The Sign Jesus Gives, 16th Monday (II), July 18, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Monica Parish, Kalamazoo, MI
Monday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Camillus de Lellis
July 18, 2022
Mic 6:1-4.6-8, Ps 50, Mt 12:38-42

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• In the Gospel, the Scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus for a “sign.” A sign is a miracle pointing to something else, namely Jesus’ authority to preach and do what he was saying and doing. We know that by this point in the Gospel, Jesus had been working miracle after miracle: immediately before he had cured a man with a withered hand and cured another who was blind, mute and possessed. But the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t want to accept what those miracles signified and the authority of Jesus’ words and deeds to which they testified. So they kept asking for other ones. Perhaps they were waiting until a supposed miracle attempt might fail so that they would be able to feel justified in their rejection of Jesus. Jesus cut to the core of why they were asking for such a miracle, saying, an “evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign.” A good and faithful generation would have already taken seriously all of the miracles and words that Jesus had done and would have grasped that he himself was the sign for which the Jews, awaiting the Messiah and his messianic deeds, should have been looking.
• But Jesus nevertheless says that the one sign that would be given to the evil and perverse generation that constantly seeks another sign is the Sign of Jonah. On the one hand this certainly points to his death, burial in the belly of the earth, and resurrection on the third day, his most definitive miracle. That sign would be given to all, but, as we know, some would nevertheless refuse to believe it. The fundamental meaning of the sign of Jonah, however, is conversion. Jonah was himself a convert — he had run away from the mission the Lord had given him, before converting through his three days in the belly of a whale and then calling the pagan Ninevites to conversion. And we remember how the Ninevites responded: they all repented, from the king down to the pets, and fasted in sackcloth and ashes. Jesus told them that he was greater than Jonah and, therefore, 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 “good and faithful” religious Jews of his day should have much more readily changed when they heard Jesus’ preaching “Repent and believe in the Gospel” and working so many miracles to back up his message. Jesus added 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 1,660 miles or, at a pace of 15 miles a day, for 110 days, nearly four months, each way — but that his wisdom was greater than Solomon’s. His listeners, however, weren’t willing to travel any intellectual or moral distance to come to the truth.
• The chief problem with the Scribes and Pharisees is not that they didn’t want to convert “in general.” They marked Yom Kippur each year and piously recognized their need for atonement just like everyone else, but they wanted to convert on their own terms and in their own way. They didn’t want to convert in the way God wanted and to begin to do what he was asking. We see that problem laid out starkly in the reading from the Prophet Micah and in the Responsorial Psalm. God through Micah puts words on their lips about the type of repentance they were willing to do and were already doing: “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow before God most high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with myriad streams of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my crime, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” Those in Judah around 730 BC were bringing burnt offerings, year-old calves, thousands of rams, huge quantities of oil, even contemplating offering their first-born children like Abraham was willing to offer Isaac and like what happened to the Egyptians during the Passover, as if those could make up for the sins of their souls. None of these signified the type of conversion God ultimately wanted. God wanted the sins to stop and for them to start living according to his covenant. God speaks to this in the Responsorial Psalm. He says, “Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you, for your burnt offerings are before me always,” but rather he rebukes them because they were not acting on his words and living by his wisdom: “Why do you recite my statutes, and profess my covenant with your mouth, though you hate discipline and cast my words behind you?”
• That’s why God tells us through Micah that the conversion he wants is to do what he asks: “You have been told, O man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: Only to do the right and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.” He specifies three things. First, to do justice, to treat others in right relationship with God, in a holy way, in accordance with their divine dignity, to give God and others their due. The fact is that many of them, in myriad ways, were treating others unjustly. God is always asking that conversion of us, so that we will love and sacrifice for our neighbor rather than hurt or take advantage of our neighbor. Second, to love mercy. The word translated as “goodness” by the New American Bible in the lectionary is really “hesed” in Hebrew or “mercy.” God wants us to love him in his merciful love, to recognize we need it, to come to get it, and then to share it with others as we have received it freely from the Lord. He wants us not merely to receive and reciprocate mercy but to love receiving it and love sharing it. So many of us in every age need a profound conversion on this point. Third, “to walk humbly with your God.”  God never tells us to stay where we are. He calls us to get up and follow him. He wants us not merely to know his ways but to walk in his ways. But once we’re moving, we’re called to walk humbly, letting God lead, knowing we need direction, receiving from him all the help that he knows we need. The Vulgate word that we translate as “humbly” is sollicitum, which basically means that we walk solicitously, seeking from God what we need rather than walk with an air of self-sufficiency. This, too, is a perennial point of conversion for us, because many of us prefer to stay put, and if we get up, to go our own way. God through Micah is calling us to follow him solicitously and humbly. And if the people of Micah’s day were summoned to act on his words, how much more do we need to act on the “greater than Micah” among us, who calls us to imitate his justice, love his mercy and follow him?
• As we celebrate this parish Mission and give God thanks for 20 years of perpetual Eucharistic adoration here in St. Monica’s, we remember that the great “sign” Jesus has left the world is the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, a sign that effects what it signifies and makes Christ, the Sign of Jonah, present. The Mass is where we hear the wisdom of the “greater than Solomon” in the Gospel and then enter, converted, into Jesus’ suffering, death, three days in the tomb and glorious resurrection, the perfection of the sign of Jonah Jesus himself said he would give. This is where Jesus, in uniting us to him, makes it possible for us to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with him, as with amazement we literally journey with him within. This is where Jesus ultimately makes us a quasi-sacramental sign of his own presence in the world.
• Someone who shows us what this transformation looks like is the saint whom the Church celebrates today. When St. Camillus de Lellis was young, he picked up many of the bad habits of his Neapolitan father, a mercenary soldier, most notably his terrible temper. With his father, he joined the military as a means of handling his aggression, but it only increased his violence. When he left military service because of a failed campaign and a serious leg infection, his temper and violence not only had continued to grow he had become a gambling addict. He was hired by the Capuchins as a laborer, and, thanks be to God, one of the Capuchins saw some goodness in him and patiently pushed him to conversion and to trust in Christ’s power to make something good of him. At 25 he converted so thoroughly that he wanted to spend the rest of his life serving God through the Capuchins, but because his leg injury was incurable, he was refused. He was cared for in Rome by the Hospitallers of St. John in such a way that, out of gratitude, he wanted to use his organizational skills, talents, and charity to revolutionize the type of care that was given to incurables in their clinic. And under the guidance of his spiritual director, St. Philip Neri, he began to organize around himself a group of men who would care for the sick. This became the Ministers of the Infirm that now are known as the Camillans. They took a fourth vow to care for the sick even at the risk of their life, something they routinely did in caring for those with the bubonic plague and other infectious diseases. St. Camillus taught his brothers in religious life how to go from Christ in the Holy Eucharist to the care for Christ in the sick. So great was his focus on Christ in the sick that he would literally treat them as if he were handling Christ, something expressing sorrow to him for all his past sins and begging mercy. When St. Camillus couldn’t walk to see the sick, he would crawl on the floor. He was someone who after his conversion sought to treat others with the justice they deserved as images of Christ, to love others with the same mercy with which Christ had embraced him, and to walk or even crawl humbly with God, open to the help he needed in every moment. And his charity became a sign of Christ and a sign of Jonah, calling the people of his age to conversion, and calling the Church ever since to conversion as well.
• If you visit the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican, you see, directly on top of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment an image of Jonah being expunged from the whale. Jonah appears to be about to fall down directly on top of the altar. It was Michelangelo’s way of showing that on the altar, Jesus descends to us as the fulfillment of the “Sign of Jonah,” calling us to conversion as we hear his wisdom, enter into the belly of the earth with him and arise with him on the third day. This is where St. Camillus de Lellis received his strength. This is where Jesus Christ will strengthen us to become for our age what St. Camillus was for his, a sign and reminder of Christ’s presence as we do justice by treating others in a holy way, as grateful lovers of God’s mercy that we seek to extend in corporal and spiritual works, and of joyful, humble followers of Christ, walking in his footsteps all the way to his eternal embrace.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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