Monday in the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time

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.”

The Pharisees and scribes act in bad faith by asking for a sign from the Lord Jesus since he has offered them many signs in his healings, exorcisms, and in how he has fulfilled the Scriptures.  But to give them one, he points to an event from the past as a sign for what is yet to take place.  He speaks explicitly that this “sign of Jonah” shows that the Son of Man will abide in the “heart of the earth” for three days and three nights.  The Lord goes on to speak of how the men of Nineveh would rise up against “this generation” and condemn it.  While we who believe see the “sign of Jonah” as meaning the Lord’s Death and descent to the dead, any sign which he gives us is going to abound in riches.  In order to know them, let us look closely at the story of Jonah.

We ought to pay close attention to Jonah’s time on the boat.  He was a stranger, from another country than the sailors with whom he sailed.  They were Gentiles while he was a Jew.  When the boat was assailed by the storm and all seemed lost, Jonah offered to sacrifice himself to save the sailors.  The sailors were unwilling to let him do this, saying that his blood was innocent, and he had to persuade them that his death was their only hope.  After he was thrown overboard, a giant fish swallowed him up.  The fish then carried him off into the sea with him in its belly.  Once in the belly of the fish, Jonah prayed to God.  In his prayer, Jonah equates his place in the fish with the place of the dead: “I called to the Lord, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried” (Jonah 2, 2).  The tone of his prayer is confident, and it ends with thanksgiving.  After the prayer, we are told that the fish vomited him up on the land.  Jonah then went on to Nineveh, at that time the chief city of the world, and preached, proclaiming that the city would be destroyed in forty days.  Thereupon the king of the city declared fasting and penance, and God spared it.  We can see the Lord Jesus in all of this: the Son of God comes down from heaven to travel among “foreigners”, that is, men.  Realizing the shortness of this life and that their souls are in danger of hell, they implore the Lord to help them.  He sacrifices himself by their reluctant hands (those of the Gentiles, who declared him innocent).  The Father saves him and he descends into the place of the dead (where he sets the just free).  The “fish” vomits the Lord onto the Land — that is, Death cannot not hold the Author of life and rejects him as with violence.  He then preaches to the Gentiles (through the Apostles) for “forty days” (forty years being the space of a generation, signifying the final age of the world).  The Gentiles convert and are saved from destruction.  

The reluctancy of the prophet at the beginning of the book and his unhappiness at its end only help us to understand that, as the Lord says, “there is something greater than Jonah here” in him.

What would the Pharisees and scribes have understood from the Lord speaking of Jonah as a sign for himself?  Remarkably, although they ask for a sign, they do not seem to have asked him to explain it to them.  Even the hint that he gives them of its meaning, telling them that the Son of Man would be in the heart of the earth for three days and nights, might not have meant anything to them.