will never change. It will only by people hearing the word of God, seeing it witnessed fully in the lives of others, that people will be able to open themselves to the power of God’s Truth and Love, which alone can change our society into a culture of life rather than a culture of death.