Word to the Wise
Monday, October 16, 2006 - 28th Monday in Ordinary Time
[Galatians 4:22-24, 26-27, 31-5:1 and Luke 11:29-32]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.
The "sign of Jonah" here has nothing to do with Jonah's time in the whale! It has to do with his preaching! He went to Nineveh and warned them that if they didn't repent, they would be destroyed. He must have been persuasive because he is really the only prophet in the Old Testament that managed to get an audience to repent! Jesus may have been ironic in his statement since not even he managed to get the results that Jonah did! A "sign of repentance" is not the sort of thing that our secular culture understands. Without a sense of sin, whether individual or communitarian, there is no sense of having to "repent" from anything! Indeed, without a sense of God, what point is there to any kind of repentance other than going on a diet to lose weight or doing more exercise? One might ask what kind of "sign" would be needed and would it convince anyone? The kind of faith that requires regular miracles to keep alive or the kind of skepticism that demands the unexplainable in order to "prove" there is a God seem to be the only possible audiences. The rest of us know that repentance is part of being human. We fall down and get up. We would quickly lose any significant relationship if we constantly demanded "proof" of love from the other. The everyday-ness of God's presence and love are an incredible sign. To demand anything else is the action of a bored child continually demanding new toys from the parent. AMEN
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