16 October 2017
Monday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time
We are very visual creatures; we derive comfort and certainty from what we can see, and are deeply confused when our eyes are deceived. Earlier in this same chapter Jesus drove out a demon, and yet they ask for a sign! What is going on here?
Jesus cuts, quite literally, to the heart of the matter: the crowd refuses to believe in Him. They rely not on faith, but by sight (2 Cor. 5:7) and will not take the Word of God at His Word. What He says, and the things He does, demands an incredible act of trust on their part, and they are unwilling to step out onto those waters for fear of getting wet when—if they but dare to believe in Him—they could walk! But they will not dare, and they will not trust.
They must have a sign; they must see outward proof of the inward Truth of Jesus. So Jesus promises that they will be given a sign, but it will not be a sign that they will like. He promises them the sign of Jonah, not only recalling the three days he spent within the fish—thus referring to His own three days in the tomb—but more so the preaching of Jonah: repent! The people of Jonah’s time believed him and repented, and their city was spared the consequences of their sins. Jesus is also preaching repentance and the salvation God offers to those who turn to them with their whole selves, but the crowd will not listen.
At the judgement, the citizens of Nineveh will condemn them: they believed in God’s prophet, and yet those in the crowd would not believe God’s own Son! The queen of the south will condemn them: she heard about the wisdom and greatness of Solomon and traveled to see if the reports were true, and she found that the reality far exceeded what she heard (1 Kings 10:7). She did not believe until she saw, but her desire to see if there was truth in the reports was enough to cause her to travel a vast distance. Yet Wisdom Incarnate comes to the crowds, to their very homes, and they will not listen. The very same people who tout the greatness of Solomon, or retell the story of Jonah, will not receive in their hearts what they cannot perceive with their eyes.
How often we hear the Word of God, how often we feel the challenge of God’s Word or the Church’s teaching pressing our hearts to conversion, to deeper commitment, but resist for lack of some kind of sign! Yet when it comes to those we love most in this world, we make no such demands that they prove the love they profess. Why is it that we so frequently put God to the test?
Yesterday we saw the importance of being a whole Christian, of our faith informing our actions, of our insides matching our outsides. Today we see the crowd’s failure to see Jesus wholly: they are far more interested in what He can do, rather than who He is. They want the great deeds of past prophets, but do not desire the one thing that can actually save them: the Heart of Jesus, which is best seen in His ordinary acts, as our hearts should best be seen in ours.