Monday in the 28th Week of Ordinary Time, October 12, 2020

Luke 11:29-32

While still more people gathered in the crowd, Jesus said to them, “This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it, except the sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. At the judgment the queen of the south will rise with the men of this generation and she will condemn them, because she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and there is something greater than Solomon here. At the judgment the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation and condemn it, because at the preaching of Jonah they repented, and there is something greater than Jonah here.”

The guesthouse where I am spending the week is quite large and lies on a wide property.  The chapel is quite beautiful, with an altar actually large enough to offer Mass on.  So many modern altars, like the one at my current assignment, are too small and oddly shaped.  The house does have internet, but it does not extend up to the bedrooms.  I’ll be able to post reflections as usual.  We got in late last night when our connecting flight was delayed a few times, and so I am only posting now.

Jesus seems to speak of the “sign of Jonah” more than once during the course of his public life.  On another occasion when he does, he points to the three days and nights during which Jonah resided within a great fish, eventually to be spewed onto the land.  Then, the Lord meant the sign to refer to his time among the dead before his Resurrection.  Here, he indicates Jonah as a sign to the Ninivites.  What did the Ninivites see?  What caused them to convert?  When Jonah came among them, he was a foreigner speaking a foreign language.  He came as an ordinary man, not as one who stood out in any way, except perhaps by his clothing.  As one man, though, he took upon himself the enormous task of going through the whole city of Nineveh, which took days to cross on foot, crying out to the people to repent, or the city would be destroyed.  Perhaps God enabled Jonah to speak Assyrian for this purpose.  At any rate, the people, and most importantly, the king, understood the message and took it to heart.  Indeed, they acted so quickly that it was almost as though they were predisposed to look for a prophet who would speak to them in this way.  Now, Nineveh was the capital of a great empire st the time.  It was girded by thick walls and filled with commerce of all kinds.  The people worshipped many gods and the king was thought to be semi-divine himself.  It was the Rome of its time. (The city of Rome was founded at about this time).  

Jesus compares himself, for the sake of the Jews, with Jonah.  Jesus, too, came amongst the people to whom he was sent as a foreigner — from heaven — but he appeared as one of them, even speaking their language.  He, too, preached repentance, but whereas the Ninivites repented st the word of a stranger who did not worship their gods, the Jews resisted repenting at the word of one of their own who did worship their God and claimed to speak for him.  And while a message of repentance would have sounded strange to the people of Nineveh, the Jews had a long history of prophets calling them back to their covenant with God.  Also, Jonah performed no miracles to underscore and confirm his message.  Jesus had performed many miracles, even raising the dead as signs that God had ratified his.  And yet the Jews resisted, rejected, and ultimately killed the Lord Jesus.  The Lord’s invoking Jonah is a striking indictment of the Jews of his time.  

The message for us is to be as the Ninivites, who acted as one would have expected the Jews to have done.  With the word of God ringing in our ears at the very least on Sunday at Mass, with the knowledge of our religion which most of us have learned from childhood, with truth about God fully revealed to us in Jesus Christ, we have far less excuse than the ancient Jews to resist the Lord’s urgent message for us to repent.