Monday in the Sixteenth Week of Ordinary Time, July 19, 2021

One thing I will note about Pope Francis’s recent motu proprio is that it is very sloppily written.  It is knotted in contradictions, and its premise is flawed.  In it, Francis attempts to restrict the “permission”, as he calls it, granted by Benedict XVI regarding the Traditional Mass, but as Benedict made clear in his own motu proprio, since that Mass was never abolished, no permission was needed to use it.  Another thing that comes up here is that this is the case of one Pope acting against another, and that the way is now open for succeeding popes to simply cancel what his predecessors have done.  Formerly, a pope was generally bound by what had preceded him.  The new situation means instability: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken” (Matthew 24, 29).

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.”  The scribes and the Pharisees seem to not want the reality of the Son of God, but only a sign of him, much as the Hebrews did at the time the Ten Commandments were given: “Now when all the people perceived the thunderings and the lightnings and the sound of the trumpet and the mountain smoking, the people were afraid and trembled; and they stood afar off, and said to Moses, ‘You speak to us, and we will hear; but let not God speak to us, lest we die.’ ” (Exodus 20, 18-19).  The Lord Jesus had brought greater power with him than these thunderings and lightnings, trumpets, and smoking mountains.  He had healed the sick, raised up the paralyzed, fed multitudes, cleansed lepers, expelled demons, and even raised the dead.  All of this frightened the scribes and Pharisees, the very people who should have understood what this meant.  Now, a “sign” was something they could deal with.  A sign did mot threaten them.  They could inspect it, debate about it, form committees to ponder it and to come up with action plans regarding it.  But the reality was more than they could handle.

The Lord Jesus rejects their request because the time for signs is over.  The Old Testament is for the Christian, the book of signs.  Its time ended with the Incarnation of the Son of God.  The Lord does point to signs in the Old Testament that point back to him.  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.  And 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.  Having spoken of these two signs, the Lord Jesus stood before the scribes and Pharisees as the Reality.  

St. Matthew does not record the reaction of the scribes and Pharisees, but we can imagine it, judging from their increasing persecution of the Lord: they “stopped their ears” (Acts 7, 56).  

Our world is full of scribes and Pharisees who want to pretend that reality is other than it is, and even that there is no God.  It is necessary for us not to listen to them, but to listen only to the voice of the One who speaks with “thunders and lightnings”.