In the Gospel we find no angry denunciations by Jesus directed at thieves, extortioners, prostitutes, unfaithful wives, occupying forces, or other sinners. The only class He denounces is the scribes and Pharisees. What had these people done wrong—people who studied the Law, taught others, and were a kind of “conscience of the nation”? Their gravest fault is probably expressed in verse 52: called to lead people to the knowledge of God, they themselves passed by this—the most important thing in human life. Without knowing God, no amount of knowledge about God will have any meaning.

The Savior's words addressed to the Pharisees and teachers of the Torah, who in those days were usually called "scribes," may seem too harsh, just as they seemed to some of His listeners. But the question was too serious, and things had to be called by their proper names. The accusations are serious: in essence, Jesus reproaches both the religious leadership of the Synagogue of that time (the Pharisees) and the outstanding teachers of the Torah for not observing themselves what they call others to observe. A strange accusation, it would seem: after all, in the Gospels it is precisely the Pharisees and teachers of the Torah who are shown as zealots for the Torah; they are the ones who constantly reproach Jesus for violating one or another of its prescriptions. But Jesus clearly identifies the problem: external religiosity devoid of spiritual content. This very religiosity became the main problem of synagogue spiritual life in the Gospel era. Many Pharisees adhered to such religiosity, and many teachers of the Torah taught it to the people.

There was, of course, an alternative, but only a few represented it. The New Testament books have preserved the names of some of them for us: Nicodemus, Gamaliel... But they did not determine the general atmosphere of synagogue life at that time. And so it turned out that calls to spiritual life were accompanied by instruction in a life that was not so much spiritual as religious. People were taught not how to acquire inner wholeness and inner light (the very "clear eye" of which Jesus speaks), but how to observe ritual prescriptions. Of course, these prescriptions also did not appear for no reason, and behind them stands a certain spiritual experience that gave rise to them; but by that time the experience had already been forgotten, while the prescriptions remained.

And now the people are offered a life of religiosity alone, without spiritual content; prescriptions without communion with God. Meanwhile, the teachers themselves feel like masters of the Torah: after all, they are the ones who comment on it and interpret it; people come to them for advice; it is their authority in the eyes of ordinary people that is unquestioned.

Not all of them, of course, were like this, but there were enough of them for a vast number of people to become locked inside a circle of formal religiosity with no possibility of leaving it. And every free word from God, any breath of God's Spirit in this environment, is perceived as something unnecessary and even dangerous: it undermines the monopoly of teachers and interpreters over the Torah, and therefore over spiritual life. It is no accident that Jesus tells those who build monuments to the ancient prophets that they are no better than their fathers, who killed those same prophets. They have no need of living spiritual life, just as their fathers had no need of it. And that means they have no need of the Kingdom either.

Condemning the "evil generation" (an evil generation in the Synodal translation), the Lord speaks of the sign of the prophet Jonah. In Matthew's account, Jonah's three-day stay in the belly of the whale is a sign of Christ's Resurrection on the third day. But in today's reading, the evangelist Luke emphasizes a completely different aspect of Christ's words. According to Luke, the sign of the prophet Jonah is the repentance of the people of Nineveh as a result of the prophet's preaching. Let us remember: the book of the prophet Jonah contains a parable about how the prophet, despite his own reluctance, comes to preach repentance in Nineveh, the capital of a very unattractive military-fascist empire. The miracle is that Jonah's word about God's truth, about mercy and compassion, against which the cruel conquerors, the Ninevites, have sinned, is heard.

In Luke's account, the Lord emphasizes that the Ninevites will rise at the judgment with this generation because they were able to hear the word of a weak man as the proclamation of God's truth. Christ's contemporaries, and all of us who read the Gospel, hear His word, spoken with authority, and do not recognize the voice of God. It is precisely this recognition that the Lord in the Gospel of Luke calls the sign of the prophet Jonah. In essence, the evangelist John speaks repeatedly about the same recognition, especially when he quotes Christ's words in chapter 10 that "the sheep follow Him because they know His voice". The essence of the sign, then, is that we hear the word of Christ and the word of the Gospel about Him, and recognize in it the truth that alone resonates with the image of God placed within us.