The Sign of Jonah: Preaching Mercy from a Reconciled Heart: July 21, 2025

Jonah. As an Order of Preachers, what should we do to go to the world from the heart of the Church? How can we invite it to know God and his Good News? How does our life commitment represent, incarnate, the dynamism and the virtues and values of the Gospel?

Table of Contents

The Sign of Jonah

“No sign will be given except the sign of the prophet Jonah.”
— Matthew 12:39

Dear brothers and sisters:

The Word of God, in the Sacred Scriptures just proclaimed today, shows us an experience of Jesus, an encounter with those who represented zeal for the law: the literal interpretation of the Mosaic law—[one] closed to human experience. The Gospel of Matthew that we heard opens with a tense dialogue between Jesus and some Scribes and Pharisees. The conversation centers on a request that these experts in the Mosaic Law address to Jesus: “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” Jesus’ response was not long in coming, it was somewhat light-hearted. [Yet] He shows firmness and determination: “An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah the prophet.”

We know that ‘adultery’ and ‘perversion of the mind and heart’ manifest a serious lack of commitment to God and to others. It has to do with the affective [dimension] and the commitment to relationships among people. The rupture in fraternal relationships, among people, generates fear and distrust. Even more, anger and aggressiveness; unfounded judgments and personal disqualification. All this alters the order willed by God and perverts the religious experience, causing harm to oneself and to others.

But Jesus does not remain harsh in reproach before the experts of the law for their having perverted and adulterated the faith they professed. Rather, He tries to offer them a reflection, a renewing and healing reading according to the experience of the prophet Jonah. He proposes a different view. It is necessary to return to Jonah in order to better understand the human heart, especially when this heart perverts relationships between peoples, cultures and social groups; when it also perverts people in their innermost being and their closest interpersonal relationships. The mistaken way in which the Scribes and Pharisees interpret the law literally dehumanizes them; it blinds them to the reality that is before their eyes; it makes them unintelligent, as they are incapable of delving into their own best tradition, and renders them incapable of facing with affection, with a clean heart, their own reality and that of others in order to transform it. If we do not appreciate the world in which we live, no matter how adverse it may be, we will be unable to collaborate in its transformation.

Jonah, as we well know, represents the initial distrust in the possibilities that individuals and peoples have to convert, to turn their hearts to God of the Covenant, to change and be better. So much so that he does not obey the command to go and preach to the Ninevites, considered as impossible and sinful by the most orthodox Judaism and, therefore, without the capacity for conversion and change.

Cardinal Grzegorz Rys invited us in his reflection on the first day of our assembly to preach the Gospel, not only to those who are already inside the Church, but also and above all to those who are outside and do not come to us. He exhorted us to announce the Gospel from an invitation to come to our house to know God and His Gospel from what our community and fraternal life manages to live and transmit.

The message that Jonah has to preach in Nineveh, his sign, is nothing more than repentance and God’s mercy. This experience of the prophet is telling us that it is possible to seek new paths; it is possible to redirect the paths of life already traveled; it is possible, in short, to raise our gaze to let God Himself speak through our lives. This preaching exercise is not far from the Dominican experience. The charism of St. Dominic [was that he] knew how to discern the sign of Jonah in his time. So much so that Dominic succeeded in incorporating God’s mercy and compassion into his lifestyle. This was his best preaching. This commitment helped him to confront the reality of his time and to help the Church in its own conversion. When we preach compassion from God’s mercy we can not only change the hearts of many, we will also be capable of changing our own. When we invite those who are far away to come to our house, to know our life experience, we ourselves are changing.

As an Order of Preachers, what should we do to go to the world from the heart of the Church? How can we invite it to know God and his Good News? How does our life commitment represent, incarnate, the dynamism and the virtues and values of the Gospel? Undoubtedly, in many General Chapters we have kept all of this very much in mind. We have not forgotten it; but, perhaps, we should recover it with more force and conviction from the experience of Jonah. We cannot overcome our wounds, our ruptures, our adulteries in the heart, our small or great perversions, if we have not first lived the experience of forgiveness and the mercy of God in our inner self.

In the measure in which we have reconciled what is separated and confronted; in the measure in which we have succeeded in bringing closer what is distant and separated; in the measure in which we have succeeded in uniting the unknown and bringing closer what is more alien to us. In that same measure we will have succeeded in widening the walls of the Church and we will have succeeded, as an Order of preachers, in preaching in accordance with the signs of our times, not very distant in the fundamentals from the experience described in the culture of the Ninevites, the culture in which the prophet Jonah is called to preach.

As preachers, we must not give up in this endeavor: to succeed in building bridges between differences, to help reconcile what is at odds and, to integrate, with God’s wisdom, as a prophetic sign the reconciled differences.

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