Robert Barron - Listen to the Voice of God
Peace be with you. Friends, I never want to pass up the opportunity to preach on the book of the prophet Jonah. I know I've done it before, you've heard me on it. But there's something inexhaustible about Jonah, and though it's a very short book, it's only a few pages in the Bible, you can read it easily, easily in one sitting. It repays our attention. So, listen now, our first reading for this Sunday, how it begins. "The word of the Lord came to Jonah saying, 'Set out for the great city of Nineveh and announce to it the message I will tell you.'"
Okay, it's a biblical commonplace that God speaks to certain people and gives them missions, right? And you say, "Well, that's great for those people in ancient times, but I never hear from God". Nonsense. Nonsense. We hear from God all the time, precisely in the voice of our conscience. John Henry Newman, one of my great intellectual heroes, refers to the conscience as the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul. It's such a good description, isn't it? The pope is the vicar of Christ, but the aboriginal vicar, the more primordial representative of Christ in the soul, Newman says, is your conscience. It's the voice of God telling you to do certain things.
Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the conscience rarely tells us to do really simple, easy things. We don't really need the conscience for that. When our conscience speaks to us, it's often telling us to do things that are challenging, that are difficult, demanding. Well, look at the assignment given to Jonah. Set off for Nineveh. Now, what's Nineveh? It was the capital city, far, far away, capital city of one of the great enemies of Israel. And then, Jonah is told he has to go and announce a message of repentance. "You people are lost. You have to change your lives".
Okay, let me get this right. I have to go to a distant country where travel was very difficult in those days. I got to go to the capital of this enemy empire, and I've got to preach repentance to them. I mean, that's about the last thing that any Israelite would want to do. And so, and now, our reading for the Sunday skips all the fireworks because what comes right after that line I just read is Jonah's escape. He goes to the seacoast, books passage on a ship and sails, it tells us, to Tarshish. Tarshish for them meant Timbuktu. It meant the ends of the world.
Well, see, this is everybody. That's why this story speaks to us so powerfully. That's everybody. We hear the voice of God in our conscience telling us to do typically difficult things, spiritually demanding things. Taking the easy path, well, that's always being proposed to us, and most of us take it. But the conscience is there to say no, not that easy path, this spiritually challenging path. So, like Jonah, most of us when told to go east by land, go west by sea, right? Most of us run to the nearest ship and try to get as far away as possible from the demand of God. Well, what happens? Chaos.
So, Jonah's on the ship with his shipmates, and the storm kicks up this dramatic deadly storm. It's threatening the ship itself. To his credit, he admits, "Okay, I'm the one. I'm disobeying God's command. I'm the reason the storm is here". And so, they throw him overboard. Now, here's the first point to take. What happens when we refuse the call of conscience? Bad for us, yeah, it is. But it's bad for everybody around us, because no man's an island. We're all connected to each other, and conscience typically sends us on a mission to benefit those around us.
And so, when we say no to our conscience, trouble ensues not just for us, but for all the people around us. Take a look, everybody, and I know it's hard to do this kind of searching moral inventory. But think of the times in your life, I'll think of those in mine, when I refused the voice of my conscience. What happened? Chaos. Well, they throw him overboard and then famously, he's swallowed up by the great fish. What does this mean? God, who's the Lord of all creation, you can't escape from God. And think of it for a second. You can't escape from your conscience. You could sail to Timbuktu, but you won't escape the press of your conscience. You can't because it's in you, right? You can't escape from God.
So, God sends the great fish and swallows up Jonah. It means God is swallowing up Jonah's recalcitrant will. God swallows him up, restricts him. Why? To punish him? No, no. To bring him where God wants him to be. So, the great fish sails through the waters and then brings him right back to shore near where God wants him to be. Friends, this is sermon for another day, but I mean, how do we read times of great suffering and depression and anxiety in our lives, when we feel like we've been swallowed up by this great fish? Well, you could read it as simply dumb suffering, or you could read it as God taking us where God wants us to be.
Well, this is where our story picks up. So, Jonah is vomited out on the land and then it says, "He made ready and went to Nineveh, according to the Lord's bidding". So, okay, to his credit, finally he does. Finally, he follows the word of the Lord. And he comes to Nineveh, it says it's an enormously large city. Took three days to go through it. That's the ancient world before we have automobiles and all that, but still, we're talking about this enormous city. And he follows the voice of the Lord and he preaches repentance, and he becomes, almost comically, the greatest preacher of repentance in the history of Israel, because everybody from the king all the way to the cattle repent, because even the cattle put on sackcloth, we are told.
See, when you resist God's voice, you resist the voice of your conscience. Trouble ensues, for you and for everybody around you. When you follow your conscience, painful as that might be, challenging as that might be, when you follow your conscience, what happens? Enormous grace is unleashed into the world. Here's the capital of this enemy empire, the city of sin, and the whole city is converted because this one man followed his conscience. What are you doing right now, all those watching and listening to me, in regard to your conscience, to the voice of God? Look, I know, we follow all kinds of voices. The voice of success, the voice of pleasure, the voice of our family, the voice of our culture and society.
All right. They don't matter at the end of the day. They don't matter at the end of the day. All that matters is, are you following what God wants you to do? If you don't, I don't care how rich you get, I don't care how famous you get, I don't care how much your family thinks you're the cat's meow, you will cause chaos in yourself and in those around you. And I could bring forward, you know this, story after story after story of great figures in our culture, our society, who've accomplished all these wonderful things. But they're like Jonah on board the ship. They're like Jonah inside the fish.
What matters is following God's will. Okay. With that marvelous Jonah story in mind, now look at the Gospel. Taken from chapter one of Mark, and we're going to read the gospel Mark now, during this cycle of readings this year. "After John had been arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God. This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the gospel". Everybody, this is the inaugural address of Jesus. So, the scholars tend to say the first gospel written is Mark's. Here are the first words out of the mouth of Jesus in the first gospel. We need to listen to them, that's the point. We need to pay attention. Listen. "This is the time of fulfillment. The kingdom of God is at hand".
If the conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul, this is Christ. This is the one of whom your conscience is the vicar. But we're hearing here, all of us, the voice of Christ himself. "The time of fulfillment is now". This is the time of fulfillment. What's he talking about? Himself. That he has arrived, the one in whom divinity and humanity meet, the one in whom heaven and earth come together, the one who is in his own person, the kingdom of God, autobasileia, as Origen said, the kingdom in person. Therefore, accept him, listen to him, internalize him. Make him the center of your life. Make everything in your life relate to him. The kingdom of God's at hand, and listen to his language. "Repent and believe in the gospel".
The word there behind repent in Greek is metanoiate. We talk about metanoia, conversion, right? Literally, meta means beyond in Greek, and then noia is derived from noose, which means mind. What he's saying literally is, go beyond the mind you have. Think about it for a second, everybody. Fellow sinners, listen to me. What's the mind that we have? It's the mind of the world. What matters is wealth and power and the opinion of others and being a success and all of this. That's the mind that the world has bequeathed to us. It's a fallen mind. It's a compromised mind. Jesus is saying here, get beyond that. Get beyond that. And may as Paul would later put it, that same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.
What will your life look like if Jesus is unambiguously the center of your life in every way? See, most of us, we got the old mind of the world, and so we're like Jonah. We're on this ship and we're causing trouble for ourselves and everybody around us. Have that same mind in you that was in Christ Jesus. Then, you'll become a bearer of grace to the world, in the manner in which God wants you to be that bearer. It might be Jonah, the most impressive preacher in the history of the world, or in your particular way.
Christ wants you to live his life in a particular way, to unleash grace in your particular manner. What it all comes down to everybody, and I'll state it simply, but I think this is correct. It all comes down to do you listen to the voice of God or not? Do you listen to what your conscience is telling you or not? If you do, you're a vehicle of grace, for yourself and for all those around you. If you don't, it's the watery chaos. That's the great either or that these magnificent readings present to us today, and God bless you.