Homily for Monday of the 3rd Week of Lent

For daily readings, see http://www.usccb.org/nab/022508.shtml

Today’s Gospel shows that the signs Jesus performs are not ends in themselves, nor are they meant to command faith in Him. The signs Jesus performs make faith in Him reasonable, but they do not command faith. As we hear often, for the children of this world, the only things signs do is to increase a desire for more signs, and so to create a dependence upon them. It was not Jesus’ mission to do as many signs as possible, only to do those signs that would make faith in Him reasonable, so that He could lead his disciples to the eternal realities of God’s kingdom that it was His mission to proclaim.
So we come to today’s Gospel dictum that a prophet is not without honor except in his own house. The reason signs were performed for the widow at Zarephath and for Naaman the Syrian was that these signs would lead to faith, whereas signs performed for those in Nazareth would only lead to a demand for more signs, because of their lack of faith.
God respects our freedom enough not to overwhelm us with signs, but he loves us enough to provide us with the signs necessary to elicit our faith. The sacraments especially are privileged signs of the presence of Jesus, and they point to the kingdom he came to establish through the great paschal events we are preparing to celebrate. Through the forgiveness of our sins and through our marriage to Christ in the Eucharist, we share in Christ’s eternal victory over sin and death. Any signs that point us away from the Eucharist are signs we would be better off without.