The prophet Micah preached to Jerusalem, but he was not from the city. He was an outsider from the farming village of Moresheth in the Judean foothills. You can imagine how the people, priests, and temple prophets received his prophecies of death, doom, pestilence and punishment. I am sure they would have liked to cast him away, tossed outside the city walls.
Where some prophets are rejected because the town knows them too well, e.g., Jeremiah and Jesus, other are rejected because the listeners assume their town of origin automatically dismisses them. In our own day, we too have trouble recognizing and accepting the prophets. They tend to chip away at the edges of our consciences and memory where lies guilt, remorse and regret; and too often, hesitancy to acknowledge our fault and seek reconciliation. They are the things we too should cast away outside the walls of our lives.
One of the famous pieces of Franciscan art can be found in the left transept of the Lower Church of San Francesco in Assisi. It is a fresco done by Pietro Lorenzetti and is one of 17 frescoes he created in the church. This fresco is located lower on the transept wall under Lorenzetti’s masterpiece, The Crucifixion. The fresco is known as Our Lady of the Sunsets.
In the scene the Virgin Marry is holding the Child Jesus. The other two figures in the fresco are St. John the Evangelist (right) and St. Francis of Assisi (left), both of whom are looking at what is unfolding in the center of the scene. There Mary and Jesus are focused on each other, and Mary has a unique gesture, holding her thumb up pointing back to Saint Francis.
“10 When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way, he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them; he did not carry it out.” (Jonah 3:10) Great! The Ninevites repented, God relented, and Jonah’s prophetic mission is complete. As mentioned, that would have been an “they all lived happily ever after” ending. But there is another chapter in the story whose first verse gives us an idea that the story’s ending is anything but happy.
This is part two of my day-off-curiosity about voting. As noted in the 
“Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed.” (Jonah 3:4) I think it noteworthy that Jonah does not announce the reason for the destruction or by whose hand, what the Ninevites can do to avert disaster, only that there is a set time of 40 days. What was the reaction of the Ninevites to Jonah’s proclamation? “When the people of Nineveh believed God; they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth.” (v.5) It does not seem as though it took a whole lot to get Nineveh to repent.
One of the most common things one hears in the Sacrament of Reconciliation is the sin of gossip. It has been said that the act of gossip is like buying a chicken in the marketplace, feathers and all, and then walking through town, plucking the feathers one by one. As a priest, how do I direct a person to undo all the damage caused by gossip. It is akin to asking the person to return and pick up all the feathers. Such is the nature of gossip and its redress.
When last seen Jonah had just hit bottom, swallowed alive. Up to this point, despite lots of opportunities, Jonah had not prayed, even when commanded by the ship’s captain in the midst of the raging tempest at sea – even as all the crew around him offered prayers to a pantheon of gods. But now it is different. He is alone, his choices and their consequences have “consumed” him, and … and what?
friarmusings 