This generation is an evil generation;
it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it,
except the sign of Jonah.
The generation the time of Jesus was like the one which wandered in the desert and failed to enter the promised land. The reason they failed was not because what God had given them was insufficient. It was rather because of the hardness of their hearts. It was emphatically not because they didn't have sufficient grounds to trust him. It was because they refused to trust him in spite of the way he had demonstrated that he was with them. So too with the people in the time of Jesus. Even ignoring the many signs they had in fact already seen, they had been given enough to recognize that Jesus was indeed sent by God, and that it was the word of God that he spoke to them.
At the judgment the men of Nineveh will arise with this generation
and condemn it,
because at the preaching of Jonah they repented,
and there is something greater than Jonah here.
The people of Nineveh were able to recognize and respond to the truth of the preaching of Jonah in spite of the fact that Jonah didn't make a particular effort to persuade or to make his message appealing. He would have probably been happier to watch Nineveh burn, but God didn't leave him a choice in the matter. Perhaps the unexpected and otherwise unaccountable nature of his prophetic mission helped people to stop and take notice. All they needed was provocation to think more deeply about their own situation in order to realize that that situation was in need of change, which was why the king told the people, "every man shall turn from his evil way and from the violence he has in hand". In a way the coming of Jesus to his own people was similar. Like Jonah, he did not do so out of shared self-interest, did not himself stand to gain anything by doing so. But unlike Jonah, he did so because of his compassionate heart. But, again like Jonah, he ought to have been a pattern interruption that allowed people to rethink the issues with which their own situation was fraught. He accurately pointed to the condition of their fallen sinful hearts in a way that only a genuine doctor of souls could do, in a way that confirmed he was both knowledgeable and trustworthy.
At the judgment
the queen of the south will rise with the men of this generation
and she will condemn them,
because she came from the ends of the earth
to hear the wisdom of Solomon,
and there is something greater than Solomon here.
We might be inclined to give the generation of Jesus a pass for not recognizing him on the basis of his wisdom. In our own day we know how susceptible we are to believe in the deceptions or mistakes of others, with the proliferation of AI generated stories and other forms of fake news. We have at times believed that certain woman and men were very wise who later turned out to be quite flawed. We are now rightly skeptical of our own ability to sufficiently perceive the truth. But what would we make of the words of Jesus? His words were not in the same ballpark of wisdom as those of anyone else whom we may regard as wise, not on the same scale even as those of Solomon, the wisest man to ever live. Jesus claimed that it was possible to hear his words and recognize truth being spoken, or, more to the point, Truth speaking. We saw this in the way people noted that he spoke with authority, and in the way the officers responded to the Pharisees about why they had not taken Jesus into custody, "No one ever spoke like this man!" (see John 7:45-47). There were of course people like Pilate who could only scratch his head and ask, "What is truth?" (see John 18:38). But this was actually the defensive position of a hardened heart. He could have recognized the truth. But there were too many implications if he did so that he didn't want to face. And so he feigned ignorance, not just before others, but even to himself, lest he still retain some awareness of his accountable guilt.
no sign will be given it,
except the sign of Jonah.
We know that the sign of Jonah was a two-fold sign. The first pertained, as we have said, to his preaching to Nineveh. But we also know that three day journey in the belly of the fish was a sign predicting the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Although the people might fail to recognize Jesus because of his preaching they might yet realize the truth when God vindicated him in his resurrection. His preaching, which may strike us as somewhat aggressive, may have actually caused them to further harden their hearts, but perhaps only to make them brittle so that the resurrection could then break them entirely open.
It seems likely that we don't appreciate the wisdom we have through the Scriptures and through Jesus in particular. We have largely accepted a tacit relativism. Not necessarily regarding truth in the absolute, but regarding our ability to understand. Many competing truths seem equally credible. How can we really attain wisdom sufficiently durable to hold up in our own lives? We can do so by listening to Jesus with open hearts and open minds. We are created in truth to correspond to the Truth. When he speaks to us we can recognize the Truth himself speaking. Then, "you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (see John 8:32).






