Wednesday in the First Week of Lent, March 9, 2022

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.”

“This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign.”  We can read these words in two ways.  First, that this generation is evil and it seeks a sign; or, this generation is evil because it seeks a sign.  In the first case, seeking a sign is a manifestation of the generation’s evil nature.  In the second, seeking a sign is sinful and so this generation could repent and cease seeking signs and it will be well.  It would seem that Jesus meant his words to be interpreted the first way.  The generation itself is evil.  The generation the Lord speaks of is the one that began at the time of his Incarnation until the he returns to judge the living and the dead.  This generation is evil because the Son of God came, taught, and died on the Cross for the human race, and still mostly has rejected him.  Its seeking a sign is a consequence of this rejection: since it does not believe in Christ, it seeks some other truth, some way out of the mess it knows it is in.  It looks for signs in pagan religions, in horoscopes, in misleading philosophies, in the ever evolving hypotheses which scientists work out, and even in the occult.  It listens to its prophets — hucksters promoting the latest fashionable ideas for their own profit.  But the time for signs was over with the coming of the Son of God into our world.  Formerly, signs such as the Jewish Law pointed to him.  Now he, the Reality foretold by these signs, has come to reveal to us all that we must know about God and ourselves in order to live in harmony with others, and to inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.

“No sign will be given it, except the sign of Jonah.”  The life and mission of the Prophet Jonah help us to understand the Lord.  We find that Jonah was sent by God to a distant and foreign land, as the Son of God was sent into our world; that he boarded a boat (the world) rocked by a storm (sin) so great that the crew could not help themselves to avoid death; that he offered to sacrifice himself to save the crew and calmly allowed himself to be cast into the sea, which represents death; that after three days in a fish (the world of the dead) he was cast out on shore, alive.  The crowd, and especially the Apostles, would look back at Jonah after the Resurrection and understand from him what the Lord had done.

“Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites.”  According to Jonah 3, 4: “He cried and said: Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be destroyed.”  Rather than despise the Prophet as a foreigner, the king and the people listened, examined their conduct, realized that it was indeed immoral, and believed the Prophet.  They trusted completely in his message and fasted in their repentance.  However, the people of whom Christ spoke have rejected the Lord and his Gospel as foreign to their interests and have not examined their lives to detect whether they need to repent of their conduct.  

“At the judgment the queen of the south [Sheba] will rise with the men of this generation and she will condemn them.”  The Gentiles who lived in the Time before grace will mock the people of this generation because all they had were signs, but the Son of God appeared to this generation, and they rejected him.  

False prophets abound these days. We need to steer carefully away from them and devote ourselves to the God who came among us, who comes among us in the Blessed Sacrament, and who will come again.