In today's gospel reading, Jesus is asked by Pharisees and Sadducees to show some sort of heavenly sign, presumably to prove his identity. Jesus refuses--other than a veiled hint about the sign of Jonah, something that can only be understood in light of the cross and the resurrection. But Jesus clearly thinks that they should have already been able to figure out who he is. But they "cannot interpret the signs of the times."There was a Bob Dylan song in the 60s about the times. One verse goes:
Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don't criticize what you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.
A couple of generations later, people who sang along with Dylan now struggle to lead the church in new times. Especially in mainline denominations like my own, we can struggle to break out of patterns from an older time. As we struggle to connect with those generations born after 1980, we often embody Einstein's definition of insanity, continuing to do the same thing and expecting different results.
But if our faith is in any way true, then surely God is at work in our world. Are our churches decline because that is simply the hallmark of a more secular age? Or are we, like Pharisees and Sadducees of long ago, unable to interpret the signs of the times?
If Christ truly died and rose again; if the Church has received the gift of the Holy Spirit, then God must be up to something, and God must expect us to be a part of it. But if I'm going to glimpse this work of God, I suppose I might need to lift my head up out of the routines of church work to see, and then interpret, the signs of the times.
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