Meal From Below: A Lenten DevotionalSample

The Sign of Jonah

When we celebrate Palm Sunday, we commemorate Jesus’ triumphal entry into the city of Jerusalem to the adulation of crowds. The day marked the apex of his popularity. It is an event in our faith story truly worth celebrating because it so dramatically foreshadows the final stanza of the great ancient praise hymn quoted by Paul in Philippians 2:10-11 “At the name of Jesus every knee will bow, and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” 

Even as we hand out palm branches for kids and adults to wave in our churches, we do so with an asterisk, a celebration with hesitation, because we know how the rest of the week’s story played out. Inserting ourselves into the commotion of that day in Jerusalem, we might imagine two very different responses to the spectacle. On the one hand, we might simply be caught up in the enthusiasm with our own hosanna cheers. “Finally,” we think, “a real wave to catch, something to get behind! God is in it! Here is a movement that is obviously going places, with possibilities of success written all over it.”

On the other hand, some of us know how these things turn out. Call us cynical, but we’ve been down this road before. Schooled by life, we’re smarter than the fickle   crowds. We’re all too familiar with how things predictably turn south. We’ll watch from a distance, disengaged and bemused, realistic in our expectations. Check with us later if you’re interested in our perspective on how the mess could have been avoided.

Jesus himself shows a radically different way of being in his own story. He attaches a curiously obscure label to this “third way”: the “sign of Jonah.” By this point he has drawn great crowds with “signs and wonders,” and could be poised to capitalize on the market share he commands. Yet Luke tells us that “as the crowds increased,” Jesus drops a cold-water pronouncement, referring to one of the least uplifting stories from the Hebrew prophets, “This generation is an evil generation; it asks for a sign, but no sign will be given to it except the sign of Jonah” (Luke 11:29). Matthew spells it out in greater detail: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth” (Matt. 12:40). This sign, and only this sign, is the one finally given to show the way for an “evil and adulterous generation” prone to extremes of either enthusiasm or cynicism.

This “third way” of Jonah does not simply aim for a middle path between the extremes. It’s a different trip altogether, as Jonah himself found out. It is the way of death and resurrection. In case those categories have become religious clichés for us, let’s just say it’s the way of being storm-wrecked, drowned, swallowed whole, and vomited up—hardly the way of over-enthusiasm or cynicism. But it is the way of transformation. When Jonah finally was spit up onto a distant shore, he was a different person in a different place. The sign of Jonah points to the way of baptism, of being born a second time, of falling into the earth and dying like a kernel of wheat, and rising to new life. It points to eating the meal of brokenness so that we may be nourished to wholeness. It is a way of struggle, loss, and relinquishment, so that we might find our way in renewed abundance.

Enthusiasm or cynicism cannot accomplish such transformation. It comes as a journey of grace, not a spectacle of magic as many miracle-watchers had come to anticipate. The invitation to salvation, shown by the sign of Jonah, is an invitation for our souls to follow Jesus as we have done in this Lenten course of the meal - through desert space and onward into the sorrows and shame of the cross. We do so with trust and courage (mixed with ample doses of our doubt and fear), knowing the companionship of our Brother Jesus. He will share with us this meal of brokenness, and be our Host in the resurrection meal of blessing.