All may learn from Jonah 4:1-11 when Jonah was angry because God did not destroy Nineveh. So, God asked Jonah the question He asks us: “Have you (any) reason to be angry?”
Jonah 4:1-11 shows how unhappy people think:
Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry that God did not carry out the evil He threatened against Nineveh. He prayed, “I beseech you, LORD, is not this what I said while I was still in my own country?” Jonah explained why he ignored God’s original call to save Nineveh: “This is why I fled at first to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger, rich in clemency, loath to punish.”
When he saw that God did not destroy Nineveh, Jonah explained every unhappy person’s thinking: “And now, LORD, please take my life from me; for it is better for me to die than to live (without getting my own way).”
God asked the question we should all ask ourselves: “But The LORD asked, ‘Have you (any) reason to be angry?”
Jonah answered with his action! “Jonah then left the city for a place to the east of it, where he built himself a hut and waited under it in the shade,
to see what would happen to the city.” He wanted to watch God destroy Nineveh!
Jonah was a typical Victim of Protestantism: “And when The LORD God provided a gourd plant that grew up over Jonah’s head, giving shade that relieved him of any discomfort, (Jonah was still suffering from having his skin burned by the digestive juices in “the great fish’s” stomach that made sunlight painful!): “Jonah was very happy over the plant. But the next morning at dawn God sent a worm that attacked the plant, so that it withered.”
That “plant” symbolizes every Protestant Marketing Plan that gives temporary “shade” to those who reject The Only Church-Creating Word of He Who Fulfilled over 300 Messianic Prophecies to His First Catholic Pope, “And I say unto you thou art Peter and on this rock I build My Church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I give you the keys to The Kingdom of Heaven.”?)
Then, God asked Jonah the soul-saving question that we pray all are blessed to ask when the structures of their beliefs fail: “But God said to Jonah, ‘Have you reason to be angry over the plant?”
God described the fate of every Protestant Marketing Plan by telling Jonah: “Then The LORD said, ‘You are concerned over the plant which cost you no labor and which you did not raise; it came up in one night and in one night it perished.”
Then, God told Jonah and everyone on earth to “love God and their neighbors as themselves” by saying “And should I not be concerned over Nineveh, the great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who (are so confused that they) cannot distinguish their right hand from their left, not to mention the many cattle?”
Catholics are blessed to have Today’s Psalm, 86:3-6, 9-10, help guide us to God: “Lord, you are merciful and gracious. Have mercy on me, O Lord, for to you I call all the day. Gladden the soul of Your servant, for to You, O Lord, I lift up my soul.”
Jesus and The Only Church He Spoke Into Being with His Church-Creating Word to His First Catholic Pope takes form in today’s Alleluia from Romans 8:15, “You have received a spirit of adoption as sons through which we cry “Abba! Father!” as we obey the prayer Jesus told the First Pope’s first Catholic Bishops in Luke 11:1-4:
“Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when He had finished, one of His disciples said to Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples.’
He told them how Jonah and every unhappy person on earth could be cured of anger toward God and their neighbors: “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be Your Name, Your Kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us, and do not subject us to the final test.”
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Today’s Simple Rhyme: “From Jonah and Jesus we clearly see / To be as Catholic as we can be!”
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