Homily for Wednesday, Week 27 of Ordinary Time

Homily for Wednesday
27th Week of Ordinary Time

Oct. 8, 2025
Jonah 4: 1-11
Luke 11: 1-4
Salesian Missions, New Rochelle, N.Y.

Image from First Baptist Thomson webpage
Oct. 6, 2022

“Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry that God did not carry out the evil he threatened against Nineveh.  He prayed, … ‘I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God…” (Jon 4: 1-2).

Jonah thought the people of Nineveh, hated enemies of the Jewish people, were evil and deserved to be destroyed.  He was very upset that God didn’t do that but, instead, showed them mercy when they repented of their evil.  The whole point of the prophetic book of Jonah is to show God’s unlimited kindness, compassion, and mercy.

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he taught them the Our Father, including a twofold petition about forgiveness.  We ask God to grant us the mercy of forgiving our sins, and we commit to forgive “everyone in debt to us” (Luke 11:4), i.e., those who’ve hurt us in some way.

We’re all eager for God to show us compassion.  But we struggle to extend God’s mercy to others, especially the mercy of forgiveness.

In the last month we’ve witnessed 2 outstanding examples of Christian forgiveness, forgiveness offered in the aftermath of terrible evil.

The 1st example came from Erika Kirk.  In front of a packed stadium and a national media audience on Sept. 21, she forgave the man who had shot and killed her husband 11 days earlier.  She did that, she said, “because it was what Christ did.”

The 2d example came from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, better known as the Mormons.  Days after a very sick man on Sept. 28 attacked a Mormon church near Detroit, killed 4 worshipers, and set the church on fire, the Mormons set up a Go Fund Me page to assist the man’s widow and child and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for them.  That was extraordinary compassion in the name of Jesus.

With examples like that, not to mention Jesus’ very direct command to love our enemies and to forgive, the least we can do is to put vengeance out of our hearts after we’ve been hurt emotionally or physically, and to pray for the well-being of our offenders; then, by God’s grace, even to treat them with kindness.  Because that’s what Jesus did for you, for me, for the whole world.