Pastor’s Notes

God’s Sense of Humor

Imagine. God laughing. He loves humanity because he can’t resist a good story. Jonah is an outrageous story. It is one of the few books in the Hebrew Bible regarded as humorous because of its ironic twists and surprise ending. The joke is on Jonah, a reluctant prophet, and on all the other devout Jews of his day who believed that God hated their enemies as much as they did. Jonah resists the call to go to preach in Nineveh because he does not want the Ninevites to repent and avoid destruction. They after all deserve what they get.

Most of the story is about Jonah’s attempt to escape his mission from God. (Sound familiar? When his pagan shipmates realize he is running away from the Jewish God, they throw him overboard. A huge fish swallows him and then delivers him to the shores of Nineveh. What he fears takes place. Though he barely preaches, the Ninevites repent, from the king on down to the animals in the marketplace.

In the final scene of the story, Jonah is sweltering in the hot sun, and God teaches him a lesson about mercy by freely giving him the shade of a broom plant. God then takes it away, and when Jonah complains, God reminds him that the tree was a gift, not something he had earned. It is the same with Israel. God chose them freely. Why should they complain if God freely chooses to do the same thing with everyone else?

The Gospel of Mark took up the theme of Jonah and applied it to Jesus. He preached God’s gift of salvation not just to the Jews but to non-believers as well, not just to the righteous but to sinners and other low-lifes. In today’s Gospel, Jesus chooses his first disciples, all fisherfolk. The disciples do not choose Jesus; he chooses them – an odd kind of rabbi. Most students apply to their own school. This school of divine love goes looking for prospective students.   Jesus opens their hearts to God’s gift of love, and demonstrates God’s overwhelming generosity. Jesus invites them to take their boats back out after a night of catching nothing. Their nets are filled with fish. It is not their doing; it is a gift. Everything is a gift.

This frightens some people. Scribes and the Pharisees complain that Jesus befriends sinners. He seemed to be giving God’s love away, thus upsetting the moral order and those who control access to institutional religion. Sinners should have to suffer some punishment or pay for their sins before God welcomes them back. No one really measures up to God’s standards. This feels unfair it is to good people who have kept their noses clean obeyed God’s laws. If God loves everyone the same why excel? Fishing for men (and women, kids and sinners…) has a different standard. God laughs with delight when someone pulls off a life poured out for others. Keep your eyes open in this Arizona pandemic time, we are seeing it all around us

A gentle week,

Fr. Michael Weldon, OFM