Luke 11:29

THE SIGN OF THE PROPHET JONAH

And when the multitudes were gathered together unto him, he began to say, This generation is an evil generation: it seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it but the sign of Jonah. For even as Jonah became a sign unto the Ninevites, so shall also the Son of man be to this generation. The queen of the South shall rise up in the judgment with the men of this generation and shall condemn them: for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and behold, a greater than Solomon is here. And the men of Nineveh shall stand up in the judgment with this generation, and shall condemn it: for they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and behold, a greater than Jonah is here.

The sign of Jonah ... is nothing less than the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ, as typified by the miraculous entombment and delivery after three days of Jonah in the belly of the great fish, this truth having been spelled out in detail by Matthew (Matthew 12:40), and witnessed by the inscriptions in the catacombs for centuries afterward. Such a view as the following should be rejected out of hand.

In Luke, the sign was not the experience but the preaching, Jonah proclaimed God's message .... Nineveh, the ancient heathen city, responded in repentance. Jesus proclaimed God's message ... the Jewish people of his day were responding not with repentance but with rejection.[34]

It is the first sentence which is in error. How a scholar can make Jonah's "preaching" the sign of Jonah is a mystery, in view of the fact that Jonah's preaching would never have been believed at all, except for the fact that Jonah's experience of three days and three nights duration was such an astounding miracle that when "word came unto the king of Nineveh" (Jonah 3:6), Jonah was believed, and the people repented. Without that prior miracle, only a fool could believe that the king of Nineveh would have led his whole nation in repentance; such a thing, if it had occurred, would have been a greater miracle than the fish episode in Jonah! We repeat, there is no authority for limiting the "sign of Jonah" to the mere man and the fact of his preaching. Where in all holy writ was preaching ever made a "sign" of anything? Of course, all efforts to open up some variance between Luke and Matthew on this question are grounded in a prior disbelief of the Jonah record and of Jesus' unqualified approval and endorsement of it.

Therefore, the sign of Jonah is here understood in the light of Matthew 12:40, as the death, burial, resurrection of the Christ, this being the great sign which Jesus promised that generation; and it should be noted that the sign was yet to be given, a future occurrence, whereas the preaching of Jesus had already been going on for years. For extensive elaboration of Jonah as a type of Christ, see indexes in my Commentary on John and my Commentary on Mark. Also, for discussion of the judgment, the repentance of the Ninevites, the greater than Solomon, and the greater than Jonah, see my Commentary on Matthew, Matthew 12:41.

The burden of this entire paragraph is that Israel had failed to respond to the preaching of the Master, despite the historical examples of Gentiles who had responded to God's message, under far less privileged circumstances.