The Only Sign Jesus Offers

Jesus said, “No sign will be given except the sign of Jonah.” —Matthew 12:39 

Father Richard considers what Jesus meant when he promised “the sign of Jonah”: 

This strong one-liner of Jesus feels rather amazing and largely unheard. He even says it is an “evil age” that wants anything other than the simple sign of the prophet Jonah. He says it is the “only sign” that he will give.  

This is indeed unsatisfying. For it is not a sign at all, but more an anti-sign. It demands that we release ourselves into the belly of darkness before we can know what is essential. It insists that the spiritual journey is more like giving up control than taking control. It might even be saying that others will often throw us overboard, and that we get to the right shore by God’s grace more than right action on our part. It is clearly a very disturbing and unsatisfying sign.  

Faith is precisely no-thing. It is nothing we can prove in order to be right, or use to get anywhere else. If we want something to believe in (which is where we all must start), we had best begin as Christians with clear ground, identity, and boundaries. But that is not yet faith! That is merely securing the foundations for our own personal diving board. 

Faith is the leap into the water, now with the lived experience that there is One who can and will catch us—and lead us where we need to go. Religion, in some sense, is a necessary first half of life phenomenon. Faith is much more possible in the second half of life, not necessarily chronologically but always spiritually. To paraphrase Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), “Life must be lived forward, but it can only be understood backward.” [1] Jonah knew what God was doing, and how God does it, and how right God is—only afteremerging from the belly of the whale. Until he has first endured the journey, the darkness, the spitting up on the right shore—all in spite of his best efforts to avoid these very things—Jonah has no message whatsoever to give. Jonah is indeed a symbol of transformation. Jesus had found the Jonah story inspiring, no doubt, because it described almost perfectly what was happening to him. [2] 

Much of my earlier work with men and spirituality was teaching them how to trust their time in the belly of the whale, how to stay there without needing to fix, to control, or even to fully understand it, and to wait until God spit them up on a new shore. It is called “liminal space,” and I believe all in-depth transformation takes place inside of liminal space. To hope too quickly is to hope for the wrong thing. The belly of the whale is the great teaching space, and thus it is no surprise that Jesus said this was the only sign he was going to give (Luke 11:30). [3] 

Fleeing the Call

At the CAC’s CONSPIRE conference in 2018, faculty member Barbara Holmes shared her own personal “Jonah story”: 

There is a crisis of disobedience when we choose to disobey God’s will for our lives. In this instance, I think of Jonah…. He thinks he’s right. He hates the Assyrians, and understandably so. After all, they were a marauding, land-grabbing nation, a real threat to Israel. He had national pride. He wanted to see them destroyed. And so, when he gets the call from God, he travels 2,500 miles to the southern area of Spain. He couldn’t get much further away. Why does he flee? He flees, he says at the end of chapter four, because he knows God is merciful. There is no worse situation than a merciful God when you want to see your enemies get what’s coming to them. Jonah wants to do things his way and ends up in the belly of a sea monster.   

Do you have a Jonah story? I do. From the age of ten through my twenties, I knew I had a call of God on my life. Through dreams, waking visions, and moments of surprising attunement with the Divine, I knew God was calling me. But here I am, a ten-year-old girl, with a call to something I don’t understand. I’d never seen a woman in ministry. For that matter, I’d never seen a woman leading in any spiritual capacity. So, what to do?  

Well, what I did was I went on with my life. I got married, had two children, and after a decade heard the call again even more strongly. This time I turned my head to where I thought God lived (up there) and I said, “Excuse me, sir, or ma’am”—I wanted to cover my bases—“I don’t know if you know about the divorce, but I have two children and I’ve got to feed them and ministers make no money. So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to law school.” [1] 

It took time, but Holmes eventually said “yes” to God’s call. She encourages listeners to remain open and faithful to God’s invitations to serve:  

As I was standing at graduation from law school, I heard a voice say to me, “This isn’t it.” And I kind of startled, and I said to my girlfriend who was standing in line with me to get our degrees, “I just heard a voice say, ‘This is not it.’” And she started laughing. She said, “Well, you sure have wasted a lot of time.”…

There was nothing to do but hear the whispering, continue my practices. And I now allow life to lead me to the precipice of the newness that was already seeded in my life…. 

Trust God, trust Holy Spirit to lead you into all truth. Make your intention clear, that yes, you will follow as called, without exception. Just make your intention known to God and wait for the Holy Spirit to lead you into the fulfillment of your vocation. [2] 

__________

Today’s Secondary Devo by Joni Eareckson Tada)

We Always Carry

. . . We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you. — 2 CORINTHIANS 4:10 – 12

Today’s verse could sound a little morbid. We always carry around in our body Christ’s death? We are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake?! A hearty and happy yes! Why happy? Because then — and only then — can the vibrant, joyful life of our Savior be revealed through us. And his life is revealed in us for God’s glory, our eternal advantage, and others’ benefit. We carry around Jesus’ death when we daily die to sin in the same way he died for sin. It means not taking a casual greeting like “How are you doing?” as an excuse to list every minor and major casualty of your day. Not using your prayer group time as an excuse to gossip. Not painting a picture of your marriage that colors your spouse as the culprit and you the hero. Not living like a martyr and making sure everybody else knows it. These are ordinary, yet important ways of putting your flesh to death with its itchiness to rebel. Oh, to die to sin in the same selfless, patient manner as Jesus on his cross! Oh, if we could only see that refusing sin benefits others around us (just as Jesus was thinking of us on his cross). Then his life would be revealed in us — his profound peace, effervescent joy, and enduring hope. Jesus, I need the power of your resurrection to help me “die to sin” today. Help me to see how “carrying your death” will result in a livelier life for me . . . and deep encouragement for others around me.

Tada, Joni Eareckson. Pearls of Great Price (pp. 150-151). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.

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