The first part of Lent (until the fourth Sunday) focuses on our call to conversion. On Ash Wednesday, Jesus taught us about the importance of the heart, our interior attitudes, in our programme of prayer, almsgiving and fasting. Then day by day, we contemplate various aspects of a true conversion of heart.

Today's liturgy draws its theme from the Gospel where Jesus compares the people of His day and place to the citizens of Nineveh in the time of Jonah. The latter were sinful unbelievers but, as the first reading tells us, they repented and changed their lives at the preaching of Jonah. Similarly, Jesus says the Queen of the South (Sheba, in present day Yemen) came from far away to listen to the words and wisdom of Solomon.

Jesus' point, as He makes clear, is that Solomon and Jonah were only the forerunners, the heralds of the Messiah. He Himself is the Messiah they foretold. And yet the people of His day encountering the Lord Himself refuse to accept Him and His call to change their lives.

What does this say to us today? Some of us can be tempted to see Jesus' teaching as applying to others around us - to those who do not try to live good Christian lives. This is true, but it is not the whole story. Each of us is on the way to conversion as long as we live. We are, in the words of Pope John XXIII, a Church always in need of conversion (an ecclesia simper reformanda).