We are near midway through Lent. I’ve found myself wondering what was going on in Jesus’ life leading up to that monumental moment and the unparalleled suffering He endured. Interestingly Matthew gives us a kind of “turning point,” or event from which everything that followed lead to His “time.”
That “point” is defined in Chapter 16 verse 21 of this Tax Man turned Christ-Follower’s Biography of Christ. “From that time on,” he writes, “Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” It’s occurred to me that I could, quite appropriately, conclude that what He did, and talked about, from then on, ‘til His Death and Resurrection, was of highest importance. Kind of “Famous Last Words and works.”
Interestingly, in that very Chapter; Chapter 16 He makes a statement which is repeated earlier in Matthew and also in Luke. “A wicked and adulterous generation looks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” (Matthew 16:4) The religious elite had asked Him for a sign presumably to prove He was who He claimed to be. This was His response to them. Luke tells us that, “As the crowds increased, Jesus said, “This is a wicked generation. It asks for a sign … .” Once before Matthew had recorded an instance where Jesus gave the same reply to religious “Teachers.” (See Matthew 12: 39 & 40)
What is there about a sign that disturbs Jesus so deeply?
Anyone who asks for a “sign” that someone is authentic is asking for proof of it. The question that follows is obvious. To whose satisfaction? Jesus indictment makes it clear that the one asking for a sign has a set of criteria which must be met. These men; this crowd; had expectations of Messiah and they were asking Jesus to meet those. Jesus refused because to comply would mean compromise. The things He did were and would always be the Father’s choice and not His. Anything else would be self-serving and dishonoring to the “Lord God.” They would be “wicked.” He would be “prostituting” Himself to another god just as those who pestered Him for a sign had sold out to a nationalistic creation of their own minds.
However, Jesus did say, in the Matthew 12 conversation that there would be a “sign.” This is how He put it. No sign “will be given … 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 Resurrection was to be “the sign.”
Among Jesus “Famous Last Words” are these. And the importance of them is that, in fact, His Resurrection was then and always will be the “sign” that establishes His identity as the “Christ” – Consummate Man – and “Lord” – Son of God.
We now live in a time when “signs” are just as eagerly sought as they were then. And, as then, so now the sensual and gratifying; spectacular and powerful; beautiful and successful are touted and craved.
Are we being seduced into the worship of another God? Are we prostituting ourselves to a deity carved out of the stuff a secular society values? Are we forgetting the centrality of a cross to the Resurrection story?
Paul, Christ’s handpicked Representative to the Roman world, is a real life example of someone who’s rock solid certainty that Jesus is “Lord and Christ” is based on a “faith” that the path of suffering and death is the way to Resurrection. This is what he wrote in his second letter to the Christ-followers in Corinth. “We think you ought to know, dear brothers and sisters, about the trouble we went through in the province of Asia. We were crushed and overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would never live through it. In fact, we expected to die. But as a result, we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely only on God, who raises the dead.”
Christ is Risen!
We too will live!
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