Seeing God at Work

Luke 11:29-36

The Sign of Jonah

²⁹ As the crowds increased, Jesus said, “This is a wicked generation. It asks for a sign, but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah. ³⁰ For as Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so also will the Son of Man be to this generation. ³¹ The Queen of the South will rise at the judgment with the people of this generation and condemn them, for she came from the ends of the earth to listen to Solomon’s wisdom; and now one greater than Solomon is here. ³² The people of Nineveh will stand up at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and now one greater than Jonah is here.
³³ “None of you lights a lamp and puts it in a place where it will be hidden, or under a bowl. Instead you put it on its stand, so that those who come in may see the light. ³⁴ Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness. ³⁵ See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness. ³⁶ Therefore, if your whole body is full of light, and no part of it dark, it will be just as full of light as when a lamp shines its light on you.”

Reflection

One day while I was in chapel at Azusa Pacific University, our campus pastor stood up on stage holding a chair in one hand about 2 feet off the ground. He stated in a dramatically loud voice, “God, if you are real, make this chair stop before it hits the ground.”

The crowd was silent as the campus pastor let go of the chair and it plummeted to the ground and off the stage. “Well I guess God isn’t real,” the campus pastor said after the chair hit the floor.

Now, my campus pastor was just trying to make a point. He did not really think that his little experiment disproved God’s existence, but I think if we were really honest with ourselves we would admit we play little games with God like my campus pastor did. We tell God, “If you do this then…fill-in-the-blank.” We sometimes just cannot see God at work, so we are moved to demand a sign.

In the text today, Jesus stands in the mist of a crowd asking for a sign: some type of miracle that would “prove” Jesus to be who he said he was. It was not enough for those in the crowd to have heard the stories; the crowd wanted to see the miracle man work his magic. It was not enough that Jesus spoke as one with authority, they wanted to see the “good-stuff;” they wanted to see the show.

Jesus just responds by saying, “no sign will be given except the sign of Jonah.”

Jonah was a man who was called by God to preach to the people of Nineveh, a people group whom Israel did not really like because they were so wicked. (This is why Jonah ran away from God’s calling at first and had to go through that whole eaten-by-a-whale part of the story.) When Jonah preached to the people of Nineveh, they all turned from their evil actions and followed God.

Now hundreds of years later, Jesus stands preaching the good news to another such wicked generation. The difference between when Jesus preached to that wicked generation and when Jonah preached to the other wicked generation is that the people of Nineveh listened to Jonah and repented from living in evil.

During the time of Jesus, it was believed that people could see because there was a “light” inside of them that would shine through their eyes highlighting everything in the world. This is what Jesus is talking about when he said, “Your eye is the lamp of your body.”

 If someone could not see, it was believed that the “light” inside him or her was “dull” or “dimmer,” because they had done something wrong. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “When your eyes are healthy, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are unhealthy, your body also is full of darkness.”

For those living during the time of Jesus, there was a large connection between the physical and the spiritual. If you were physically sick, there might have been a spiritual reason for it. If you were physically fine, there was believed to be a spiritual reason for it.

Today we might think this is really silly, but I think there is some truth to this. One time I was talking to a student when she told me that she had lately been really tired, sick feeling, and even randomly broken out in tears over “little things.” As we began to talk more, it became clear that there was a spiritual war with God happening within her. She was dealing with something very physical, but also something very spiritual.

Throughout the book of Luke and Acts, the writer refers to Jesus as “light” and the Evil One as “dark.” Jesus now picks up this theme by using the language and understanding of those in his culture to teach them a lesson. Jesus wants the crowd around him to realize that those with a “healthy eye” have an inner light and those with a “sick eye’ indicate that they have inner darkness. In simpler terms, the reason that the crowd could not easily see that Jesus is from God, and therefore requested a sign, is because the darkness inside of their bodies clouded out their ability to see correctly. Therefore, they could not truly see who Jesus was.

This story begs a scary question: if we cannot see God at work in our lives and/or in the world, is it because God is not there? Or, is it because there is some darkness inside us that is clouding out God’s work in the world?

Questions

1.     What did Jesus’s audience demand of him?

2.     Have you ever asked for or even demanded a sign from God? If so, why? What brought you to that point?

3.     Why cannot the people see Jesus for who he really is?

4.     Is there any darkness that might be blocking or clouding out God’s work in your life?

5.     What are some ways can you ask God to help you remove that darkness? In what ways can you seek God and his light?

6.     In what ways can your family try to focus on God and not the darkness of the world?

7.     Pray for each other as a family, pray and ask God to help you focus on him and see his light in the world.