What is the basis of your relationship with God? Are you looking for some personal benefit in life through your relationship with God? Is your relationship with God based on bending reality or even God to your expectations and desires? Are you looking to be impressed with a circus show or magic tricks? All those negative spiritual aspects are present in the encounter between Jesus and the scribes and pharisees. They want to force Jesus to perform a miracle in order to believe his Word.
Jesus calls their attitude “evil and unfaithful” – hard words directed to a whole generation. He calls evil and unfaithful the most pious folks; the people who were the most highly educated in their religious tradition. They insist that God should do what they want and expect. Yet Jesus insists that true faith is a surrender of our will to God’s plan for salvation. The Our Father calls us as true Christians to an attitude of surrendering to the will of God and living within what God provides daily. Jonah’s three days in the belly of the whale are a prefigure of Jesus’ passion and resurrection.
There are many things and events in our lives that we cannot control, cannot understand, and cannot accept. Our human tendency towards violence and vengeance tends to lead us to try to force God to change all that. Or we just let ourselves drift into unbelief. We edit the Word of God and our image of God to our own limited understanding.
In the first reading today, the first thing the people of Israel do in their new freedom from slavery is complain, despair, and demand. In today’s Gospel, the most religious people of that generation can only issue demands. True faith is based on trust and confidence not complaints and demands.
An evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign,
but no sign will be given it
except the sign of Jonah, the prophet.