First reading                       Jonah 3:1-5,10

Responsorial Psalm         Psalm 24(25):4-6,7b-9

Second reading                 1 Corinthians 7:29-31

Gospel                                   Mark 1:14-20

If someone like Jonah turned up here next week, proclaiming that “only forty days more and Roma is going to be destroyed”, we’d probably laugh at and ridicule the person, or worse, simply ignore them. Surely this was one of the reasons that Jonah himself attempted to flee from God rather than go to Nineveh, that “city great beyond compare” and preach to its inhabitants. After all, Nineveh, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, was a pagan city. They didn’t believe in the God of Israel, so why would they listen to a Hebrew prophet? In obeying God, Jonah would have to suffer the embarrassment of playing the prophet of doom, a suffering which worsened for him when the city of Nineveh actually heeded his words, repented of their sins and were spared the impending wrath; in other words, when Jonah’s words failed to come true! If you read on in the Book of Jonah, it says he was so grieved in fact that he laid down and asked God to let him die (Jon 4:3).

How is it that this pagan city, “from the greatest to the least”, was able to fast and put on sackcloth in the face of such an outlandish announcement, while we who call ourselves Christians would probably at best laugh, and at worst totally ignore, such a proclamation? I mean, seriously, have we fallen so far from grace that pagans are more responsive to God’s word than we who bear the name of Christ and have access to the Holy Sacraments? For this reason, Jesus himself said to the Pharisees, “on Judgement Day the men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation and condemn it, because when Jonah preached they repented; and there is something greater than Jonah here” (Matt 12:41). Now, you might rightly ask, “Father, how do you know that we would simply laugh or ignore? Isn’t it a bit precarious to try and predict what one woulddo? Aren’t you being a bit judgemental?” Well, the proof is in the pudding, brothers and sisters! Because the fact is, “there is something greater than Jonah here”. More than a prophet of doom, we have the Lord Jesus Christ in our midst, whose first recorded words were “the time has come and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News” (Mk 1:15). Metanoeĩte kaì pisteúete en tō euangelíō – literally, “change your minds and put your faith in the Gospel”. Well, have we heeded those words wholeheartedly?

Furthermore, whether it be 40 days more, or 400,000 days more, Roma is going to be destroyed. In our second reading today, St Paul warns us not to be attached to the things of this world, because “the world as we know it is passing away” (1 Cor 7:31). Indeed, not just our beloved town, but all temporal things are exactly that, they are temporal, meaning at some point –we know not the day nor the hour– they will cease to exist. Why then, I must ask, do we so often neglect the work of repentance in order to cling to a sinking ship? Why do we put off till tomorrow what ought to be done today, especially given the fact that for everyone without exception, at some point tomorrow never comes? Why do we then put our faith in passing things rather than fixing our minds on eternity? Why do we allow ourselves to be shaped by a secular mindset, rather than transformed by the life-giving Gospel of God? 

Let me share something with you that has been troubling me recently. As you know, I often attend to those who are dying, to bring them the Sacraments in their hour of greatest need. On several occasions though, I’ve been confronted by people on their deathbed, who refuse to make a confession, and even claim they have nothing to confess. I find this shocking, that even in the face of one’s last end, people who have been away from the Sacraments for many, many decades, can believe themselves righteous, to be saints with no need of repentance! In those situations, there’s nothing I can do for such people. The Last Rites are not magic spells! Brothers and sisters, this is what happens if we habitually ignore the Lord’s call to repentance in the Gospel today. If you habitually ignore the work of salvation in your life, you won’t suddenly gain the courage to confess on your deathbed, thereby you will die without sanctifying grace. And there is nothing more horrifying than that. The habits we build now, shall determine the outcome of our lives.

On that note, it is providential that today, in honour of the strong Filipino presence and contribution to this parish, we celebrate the special feast of the Santo Niño or “Holy Child”. The Santo Niño is an image of the child Jesus that was presented by Spanish explorers to the King and Queen of Cebu as a baptism gift in 1521, signifying their conversion and ready embrace of faith in Jesus, a faith which in some ways has come to characterise the Philippine people. The habit of just over 500 years of Christian faith in the Philippines has not only brought salvation to the people of the Philippines, but now that they are sending missionaries us, to Australia, America, Europe and the places that once sent missionaries to them, they are holding the light of the Gospel back out to the West, which has become so indifferent to the message of Jesus. We must face the fact that without the priests and lay people that have migrated to this country from places such as Asia and Africa, the Church in Australia would collapse. Let us then heed the Lord’s call in the Gospel today to come and follow him, and be encouraged by the witness of those nations such as the Philippines, whose Catholic faith holds out to us anew, the call to renew our baptismal commitment to change our minds, and put our faith in the Gospel.