At Mass for Wednesday in the First Week of Lent, the First Reading focuses on Jonah’s successful conversion of the Ninevites. Threatening them with God’s destruction should they not mend their ways, “the people of Ninevah believed God; they proclaimed a fast and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth.” The Gospel reflects on that event: Jesus speaks to “an evil generation” because, whereas the pagan Ninevites were moved to conversion, they are deaf to “something greater than Jonah here.” (I wonder where our translators, whose version the bishops assiduously protect by copyright, came up with “something.”)

Jonah is very much an appropriate figure for Lent. My view of Jonah has been reshaped by the 20^th century Polish author Roman Brandstaetter, whose short novella Prorok Jonasz [The Prophet Jonah] makes him a more complex character. The stock image of Jonah may be of the guy so resistant to God that when Yahweh tells him to go east, he gets on the first westward boat. But would God have called as a prophet a man fundamentally disobedient to God?

Rather, as Brandstaetter suggests, Jonah is a man so devoted to the God whose image he had — the God of Israel — that the idea the Lord might use His election of Israel to be a “light to the nations” could only be heresy to him. It takes God’s action — sometimes quite direct and not always painless — to broaden Jonah’s horizons: God’s love of Israel was not to the exclusion of the rest of mankind.

At the same time, Jonah’s message to Israel and to the pagans is the same: convert! Ninevah is called to change its ways (and does). In the process, Jonah also comes to a deeper conversion about what God’s love entails. But the message to both is the same: change your ways! Jonah wasn’t invited to “accompany” Ninevah or to showcase messages of “acceptance” and “welcome.”

In some ways, today’s Gospel also seems to be a message to today’s Church. Unlike the Israel of Jesus’ day, some modern churchmen aren’t even seeking a sign. Like Ahaz with his false sense of modesty (God invites him to ask for a sign and he demurs, Is 7:11-14), too many moderns don’t ask for a sign because they are sure the signa temporis are infallible signs of what God is telling His Church today. In this modern ecclesiology, the Holy Spirit has relocated from the sanctuary to the nearest divorcees and bathhouse to teach us “the joy of the Gospel.”

Pagan Ninevah embraced what Israel (and, earlier, Jonah himself) wanted to avoid. The “Queen of the South” went to Solomon not to be told that she should just “discern God’s actions” back home but to be instructed. And we who have someone “greater than Jonah here” seem at least sometimes to be hiding under bushel baskets.

I say this also because, yesterday, some of the Catholic press picked up remarks by Erik Varden, the bishop of Trondheim, Norway, who is preaching the papal Lenten retreat. He was quoted as warning against “when the Gospel is… instrumentalized as a weapon in culture wars. …. Every manipulation of Christian words and symbols for other purposes must be vigorously challenged…”

I’d like to see the fuller context of Bishop Varden’s remarks, because he has tended to be a (rare) voice of orthodox reason in northern Europe, is the son of a highly secularized society, and because comments torn out of context can be distortive. Yes, the Gospel is not fodder for “culture wars.” But the Gospel is also going to come into conflict not just with individuals but also cultures called to conversion.

Pace the anti-culture warriors heard loudly in today’s Church, human beings are neither isolated monads nor rugged individualists. Their ways of thinking are suffused, often in ways they do not even recognize, by the cultural waters in which they swim. And, if you regularly swim in polluted waters, you are going to pick up some ill effects.

One wonders whether those members of the hierarchy who eschew active cultural criticism (the “anti-culture warriors”) think the pre-Constantinian Church was desirable, a preferable model for how the Church engages culture. Is this some kind of stunted version of the “liturgical recovery” that similarly canonizes the early Church practically exclusively, acting in practice as if the Holy Spirit gave up shaping the Church’s worship life until Annibale Bugnini and company came along? The latter is, after all, the implicit assumption when we hear how, somehow after the fifth century, Christian worship practices were generally “distorted” and overlain by undesirable “accretions” until mid-20th century “reform.”

Before the Edict of Milan, Christians did not engage the culture but were often its victims. When Christians moved from persecuted to protected and promoted, they also changed the culture, e.g., Roman newborn abandonment no longer enjoyed legal or social protection. True, it took a while for the elites to be changed, but that also seems to underscore rather than challenge the value of the “culture war” engagement. I’ll be blunt, though it might offend some, including clerics singing paeans to secularism: The culture of Christendom was a marked religious and human improvement over its pagan predecessor.

But that meant recognizing that the “one who is greater than Jonah” does not just call for a “personal relationship” but a whole lifestyle that changes not just the individual but the society in which he lives. Both Jonah and Jesus’ contemporaries are quite content with the culture and world in which they live — one which Christ’s radical call to lifestyle conversion threatens to make less comfortable. Both try to redefine God’s demands: Jonah, with “God really couldn’t mean that,” the Pharisees, with “He is possessed.” It seems that some things we see in our day have been in others’ playbooks.

[Today’s Readings are here: https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/022526.cfm ]