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January 21, 2024: A Spirituality of Urgency in our Christian Faith
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Scripturally, there’s meant to be a sense of urgency in the living out of our faith in Jesus. Certainly, for folks who have left their faith behind for whatever the reason, looking at their faith in Jesus through a rearview mirror, knowing that each daytime runs out to renew our faith in God, a “faith urgency” is needed. But also those with faith, making space within our Christian spirituality the belief and practice that, as we may search for a deeper level of lived faith, we may struggle to even come close to arriving there. I suspect there are many Saints in the Communion who experienced this, that as devoted as they truly were in their love for Christ, they considered themselves to be of little use to God after doing some pretty marvelous things in their life. St. Thomas Aquinas comes to mind. We can also suspect their attitude, if you will, was one of “God can accomplish without me everything I ever did in his name. God could have done it himself if I had never been born.”
There truly is a sense of urgency to the living out of our faith, for tomorrow we are not guaranteed to still be living and breathing the oxygen of earth. There are simply no, none, nada, zero guarantees in the matter of how quickly our lives can change concerning being here (present life) or there (eternal life) within a short space of time. This approach to living our faith has been a consistent theme of many Saints regarding their lives. When they thought they may have reached a pinnacle in their faith life, they would arrive at an understanding they were not close to the peak of any mountain of faith, even though they moved mountains in their faith lives. It’s an interesting spiritual juxtaposition, to say the least.
It seems the older we get, for those of us over 60, then 70, and then 80 for those who are strong, as the Psalm says, it seems there is a hurriedness to reaching a certain plateau, a certain deepness of faith for those whom faith in Jesus is central to our lives, knowing that our time is now short, maybe 20 years or more, which goes by in a heartbeat. I remember Y2K like it was yesterday, which was 24 years ago. Wow, where did that go? And I fondly remember 20 years before Y2K when I was having the time of my life playing baseball in college, working at UPS, driving an awesome sky-blue Camaro, walking around town like I was the king of the universe. Funny how attitudes can change over time while advancing with some degree of maturity. At this stage, I do pray that each of us who have reached an age that reminds us we’re much closer to eternity than taking up residence on earth above the ground, that we do possess a hurriedness to our devoted lives of faith. A hurriedness in the sense of settling important matters with the Lord before moving on to the next phase of the human condition. For the clock is ticking.
Each of us needs to decide what those important matters happen to be, and then bring them to prayer, accompanied by an honest conversation with our Creator. Be it our suffering, our sinfulness, our lack of thankfulness, our hardcore views in this world that have openly clashed with God’s revelation, the important personal questions we have, or whatever has held us back from being the person God has created us to be from the world’s foundation, and much more, it would a useful spiritual practice to “go deep” at least once with Jesus, like a speedy wide receiver in the NFL, so our loving and merciful God will catch us in his arms when we head off to the heavenly Jerusalem. Procrastination in this matter is, well, a bad waste of time. Most procrastination is a waste of time, but procrastination with regards to our salvation, or being as clear of heart and mind as we can be with our merciful God, is a viable spiritual process for any person at any age.
When Jonah began his long 40-days walk around the city of Ninevah (long for him; short for the Ninevites) as we hear in this week’s first reading, he had a funny, twisted sort of hope in the work God gave him to do. God sent Jonah forth from the belly of the fish, landing him eventually at the walls of Ninevah, to begin a countdown that was meant to bring the city of Ninevah to their godly senses, and away from their ungodly acts. Jonah had little hope for those wayward people. In fact, he had no hope they could change their wicked ways. Jonah’s reaction at the end when Ninevah repents, and God forgives them, is, for lack of a better term, self-serving. He was saddened and upset that he succeeded in turning Ninevah away from their wretchedness, rather than being destroyed by God in such and such number of days. Jonah wanted them wiped out. He wanted to enjoy from a distance some Divine fireworks on a city and its people, but what he got was success in their conversion.
This makes Jonah a pretty interesting dude, to say the least. He was saddened and angry over God’s lack of destruction in this matter. And why did God relent at His readiness to destroy Ninevah and its occupants? Because they reacted with a sense of urgency to Jonah’s countdown to Divine retribution. The city’s occupants didn’t twiddle their thumbs like some group of folks who cannot figure out what to do next to stop the Divine tidal wave aimed at them. Forty days before extinction, which grew less in number by the day, was a short time to go into a long huddle and come up with a play just before the clock ran out on them. Instead, they came up with a Hail Mary with lots of time on the clock.
It's interesting how we can have two major choices staring us in the face when our lives are edging toward an abyss. This can be seen today on a national level with our country regarding some of the immoral Ninevite choices presently occurring in our midst pertaining to the human body, affecting both adults and children. It’s beyond question that present-day America has taken on a large portion of Ninevah, before Jonah showed up. As individuals and a nation, we can either continue on our way toward an ugly, self-imposed ending due to squalor and immorality, one along the lines of God ready to wipe out a good-sized city. Or allow a nation to destroy itself. We can continue living in ways that go against the genuine goodness of our humanity, away from the holiness God has created us for, falling into a crater nearly impossible to crawl out of… Or, we can make some necessary tough changes through the sharing and living of our Christian faith, changes that will lead us to a better place. Changes that will not be dwelled on for days and years on end, but asking God for the courage to make a good change, a positive change, a holy change in our lives in short order. Where is Jonah when we need him? Oh yes, his name is Jesus, and he’s given us all the tools necessary to alter the course of our lives and nation.
Back to Jonah. What can we Christians learn from this fascinating Old Testament story that ended in success, even though a Prophet was a bit miffed that his hoped-for fireworks display upon Ninevah was cancelled by God? We can take from this story a couple of thoughts. First, we can perform an internal, inward assessment of our Christian lives, arriving at a healthy understanding of what Jonah (Jesus) is calling us to be rid of. What is it in our lives that can use a good dose of sackcloth and ashes. Not in any phony sort of way. But for real. This would be akin to an examination of conscience prior to settling into the confessional in search of God’s mercy. Jonah, in his yelling out “Forty days more and Ninevah will be destroyed,” caused Ninevah to look inward, into their conscience, as a city. Theirs was not a phony set of reactions that followed. God would have known this as he sees the deepest recesses of the human heart. The reaction of sorrow that led to the conversion of the Ninevites was authentic and lasting. It’s when we search for God’s mercy in truth that we come to be rid of the bad fireworks that we burst upon ourselves.
Second, Ninevah is not only personal for us as individuals, and seeking to alter ways in our lives that go against the beautiful purpose of God creating us. Ninevah is also national, if not worldwide. The concern here, of course, is how our nation, founded on Judeo-Christian values, has gone south with values that speak to the presence of God in our midst, replacing them with self-defeatist values one would find in Ninevah before Jonah was sent forth. Yes, we’ve had a running retreat of Godly values over the past number of decades that threaten the very existence of our nation. One rather interesting thing about this Old Testament story is how Ninevah was paid special attention by God to the point of God sending Jonah to warn them. In America, we may or may not receive the same sort of benefit by way of a living Saint coming to the forefront, calling us to task, to repent and believe in the Gospel. Either way, we’ve had our Jonah. We’ve had Jesus and his expansive good teaching called the Gospel to wake us up and smell the coffee before the real fireworks are set off. Some would say they are already exploding.
Possessing a spirituality of urgency in our Christian faith, not only for middle aged folks and elders, but even for the young, is healthy for our bodies and souls. The Scriptures tell us the time is short, and the gate is narrow. Indeed, they are. For if we live 100 years or more, the time remains short. This is simple wisdom and good insight. May we allow space for such urgency to be part of our Christian living. The old Ninevah we are not. The new and converted Ninevah we are meant to be.