Everybody knows the story of Jonah and the whale. It’s epic, the kind of story to tell the kids to get them excited about Scripture. One that they’ll remember. And it’s one Our Lord Himself will use when speaking of His future conquest of death: “the sign of Jonah.”

But that story is at the heart of something much bigger which we hear in the OF today. Something that we don’t often recognize when it comes to the prophet Jonah, though that we may recognize when the type is brought to fulfillment in Our Lord.

Jonah is, in its core, a story of repentance and the mercy of God, which is the heart of the Gospel. For when Our Lord begins to preach, the Evangelists summarize it as, “Repent! The Kingdom of God is at hand!” And it’s Divine Mercy that flows from the Heart pierced on the Cross.

Jonah runs from his call. He runs because he isn’t sent to prophecy to Israel or Judah. He’s sent to prophecy to Nineveh. Nineveh, the great city that will be the capital of the Assyrian empire which will eventually conquer the Northern Kigdom of Israel.

Jonah runs because he doesn’t want Nineveh to hear the divine call to repentance. Because he wants the enemies of his people to fail to hear the Word of God and thus to be destroyed. But God has other plans.

And so Jonah spends three days and three nights in the belly of the whale. And when he is restored to land, he preaches repentance to Nineveh. And they listen. The repent. They feel sorrow. They return to God. They change their minds and their hearts.

The challenge of the Word of God is always one of repentance. But it is not merely that we must repent. It is also that we must give our enemies a chance to do the same. We must preach the Gospel even to them. We must pray for our enemies and do good to our persecutors.