Monday in the 16th Week of Ordinary Time, July 22, 2024

The Feast of St. Mary Magdalene

Matthew 12, 38-42

Some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Jesus, “Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.” He said to them in reply, “An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign of Jonah the prophet. Just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale three days and three nights, so will the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights. At the judgment, the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation and condemn it, because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and there is something greater than Jonah here. At the judgment the queen of the south will arise with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and there is something greater than Solomon here.”

“Teacher, we wish to see a sign from you.”  Throughout Israel’s history, there had been signs from heaven of God’s will.  God put his bow in the sky after the Flood as a sign for Noah and his descendants that he would never again destroy the world through water (cf. Genesis 9, 12-13).  He changed the names of Abram and his wife Sarai to show that they would be the parents of a great nation (cf. Genesis 17, 5 and 15).  Later, Almighty God sent the Prophet Isaiah to assure King Ahaz of Judah that he would win a difficult battle, and them the Prophet asked the king to name a sign that the Lord would give him to show that he would do this (cf. Isaiah 7, 11).  After this, Isaiah gave a sign to King Hezekiah that he would be healed from a deadly disease (cf. 2 Kings 20, 9).  It would seem from these precedents that the scribes were within their rights to ask Jesus for a sign that he was who he said he was.

The Lord Jesus rejects their request because the time for signs is over.  Now is the time for the fulfillment of the signs already given.  To this end He speaks of Jonah and Solomon.  Jonah had given himself up for the strangers on the boat on which he was sailing and urged them to throw him overboard so that they might be saved.  And then three days later he landed on a beach and went on to preach in Nineveh, so that these foreign people might be spared the wrath of God.  The sign of Jonah, then, is fulfilled in the Lord’s sacrificial Death and in his preaching for the salvation of all.  And the sign of Solomon, who asked God only for the wisdom with which to rule his people, and who did not engage in war, but used the peaceful times for the construction of the Temple.  This sign is fulfilled in the Lord’s Incarnation in which human nature becomes a temple for the living God.

Now is the time of the fulfillment of God’s promises to save his people from their sins.  We rejoice in living in this time, which makes us the heirs of the Scriptures, the Fathers, the Holy Mass and sacraments, and of the examples of innumerable saints.  It is a time when we ourselves can become guides to others into this reality, where the love of God abounds.  We live in the midst of people riven with anxiety.  Let us not ourselves give way to this but let us show by our calm and our enduring hope of heaven that there is a better way for them.

We honor St. Mary Magdalene today, a woman at one time possessed by seven demons which the Lord drove out from her.  Out of her love for him she followed him for the rest of her life, even standing under the Cross with St. John and the Blessed Mother.  She was among the group of women who came to the tomb to anoint the Lord’s Body, and she was among the first to see him alive again.  We ask her intercession that we may also one day merit to see the One whom she saw and served.