Our Approach to Jesus’ “Signs,” 16th Monday (I), July 24, 2017

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Monday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Charbel Maklouf
July 24, 2017
Ex 14:5-18, Ex 15, Mt 12:38-42

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today the Scribes and the Pharisees — those who as we saw a few days ago had begun to conspire to plot Jesus’ death, those who had said in the previous scene that he did exorcisms by the power of the devil — come up and hypocritically call him “Teacher” and ask him for a sign. A sign was a miracle that pointed to something else, namely Jesus’ authority to preach and do what he was saying and doing. But we know that Jesus by this point had been working miracles non-stop: he had immediately before cured a man with a withered hand and had expelled demons, he had cured everyone who had been brought to him, he had multiplied bread and fish to feed a multitude, he had cured lepers, made lame people walk and so much more as signs pointing to the fact that he was speaking and working with the authority of God. But the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t want to accept what those miracles signified. So they kept asking for other ones. Perhaps they were waiting until a supposed miracle attempt failed so that they would be able to feel justified in their rejection of Jesus. What they failed to grasp was that Jesus himself was the sign of God, he was the one pointing to God’s presence because he was the sign and signified all at the same time. Jesus cut to the core of why they were asking for such a miracle, saying, an “evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign.” If they were of a good and faithful generation, they would have already taken seriously all of the miracles and words that Jesus had already done and grasped that he himself was the sign for which the Jews should have been looking. The reason why they failed to grasp the meaning of the sign of Jesus and all the other signs he was doing that pointed toward him was because they were obstinate in what we could call their “religious idolatry,” in their worship not of God but of the religion they had made around the God of Israel, all their man-made precepts and interpretations that were leading them to seek to break the fifth and eighth commandments to murder Jesus. No matter how many signs Jesus worked, no matter how many times he spoke with authority, no matter how many times called them to conversion, they just refused to budge.
• Obstinacy is perverse adherence to an idea despite all arguments and signs to the contrary and we see the classic sign of obstinacy in today’s first reading. Pharaoh and the Egyptians were obstinate in their treating the Jews as their slaves. And despite Pharaoh’s finally giving the Israelites permission to leave to go to worship God in the desert, when the Egyptians saw them leaving, they gave up mourning their first born sons, and came in pursuit. None of the plagues God had worked convinced them to change course. And when God opened the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to pass through on dry ground, not even that miracle could convince the Egyptians that God was giving a clear sign that he was on their side and was helping them to flee. “So obstinate had the Lord made Pharaoh that he pursued the children of Israel even while they were marching away in triumph” and they were so obstinate that they foolishly pursued the Israelites into the Red Sea, where, as we will see tomorrow, they all perished. Nothing could persuade them to stop, review their behavior, and possibly change course. This is the same thing we see in the Scribes and the Pharisees. Not even Jesus’ resurrection would be enough to convince them that all signs were pointing to his divinity, to the truth of everything he was saying. Some would try to bribe the guards to lie and say that while they were asleep Jesus’ followers came to steal his body.
• As believers, we have to confront this obstinacy in our own hearts at times, this refusal to accept what God has done and what it means. We see in today’s first reading that the Jews similarly had missed the point of all God had done. “Were there no burial places in Egypt that you had to bring us out here to die in the desert?,” they asked. Really? God had worked ten great miracles for them and yet they failed to have confidence in him. Even after he parted the Red Sea for them and brought them to the other side — the greatest of all his signs in the Old Testament — they would similarly complain that God had abandoned them or just brought the to the desert to die. Sometimes, we, too, can be faithless and perverse. The way we should respond to God’s signs, on the other hand, is two-fold.
• First, to ponder on all God did with gratitude, not asking him for “more,” but allowing what he’s already done to fill us with faith and gratitude. This is the first means by which we can become a “holy and faithful generation.” This morning in Lauds we had Psalm 113, which gives God thanks for all that he has already done as signs of his love in the present. I often love to pray Psalm 136, which is a litany of gratitude to God for his enduring mercy. The Magnificat is similarly an interweaving of praise for all that the Almighty God does for us in our lowliness, how he repeatedly has shown the “might of his arm,” so that we might never begin to believe that he is now weak.
• The second way we’re supposed to respond to God’s signs is to rest in what is the greatest sign of all, Jesus himself. He is the living sign of God’s saving presence. And he calls us to do something in repose to him: to repent and to believe fully. The two examples he chose to share with those challenging him demonstrate the summons to conversion and faith. The first one is Jonah, who not only is a sign of the Resurrection, but a great example of conversion who then was able credibly to preach conversion. We know that at Jonah initially refused God’s call. He ran in the opposite direction of Nineveh. He tried to escape on a boat from Joppa, but that’s when he was thrown overboard and experienced the miracle of being saved. Afterward, having learned the lesson, he went to preach conversion and God blessed his efforts. He could incarnate what conversion was. And even though at the beginning he didn’t persevere faithfully in doing what the Lord was asking, he did at the end. Jesus was able to use him as a sign for his interlocutors: that just as conversion was possible for Jonah, it, too, was possible for them. And in terms of preaching conversion, Jesus, as the Messiah, was giving an even greater summons. At the message of Jonah, the Ninevites all repented, from the king down to the pets, who all fasted in sackcloth and ashes. Jesus told them that he was greater than Jonah and a greater sign of conversion. If the pagans of Nineveh had changed their ways at the preaching of Jonah on the first day, then the supposedly religious Jews of his day should have much more readily changed when they heard Jesus preaching “Repent and believe in the Gospel” and working all the signs to back up his message.
• Likewise with the reference to Solomon we see a sign of the wisdom Jesus bears and is , which should lead us to conform our life to Him. Jesus says that the Queen of Sheba had traveled a great distance with many caravans in her retinue in order to hear Solomon’s wisdom — she had in fact traveled 1660 miles or, at a pace of 15 miles a day, over three months each way — but that his wisdom, God’s teaching about how to live, die and live forever, was greater than Solomon’s and he was saying that the Scribes and Pharisees weren’t willing to travel any intellectual or moral distance. They weren’t willing to respond with faith. Do we regularly respond to the greatness of the sign of Jesus’ wisdom in the Word of God?
• Today, the Church celebrates St. Charbel Maklouf, a great Maronite monk and priest who lived a holy ascetic life of continuous conversion and reparation, who hungered for God’s wisdom and conformed his life to it, and thereby became in his lifetime a sign of God’s presence and after death a source of God’s continual signs and wonders. As a young boy, he was drawn to the example of his maternal uncles who were monks. Shepherding his family’s small flock as a boy, he would take them to a grotto where he had installed an icon of the thirstiest human being who ever lived — the Blessed Virgin Mary! — and would spend the day in prayer. His family wanted him to marry and to continue his hard work on the farm, but when he was 23, he left home without telling them because of the opposition to begin his training as a monk and then as a priest and finally as a hermit. He sought constantly to turn with the Lord in prayer. He was deeply devoted to the Lord Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, and it’s significant that he basically died during Mass. While he was celebrating the divine liturgy he had a stroke from which he never recovered. God waited to call him home for eight days and summoned him on Christmas Eve. After his death, his remains glowed, people came to him to ask for miracles that were granted, when his body was examined it was found incorrupt, and now he is a great witness to the continuous power of God’s signs, not just in miracles granted through his intercession, but in his holy life, which leads people to Christ to have a relationship with him modeled on what they see in St. Charbel.
• We finish with the Sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah spent three days in the belly of a sea creature in the ocean — and the ocean was a sign of death — before being spit out onto the shore “risen from the dead,” so Jesus would spend three days in the belly of the tomb before likewise being spit out risen. That is the great sign Jesus himself would give, his own resurrection. And we enter that sign, and what it signifies, every Mass. I’ve always been moved that in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, right over the altar where the Popes celebrate Mass (now on the feast of the Baptism of the Lord each year and in the Mass the day after their election), Michelangelo has depicted Jonah. Not only is Christ the fulfillment of the Sign of Jonah, but at Mass, we enter into Christ’s Passion, death and resurrection. We enter with him into the tomb and at the end of Mass he spits us out to the world, to be through, with and in him, new Jonahs, new Solomons, living and preaching the conversion and wisdom with which Jesus has enriched us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: