Audio only:
Joe explains the importance of the Sign of Jonah named by Jesus in Matthew 16, and how it relates to Holy Week.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer. I’ve got two very exciting pieces of news to share with you before I get started on today’s episode. Number one, this time next week, we should have the debate with Doug Wilson that I just did. It should be live and up and you should be able to watch it in its entirety. I will also have an episode that’s basically a version of my opening statement like I normally do. And then you can kind of go from there and watch the entire episode. So that’s really exciting. There’s even more exciting news that’s coming this Sunday. I won’t tell you what it is. I’ll let you figure that out for yourself, but I hope you’re spiritually preparing for it. To that end, I wanted to share an angle on Holy Week that I don’t hear people talk about or appreciate because it’s kind of subtle.
I know as I was preparing this episode, there’s a lot of stuff we talk about with Holy Thursday, with the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood with Good Friday. What does it mean for Jesus to die on the cross? How does the cross pay for our sins? Holy Saturday, what do we make of Christ being in the tomb? And is this a descent into the hell of damn nation? No. Or is it going to share all this kind of place of the dead? Yes. And then of course, all the meanings to Easter Sunday itself. So it’s hard to say anything on Holy Week and what’s called the Tridium, these final three days of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and then Holy Saturday leading into the Easter vigil. It’s hard to say anything on that that you may not have already heard before, but I want to do my best to present one of the pieces of a biblical evidence you might not be familiar with, pointing towards both the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and actually a lot more.
And then highlight the special role that Simon Peter has to play in that, which is kind of unique and surprising. So first, what is the evidence? Well, the evidence is the sign that Jesus gives. So for instance, in Matthew 16, when the Pharisees and Sadducees come to Jesus, they test him and they ask him to show them a sign from heaven. It’s very clear from the text. This is not a good faith attempt to understand Jesus better. They’re just demanding more and more evidence. And Jesus responds by saying that an evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign, but no sign shall be given to it except the sign of Jonah. That’s a very confusing kind of statement. Jesus a little bit later in Matthew 16 will give another confusing statement. And this is one Calics and Protestants are often very familiar with when he tells Simon that he’s going to be Peter the rock.
And upon this rock, he’s going to build his church confusing, fascinating passage, but there’s one part in there that is worth drawing out in light of what we just heard about the sign of Jonah, because Simon Peter has confessed Jesus as the Christ, the son of the living God. And Jesus responds by saying, “Blessed or you Simon Bargona.” Now that is literally Simon’s son of Jonah or son of Jonas. And there is on the surface at a neat parallel that Simon has said, “You’re the Christ, the son of the living God.” And Jesus said, “Simon, you’re Peter, the son of Jonah.” Okay, looks really good, but there’s a problem with it. And that problem is that John one tells us that Simon is the son of John. Now, this couldn’t just be a mistake, some kind of error where different evangelists are screwing up the details because it’s very clear from John one that John himself is writing this with a view towards Matthew 16 because the next words out of Jesus’ mouth are, “You shall be called Caphas,” which is rock, which he then translates as petros.
So we know that John has Matthew 16 in view while he’s telling us, “Oh, by the way, Simon’s father’s name is John, not Jonah.” Now, this is a confusing detail and some scholars have attempted to resolve it by saying, “Well, maybe these words were interchangeable like John and Jonah were basically the same name, and they just aren’t. They simply are not. Both of them come from Hebrew, but the name John comes from a name meaning God has graced, the name Jonah means dove. They’re not even particularly similar.
There’s another dimension as well that makes this more complicated because yes, he’s called him Simon Bargona. And at a literal level, Bar Jonah means son of Jonah, but we also know that bar and bat, son and daughter, are used in these ways that we would not use the term son and daughter in English. Now, one of those is just a descendant, but you see it much more with something like the phrase bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah, which means you’re the son or daughter of the law, literally commandment, but here it means the law. So if you say that a child has gone through their bar mitzvah, you mean they’ve become a son of the law. Well, obviously you’re not using son in a biological sense. There’s some other spiritual or metaphorical sense going on. And so I want to draw our attention to that and say, maybe the way to understand Simon Bargona is to recognize that this comes in the same chapter that Jesus promises to give the sign of Jonah.
So that’s the task I want to set out to do, unpack what are the three meanings of the sign of Jonah and how does Simon Peter fit into that story? All right. So the first and the most obvious meaning is the reason I’m doing this during Holy Week, that the sign of Jonah is about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And Jesus basically tells us this. And Matthew 12, when he mentions the sign of Jonah, that time he says,” For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. “That is pretty clearly a reference to his death and resurrection. And we might be reminded of Matthew 27, which we just heard in Palm Sunday’s mass gospel, where they want to post a guard outside the tomb because they say,” Sir, we remember how that imposter said while he was still alive, after three days, I will rise again.
“So the three days and three nights or the after three days is clearly referring to the death and resurrection of Christ. Nevertheless, there’s a particular point of confusion we might arrive at. How does that math kind of work? Because we have true to him where we have Holy Thursday evening with the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood, then we have Good Friday. So it’s the last supper. Then we have Good Friday where Jesus dies on the cross and then he’s in the tomb on Holy Saturday. And then Saturday night or Sunday morning, we celebrate Easter vigil or Easter morning mass. So it’s this three day period, very sacred time, but it’s not really three days and three nights as we would count it. And if you’re measuring from Jesus’ death on the cross on Good Friday, you would never say Sunday morning before dawn is after three days, that math just doesn’t hold up.
So it might look like a kind of glaring biblical error. And I want to suggest that there’s actually a very easy solution to that, which is just that counting works different in different cultures. So in Greek and in Hebrew, you count the original day as well as counting the end day. So if I say after two days, I mean something 48 hours from now, somebody else looking at something 48 hours from now would call that after three days because they’re including today, tomorrow, and the next day, those three days. We only include tomorrow and the next day. So we would count as two days, they would count as three. This is a point of just an established difference in how the counting works in different cultures. It’s not a matter of one being right or wrong, it’s just a matter of how they count. And you can actually see this very clearly in Acts chapter 10 with Peter and Cornelius.
Now, this is actually pretty delightful that it happens to be right here because Peter and Cornelius is very much going to be important for making sense of the sign of Jonah. And I’ll explain why when we get to the third one. But for now, we’re just going to take the most superficial level, just a mathematical one. So Cornelius has a vision, the ninth hour of the day in which he’s told to send for Peter. So let’s just call that day Sunday, just for the sake of clarity.
In verse nine, we’re told the next day, Peter has his own vision, about the sixth hour of the day. So we’ll call it Monday, right? So we had Sunday, the next day, Monday. The next day, Acts 10:23 tells us that Peter sets off from Japa on his journey. That’s a relevant detail. We’ll get to that in a little bit. And then on the following day, the inter says Auria. So we were at Monday and then he leaves on Tuesday, he arrives on Wednesday. So you go from Sunday to Wednesday. Cornelius is going to now share with him the thing that happened on the original day on Sunday. Now we would say three days ago. If someone’s asking you about something that happened on Sunday, on Wednesday, you’d say three days ago, on Sunday, this thing happened. Cornelius doesn’t say three days ago. In Acts 10:30, he says four days ago.
Now, this is not some internal math mistake within Acts 10. This is just something you need to know that different cultures count differently. And so if you’ve ever been confused about the three days and three nights or after three days, that’s why. So the first meaning is a very clear meaning that just as Jonah was in the belly of the whale and then he rose or really the belly of great fish, Jesus is going to be in the belly of the earth and then rise again from the dead. And we would say two days later, they’re going to say three days later. That’s what this is pointing to. That is the first and most obvious dimension of the sign of Jonah. But I would suggest it is not the only dimension of the sign of Jonah. A second dimension is that it’s about the destruction of Jerusalem.
And you might be saying, “Where is that in the text?” Well, several places, but it is absolutely, I’ll say it at the outset, it is less obvious, but I think you can see it there once you know what to look for. In Matthew 12, Jesus goes on to explain what he means by the sign of Jonah by saying, “The men of Nineva, where Jonah preached, will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for they repented at the preaching of Jonah and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.” Then he talks about the Queen of the South arising of the judgment with this generation. So this is actually the third time the reference to this generation has been mentioned because right before this in verse 39, he says, “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign.” So we’re being introduced to the fact that there’s a wicked generation, the one demanding a sign from Jesus, this generation tied to Jerusalem, as we’re going to see, and they are worse than the Ninevites at the preaching of Jonah.
That doesn’t give us a timeline, but it does suggest some kind of judgment is going to be visited upon this generation. So it gives a little bit of a timeline, a generation. There’s a couple more things we can say more specifically about what that judgment will look like and when it will happen. So in Matthew 23, Jesus says, “Truly, I say to you, all this will come upon this generation.” And then he says, “Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who were sent to you. How often when I’ve gathered your children together as a hen, gathers her brood under her wings and you would not. Behold, your house is forsaken and desolate.” So this is a judgment to be visited upon Jerusalem and more particularly the house of Jerusalem, which I think we would rightly identify as the temple. For example, when Jesus purifies the temple, he says that my father’s house is to be a house of prayer for all people, but you’ve made it a den of robbers.
So the house in Jerusalem is the temple. If that wasn’t clear enough for Matthew 23, Matthew 24 makes it pretty explicit because Matthew 24 begins with Jesus and the disciples walking and seeing the beauty of the temple and Jesus saying, “Truly I say to you, there will not be here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.” Then he goes to the Mount of Olives and gives the amount Olivet discourse. And that ends in verse 34 with him saying, “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place.” So there’s some kind of judgment to be visited upon Jerusalem and upon the temple in this generation. That gives us a more specific sense of what’s about to happen, but I think we can get more specific yet by looking at the fact that the rebellious generation, Paraxilance in the Old Testament was the wilderness generation that Moses, a prefigurement of Christ, had come to liberate the people and the people complained and they didn’t want the salvation they were offered.
And so number 32 says that the Lord’s anger was kindled against Israel and he made them wander in the wilderness 40 years until all the generation that had done evil and the sight of the Lord was consumed. So this is the first time we see a generation connected with 40 years. It’s not the last. So this same wilderness generation is referenced in Psalm 95 and which God says, “For 40 years I endured,” or some translations they loathed that generation and said, “There are people who err in heart and they do not regard my ways.” So the rebellious generation, 40 years. If that’s not enough, remember the preaching of Jonah because he’s going to Nineveh and saying, “Yet 40 days and Nineveh shall be overthrown.” So he’s predicting a timeline of 40 days and I think we should see in Jesus’s words an implicit timeline of 40 years.
But here beyond the days, years difference is the second difference. So the people of Nineveh believe God, they proclaim a fast, they put on sackcloth and they repent. Now remember Jesus’ words that he longs for the repentance of Jerusalem. Nineva does repent and Jesus reminds the people of Jerusalem that the minute Nineveh will arise because they repented and those in Jerusalem won’t. I mentioned this because 40 years after Jesus says all of this, you have the destruction of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple in particular. This is the beginning of the Jewish diaspora in about the year 72. So it seems to me that the second meaning to the sign of Jonah is a prediction, albeit something of a sort of subtle prediction, but not that subtle prediction, that the temple will be destroyed, that they will face the fate of Nineva, had Nineva not repented, but now that will be visited upon Jerusalem because something greater than Jonah has arrived and they’ve turned their back on Jesus.
Then we have the third sense of the sign of Jonah. And I’ll explain, as I said, how Peter fits into all of this in just a moment, I think it’ll become clearer with this third sense that the sign of Jonah, in addition to being about Jonah being in the belly of the whale for three days, about the 40 days and then of it will be destroyed, is also about the proclamation of the good news to the Gentiles or the opening of the doors of salvation to the Gentiles. Maybe a more accurate way to put that. Now, I think we have a hint towards this in Matthew 12, because you notice Jesus says that the men of Nineveh will arise to the judgment with this generation and condemn it, and then the queen of the South, that’s the queen of Shebah, will arise at the judgment with this generation and condemn it.
So you have the reference to this generation, but who are the accusers? It’s faithful Gentiles. So it’s pretty striking because we’re told explicitly she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon. And behold, something greater than Solomon is here. But here you’ve got these people who aren’t in Jerusalem, who are far flung ends of the earth. They hear this good news coming from God and they repent and they want to hear it and they convert. And here, Jesus is bringing it right to them in Jerusalem, the very heart of things, and they won’t listen. So that is, I think, our first indication that this is going to have something to do with the opening of the doors of salvation to the Gentiles. But also, if you’re familiar with the story of Jonah, this is basically the point of the story.
I mentioned this if you watched my episode recently with Luke Hansen, it was sort of an aside there, but I think it’s worth pointing out that one of the messages of the book of Jonah is that God is a creator of the entire Cosmos. He’s a creator of everything. And as such, he’s not just a creator of a little tribe or a little nation. He’s not just the God of a little corner of the earth. He’s rather the God of everything. Now you see this implicitly and explicitly throughout the book. This is why Jonah rebels. This is why Jonah doesn’t originally want to preach salvation. We’re told this by Jonah himself in Jonah four. He reminds God, isn’t this what I said when I was yet in my country? That is why I made haste to flee to Tarshish, for I knew that thou are to gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding and steadfast love and repentance of evil.
In other words, he doesn’t want to preach the good news that God has given him to preach because he knows the Nineevites will convert. Now, that might be confusing when you’re first reading this. If you don’t know a little bit of the cultural context, Nineveh is the capital of Asyria. These are the mortal enemies of the Israelites and God wants to save even your enemies. That’s one of the points, the culture, the ethnicity, the tribe, the people, whatever that you hate the most, God loves them and wants him to be saved and that is politically an opportune. That rubs us the wrong way. We want just a national God. We want just a God of our people and he’s a God of all peoples. So this is a lot of what’s going on that Jonah is being sent to preach to the Gentiles in this very clear way that’s quite unusual among the Old Testament prophets and Jonah does not want to do that.
And this gives the book some of its comedy, frankly, because Jonah decides he’s going to try to flee from the presence of the Lord. But remember, the whole point of the book is you can’t flee from the presence of the Lord because God created everything. And so there’s this absurd moment where there’s a storm on the sea and Jonah’s trying to explain to the sailors that he’s being punished because he’s a Hebrew who fears the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land. And yet because he doesn’t want to obey him, he has decided to flee from the presence of the Lord. So he’s trying to flee from the presence of the Lord on the sea that he is telling them he knows God made. This is the absurdity of Jonah’s actions, that he is trying to run from God.
And of course, you cannot run from God. So I mentioned this to say, Jonah has this hallmark amongst Old Testament prophets of having this special mission only to the Gentiles. We only see him preaching to the Gentiles, and he is very much the kind of reluctant prophet. Well, this makes sense given, as we’re going to see the connection to Simon Peter, because Peter, son of Jonah, Peter Bargona, Simon Peter Bargona, is the one who opens the doors of salvation to the Gentiles in Acts 10, and some of the Israelites are upset with him, the so- called party of circumcision. These are Jewish Christians who are upset and said, “Why did you go to uncircumcised men and eat with them?” And Peter has to explain to them that God has opened the doors of salvation to the Gentiles as well. Now, I knew this much, and I referenced this in my book, Peter, but there’s actually layers of this that I didn’t realize even when I wrote about this in my book.
So I’m indebted to the 1957 commentary in the Acts of the Apostles by CSC Williams, in which he mentioned some of the extra details I’d overlooked really just briefly in two pages, between pages 152 and 153. And one of the things he points out is that there is this fascinating connection between Jonah and Peter in Acts 10, which we saw a little bit of that before, with this connection to Joppa. On that first day, remember when Cornelius has a vision, the vision he’s told to sin men to Japa because Simon Peter is living there or staying there. And why is Joppa significant? Because that’s where Jonah had fled to get on the ship to try to get away from the Lord. As Robert Wall points out in the book, the New Testament is cannon, there’s actually several other connections between Jonah and Simon Peter, particularly in Acts 10, 11 and 12.
You have the continuity of location, which we already saw. You have this hesitancy to go preach the message of good news and God has to intervene. So you have Peter needing to be told multiple times in the vision in Acts 10. You have, of course, Jonah originally refusing to do the thing God has called him to do and he has to be sent a second time. The language of sinding is almost identical. The rise and go language to Peter and to Jonah, the Gentiles then in fact believe, which is a detail we sort of just take for granted, but is actually quite remarkable. And then the faithful Israelites are actually upset that they believed, whether that be Jonah or the crowds that we already saw in Acts 11. But there’s actually one more detail that I think is really incredible and drives home, in my view, drives home pretty decisively that you should read Acts 10:11 and 12 as one of the ways Peter lives out the sign of Jonah.
And it has to do with King Heroda Grippa. This is the son of Christmas Herod. This is Linton Easter Herod. And he has decided to persecute the church. And so he has James killed, and then he has Peter arrested, and Peter is as good as dead. He’s locked up in prison. But just as Jonah, when he was as good as dead, was miraculously released from the great fish, whale and popular imagination. So Peter is miraculously released from jail. Okay. Maybe that is an interesting connection, maybe it’s not. I’m going to hold that thought because of what’s going to happen next. So remember, the King Nineva, when he finds out that the released Jonah has come and preached this message, he repents. King Herod, when he finds out that Peter has been released, has the jailers put to death. So he has a much more hardhearted reaction, but there is a particular moment in Jonah three where you see the king’s repentance.
And I want you to pay careful attention to three details that he does between verses six and nine. The tidings reached the king of Nineveh and he, number one, arose from his throne. Number two, removed his robe and covered himself with sackcloth and satin ashes. And number three, he proclaims a fast and tells the people to cry up mightily to God so that they can hopefully appeal to God for his repentance. Those are the three things. I want you to remember those three things. He gets out of his throne, he takes off his royal robe and he turns the people to God. In contrast, when Herod hears that Peter has been miraculously freed from prison, we’re told on an appointed day, Herod put on his royal rope, took his seat upon the throne, and then he makes an oration to the people and the people shout out the voice of a God and not of man.
So he has not turned the people towards God, he’s turned them towards himself. They then treat him as a God and immediately an angel of the Lord smites him because he did not give God the glory. Now, maybe that’s all a coincidence that there happens to be reference of putting on or taking off robes and getting out of or getting into thrones, but it seems to me that there is a pretty obvious connection that the king and Nineveh and King Herodo Grippa have reacted in opposite ways. One of them is taking on the seat and the robes of royal authority. One of them is casting those things off and pointing the people to God. And so they have these opposite reactions at the level of the robe, at the level of the throne, and at the level of who they’re pointing people towards. There’s actually a fourth detail as well, because it’s not just that Herod dies, we’re told that he was eaten by worms and died.
And the worm also appears in Jonah. God, to try to show Jonah how ridiculous he’s being, miraculously grows up a gourd plant, and then he destroys it, but he destroys it particularly with a worm. And the word there, Skolaxis is the same word being used in both contexts. And you don’t see a ton of references to worms. So the fact that you have these references to the robe, the throne, the turning the people towards are away from God, and then the worm, it just looks like too much to be a complete coincidence. So I would suggest the sign of Jonah includes all three of these things. It includes the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It includes the foretelling of the destruction of Jerusalem as a punishment of the wicked generation, and it includes the doors of salvation being open in this decisive way to the Gentiles.
So finally, how does Simon Peter fit into all of this? What makes Simon son of Jonah? What makes Simon bar Jonah? Well, I think the third of those three is already clear that he is the one who is proclaiming salvation to the Gentiles and he is the one who’s preaching, gets even to the king and the king reacts, although the king acts in opposite ways between Jonah and Peter, but this is what’s happening. But the other two senses of the sign of Jonah are also tied to Peter. And this is particularly true in light of Pentecost because remember that first way, the most obvious one is that the sign of Jonah is the death and resurrection of Jesus. And Peter is the first one to preach that publicly. On Pentecost, he gets up and he says, Men of Israel hear these words. And then he tells them how Jesus was delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men, but God raised him up having loosed the pangs of death because it was not possible for him to be held by it.
So the death and resurrection of Jesus is first proclaimed publicly by St. Peter on Pentecost. And then when the people want to know what to do, this is still Acts two, we’re now down in verse 40 to 41, He testifies to them and exhorts them saying,” Save yourselves from this crooked generation. “For those who received His word are paptized and they were added that day about 3,000 souls. So that second meaning that there is a judgment upon the wicked generation, a judgment which we see culminating in the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, he is giving them the way out, that they can become part of the new temple, which is the body of Christ. Remember Jesus’ words, the story of this temple, and in three days I’ll rebuild it, that death and resurrection, the three days that’s pointing to the new temple and the people are being drawn away from the old temple, which is passing away towards the new temple, which is the body of Jesus Christ.
And then through baptism, they are added that day to the body of Christ. Now, in Acts two, we’re still at the first and second meaning of the sign of Jonah. He is preaching the death and resurrection of Jesus and preaching freedom from the wicked generation to the house of Jerusalem, but he will soon, eight chapters later, preach this to Cornelius and then to Gentiles more broadly. And so that’s where you see him fulfill that third meaning, that he is sort of the reluctant prophet to go and open the doors of salvation to the Gentiles just as Jonah had been before him, but his preaching has this opposite effect in terms of how the king reacts in the two cases, but it’s actually more successful in another sense because remember, you have this conversion in Nineveh, you have a much bigger conversion coming from the preaching of Jesus by Peter that you have in the opening of the doors to the Gentiles as Gentile Christians around the world bear witness.
So I just thought this would be kind of a cool thing to share as you’re interning into Holy Week this week that maybe you’ve looked at the whole story of Jesus’ passion from 10 different angles. Maybe you’d never connected it with Jonah, but this sign of Jonah is a significant way of understanding what’s happening, and Jesus repeatedly points to this sign when he’s asked for a sign. So if you want to understand what’s happening here, I think you should understand it through the lens of the sign of Jonah, and then you also get to see this cool role that Simon Peter gets to play in. I hope this is good spiritual food for thought, and I hope you’re having a blessed holy week. For Shamus Popury, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.