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.

I want to talk to you today about the word of God in sacred scripture in the Holy Bible. We Catholics over the years have been accused of not reading the scriptures enough, and I think that could be said of all Christians, that we don’t read the word of God enough. It’s interesting, in this modern era we have the opportunity to really read and come to know the word of God, more so than ever before. For many centuries, a lot of people didn’t read the Bible because they were illiterate. Some years ago I was researching my family history to get my Irish citizenship papers, which I now have an Irish passport. I don’t know if I mentioned this to you, but I am moving to Ireland as soon as it stops raining. That’ll be when it starts raining in Los Alamos. I found my mom’s birth certificate, and my grandfather, John Morgan, had signed it with an "X". And I was surprised. I had never met my grandfather, but my mom told me he was a very intelligent man. He did as well as he could in those poor, poor days in rural Ireland. And so, many people couldn’t read, and so the church taught the scriptures by other means. Stained glass windows are a great example. Throughout Europe, I was in Chartres cathedral last year, and the stained glass is over a thousand years old. It’s absolutely magnificent. It’s filled with details of the Annunciation, and stories of the prophets, and everything else. And you can just, Chartres was a cathedral where thousands and thousands of pilgrims passed through and actually stayed in the cathedral. It’s a massive place, and they would sleep in there, on their way to other sites of pilgrimage, especially in Spain. And so, the church taught scriptures through stained glass windows, and also through art. You know, Michelangelo and Leonardo DaVinci and others were not primarily painters and sculptors, they were theologians who used the medium of art to teach. And also, of course, that is true of song. We have learned to praise God through song, and many of the songs were taken from sacred scripture.

The Bible is not a book. Sometimes people say, "I’m going to start reading the Bible." And they assume they should start on Page 1. Well, its not a book, it’s a library, 73 books in the Bible, all very different, very unique. And so, it’s not the kind of book you read from one end to another. You select what ever you want to read, and know what you read. There are many kind of literature in the Bible. There’s historical books, of course – 1^st and 2^nd Samuel, 1^st and 2^nd Chronicles, the Gospels are largely historical. There’s prophetic books. We know Isaiah, and Amos, and Jeremiah. There’s poetry and prose in the Bible, in the Psalms and Proverbs. As a matter of fact, Job is a poem. There’s Wisdom literature – the Book of Wisdom, Sirach, Proverbs. Apocalyptic literature; that word means hidden things, that’s why it’s so hard to understand sometimes when we read Daniel or Revelations. And letters of instruction. So it’s not all one type of literature.

We Catholics differ from some Christians who are fundamentalists. They read everything in the Bible as if it was history. And we don’t do that. If we limited our knowledge of God’s word to just historical events, we would be impoverished immensely. And so, depending on the book of the Bible, you read it as it is written, for the purpose it is written. And let me explain that by using the example that we heard in the first reading today from Jonah. The reading we heard from Jonah was the highly sanitized version of what happened. It’s a great story, but to understand it… you all know the story of Jonah with the whale and the fish and all that stuff. And what amazes me is that people sit down and read the book of Jonah and they don’t laugh. Because its Jewish comedy. You’re supposed to laugh. It’s a funny story. The story of Jonah, just sort of recapping it, is this. Jonah was called to be a prophet by God. He was sent to the city of Nineveh, to proclaim a fast and repentance so that the people of Nineveh could be saved. Right? But do you know what Nineveh is today? Does anyone know the name of the city today that Nineveh has become? It has a new name. Come on, now. Every once in a while I know something that you people don’t know. No one knows? It’s the city of Mossul, its in Iraq. As a matter of fact, it was in the news last week that Sadaam has built a palace there, and they suspect that underneath the palace in Mossul or Nineveh are hidden dangerous weapons. It’s about 300 or 400 miles north of Baghdad on the Tigres river. That was Nineveh. You won’t believe this, but back in those days of Jonah, some 2600 years ago, the Jews didn’t like those people. And those people didn’t like the Jews. So what else is new? Nothing changes. Nothing, sadly, changes in the Middle East. So, Jonah hated the Ninevites. He wanted them all to go to hell, literally. And so when God called him up to go and preach His message of repentance, Jonah says, "No." And so, he ran away from God. He got on a ship. He bought passage. The ship was headed far away, to Tarshish, which is not the Tarshish that Paul was from, but some place in Spain. And, of course, God wouldn’t let him get away, and He sent a great storm. And the ship was being tossed about and it was clear that they were about to die. And the ship had sailors from all over the world and they all prayed to their gods and nothing happened. The storm got worse. One of the sailors went into the hold of the ship and there was Jonah, asleep. And he said, "What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have a god that you can pray to?" And Jonah says, "Oh, I’ve got a God. Believe me, what a God." And Jonah confessed, "Well, the reason that this is happening is because I am running away from this God." And so, after some deliberation, Jonah suggested, and they finally agreed, to throw him overboard. And they did. And the storm and the seas were settled. And a big fish came and swallowed up Jonah. And three days later – three days, prophetic – three days in the tomb – three days later this fish spewed up Jonah on the beach. Can you imagine what he looked like? Our hero. I picture him looking like Danny DeVito, a little Jewish guy. I think DeVito is Italian, but you know what I mean. So he’s on the beach, and God says, "Jonah." And he goes, "What?" "Go to Nineveh." And he does. I’m sure he was saying, "They won’t accept it. I don’t want them to accept it." And he goes to Nineveh, and it’s a great city. It takes three days to walk around. And he goes to Nineveh and he tells them, "You people are in sin. You need to repent and change your lives and fast and put on sack cloths and ashes." And, lo and behold, they do! The king learns about God’s warning, and the king orders even the animals to put on sack cloths. And the king himself sits in ashes for forty days, as a sign of repentance. And God spares the Ninevites, which really disgusts Jonah. So he’s on a hill as the book ends, overlooking this, and he says, "I wish I was dead. I’d rather be dead than to see those people live." Doesn’t that sound familiar today? Just, nothing changes in the Middle East. And so, he’s about to die, and there’s a bright sun and a scorching sun, and its taking his strength. And God sends a plant, a gourd. And the gourd grows quickly and gives him shade, and Jonah says, "Oh, thank you." And God kills the plant with a worm. And Jonah says, "Why did you do that?" And God says, "You think I care more about the plant than I do the people of Nineveh? I gave you that plant, I can’t take it away?" And that’s the end of the story.

And that’s a funny story. But it’s a story filled with very important lessons. And here are just a few of them. First of all, its an allegory; its not history. Don’t go home and say, "What did Father say? He said the Bible is a lie." Some of the great truths cannot be told with history, they have to be told as allegories. We all know that from literature. So, it’s an allegory of God’s love and mercy. And it’s also somewhat satirical. Look at Jonah, the Jewish hero. Now this book was written in post-exilic Israel, in Judah, after the Babylonian captivity Iraq begins. And so, it was a hard pill for the Jews to swallow to hear this lesson, because their hero Jonah, as typical of them, is portrayed as a vindictive, narrow-minded bigot. And God is portrayed as a loving and gentle God. So, God is filled with mercy and forgiveness.

Secondly, God’s love is universal. The Jews considered themselves the Chosen People, no one else. Sometimes some of us may have thought that. Wrong. God’s love is universal. God loves the pagan in Mozambique, every bit as much as He loves you and your baby. God’s love is universal and divine and perfect for every one of the six and a half billion of us on this planet. There is no pecking order with God. We Christians feel that we are blessed because we know this God personally, and we know Him intimately, especially in the Holy Eucharist. But that doesn’t mean He doesn’t love others as much as He loves us.

Thirdly, God’s love is free and unmerited. You don’t earn it. You accept it. You’re grateful for it. You don’t earn it. And fourthly, and Jonah learned the hard way, don’t try to run away from God. Now, do you ever run away from God? Do you hear God in your conscience and disobey Him? That’s running away from God. Don’t do it. God has been called the Hound of Heaven – He will track you down. Because He loves you, and wants to save you. So, the sooner we give in to this God, the sooner we submit to His holy will, which is always in our best interest as well, the sooner we will find peace, the sooner we will find real peace.

One little story. The Bible is filled with stories. So I ask you the question – Do you read the Bible every day? Don’t put up your hands. Well, you wouldn’t anyway. I do because I have to. That’s one of the reasons I became a priest. I became a priest because I didn’t trust myself. And I figured, "I will get into this organization and I will promise." Because I always keep what I vow. I’m pretty good at that. So I promised to pray five times a day and go to mass every day. I figured maybe I could slip into heaven that way. Read the Bible. Now, what do we Catholics do when we pick up our Bibles? (Blow the dust off.) I’ll tell you the story about St. Thomas Aquinas when I first started this couple would sit in the front every Sunday. And this woman had the biggest Bible ever seen, that you could carry. It was huge. And after about six months she said, "You know, Father, I’m not Catholic." And I said, "Yeah, I know." I knew the first time I saw her, the way she was carrying that Bible. We need to… This is our book, you know. The Church is older than the Bible. The Cannon, the books in the New Testament, were determined by the Church in the 4^th Century, in the year 380. There were other books, like the Gospel of Thomas, that were not considered Canonical. The Church is older than the scriptures, and this is a great gift that we have – a gift to read every day. There’s no reason not to. So read the scriptures and you’ll find God in there. And you’ll find instruction and you’ll find salvation. This is the word of God, and its the word of God that says, "I love you, and I always will. And I always have."