We’re back with our daily reflections from the readings at Mass. Today, Fr Richard takes us from a vomiting fish to a world without barriers where everyone can know they are children or God.
Monday of 27th week in Ordinary Time (Year 1)
Readings: Jonah 1.1-17; 2.10 and Luke 10.25-37
To many people outside of the Christian faith, the Bible is probably viewed as a very traditional sort of book, containing rules and regulations about how to live. For those us who are more familiar with the Bible, we know it to be so much more than that.
Tonight’s reading from Jonah, for example, is quite comical, with the image of Jonah himself being thrown overboard from the ship, swallowed by a great fish, then after three days vomited out onto the land! But our reading from Jonah, and today’s Gospel, reveal that the Bible can be very radical, and offer a profound challenge to common ways of thinking.
The reason Jonah was on the ship in the first place was because he was running away from God. He didn’t want to carry out the mission God had given him, which was to go and preach repentance to the people of Nineveh. The fact that God is wanting to send him there at all, to a people outside of the nation of Israel, is very striking. For it tells us that God’s love, mercy and compassion extends to all peoples everywhere, not just a select few. In other words, God’s love is profoundly inclusive.
We see this theme of radical inclusivity in the famous parable of the Good Samaritan. The religious insiders, the priest and the Levite, fail to help the man who has been robbed. They pass by on the other side. It is the Samaritan, the traditional enemy of the Jewish people, who does the right thing and shows the man something of God’s love and compassion. The message is clear: everyone, regardless of who are they are, can be channels of God’s grace. Throughout the course of human history, people have been inclined to put up barriers, and view some folk as better than others, or divide people up into “insiders” and “outsiders”. Perhaps we need a little more the radical inclusivity that we find in the Bible to permeate modern society, so that those barriers can be broken down, and every person can be seen for what they truly are: a beloved child of God.
South Cardiff Ministry Area 