Monday of the Twenty-EighthWeek in Ordinary Time
The gift of the faith
While still more people gathered in the crowd, he said to them, “This generation is an evil generation; it seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it, except the sign of Jonah. Just as Jonah became a sign to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be to this generation. 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. 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. Lk 11,29-32
The Queen of Sheba came from the southern Arabia, the today’s Yemen, to hear the wisdom of King Solomon: “And there is something greater than Solomon here”, Jesus says today. “This generation seeks a sign” the more it gets, the more it looks “but no sign will be given it, except the sign of Jonah”. “And there is something greater than Jonah here”: this is the summary of the today gospel. To the humanity, always in search of an absolute wisdom, of an incorruptible truth from the time which elapses, which looks for signs, in the life and in the history, to come into contact with infinity of God, the Lord presents only the truth of the gospel and his resurrection, which is the sign of Jonah. The message of the gospel, however, is understood and recognized only by the tiniest, or by those who knows how to be in front of this event of the historical death on the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, with its mystery and its power of liberation. Only with the attitude of the children, who believe wholeheartedly to the words of one who loves them, without feeling the need for tests and demonstrations, we are allowed to penetrate this mystery of love and to enter into the kingdom of the heaven, which the Lord has prepared for us. We pray for this to happen and if it already happened, to the aim that it remains alive until the last breath of life.