Matthew 12:38-44: Asking, Never Intending To Change

Then some of the Pharisees and teachers of the law said to him, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from you.”

He answered, “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign! But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of a huge fish, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and now something greater than Jonah is here. The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it; for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom, and now something greater than Solomon is here.

“When an impure spirit comes out of a person, it goes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it. Then it says, ‘I will return to the house I left.’ When it arrives, it finds the house unoccupied, swept clean and put in order. - Matthew 12:38-44

 There are many fakes out there. If I read the headlines from various facebook posts, they all claim to possess some hidden or secret knowledge that, if I were just to listen, would change my life. From one of my early blog posts, a reader sent me a note to let me know that he was one of the few people to recognize that Lazarus was the author of the Gospel of John. He had the secret knowledge.

The problem is that we become numb to what is real while we try to protect ourselves from what is fake. The world is required to prove itself to us before we will believe. That is, our default answer is "No"

Jesus said that his listeners were "a wicked and adulterous generation" to ask for this sign. Somehow their asking was not a genuine request for information but rather, from the context, a dig for dirt to use against Jesus. In other places in the gospels, we saw that "They hoped to catch Jesus in something he said, so that they might hand him over to the power and authority of the governor" (Luke 20:20) and in another place "they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath." (Mark 3:2) That is, it wasn't that they asked the question that was the problem. It was that they asked without ever intending to believe!

They were the enlightened. They knew that nothing important (like a Jesus) came from Galilee. As the enlightened, it was their responsibility and their joy to expose Jesus either as a fraud, as misguided or as dangerously inflammatory. In today's passage, Jesus gave examples from foreign nations (Assyria for the first, Egypt for the second) where people responded with genuine curiosity and a willingness to change. But not Jesus' audience. They asked without ever intending to change their lives.

It is a cynicism that threatens to cripple my life as well, because the enlightened (like me) never feel the need to change whereas the humble always sit at the feet of Jesus to learn.