John Calvin Commentary Matthew 12:39

"But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given it but the sign of Jonah the prophet:" — Matthew 12:39 (ASV)

A wicked generation. He does not merely charge that age with malice, but pronounces the Jews—or at least the scribes, and those who resembled them—to be a wicked nation; thus declaring that they suffered from a hereditary disease of obstinacy. The word γενεά sometimes denotes an age, and sometimes a people or nation. He calls them adulterous, that is, spurious or illegitimate,¹⁶⁵ because they had degenerated from the holy fathers, as the prophets reproach the men of their age with being not the descendants of Abraham, but the ungodly seed of Canaan.

Seeks a sign. This leads to the inquiry: Did Christ address them with such harshness of language because they wished for a sign? For on other occasions, God shows that He is not so displeased on this account. Gideon asks for a sign (Judges 6:17), and God is not angry but grants his request. And though Gideon becomes importunate and asks for another sign, God still condescends to his weakness. Hezekiah did not ask for a sign, and it was offered to him, though unsolicited (Isaiah 38:7–8). Ahaz is severely blamed for refusing to ask for a sign, as the prophet had instructed him to do (Isaiah 7:11).

It is not solely, therefore, because they ask a sign that Christ makes this attack upon the scribes, but because they are ungrateful to God, wickedly despise so many of his wonderful works, and try to find a subterfuge for not obeying his word. What a display this was—I do not say of indifference, but of malice—in shutting their eyes against so many signs! There was, therefore, no proper ground for this demand, and they had no other purpose than to appear to have a good reason for rejecting Christ. Paul condemns their posterity for the same crime when he says that the Jews require a sign (1 Corinthians 1:22).

A sign shall not be given to it. They had already been convicted by various miracles, and Christ did not abstain from exerting his power among them for the purpose of rendering them inexcusable, but only meant that one sign would stand for all, because they were unworthy of having their ungodly desire granted. “Let them rest satisfied,” he says, “with this sign: that as Jonah, brought up from the bottom of the sea, preached to the Ninevites, so they will hear the voice of a prophet risen from the dead.”

Most commentators, I am aware, display greater ingenuity in expounding this passage; but as the resemblance between Christ and Jonah does not hold at every point, we must inquire in what respect Christ compares himself to Jonah. For my own part, leaving the speculations of other men, I think that Christ intends to mark out that single point of resemblance which I have already hinted: that he will be their prophet after he is risen from the dead. “You despise,” he says, “the Son of God, who has come down to you from heaven: but I am yet to die, and to rise from the grave, and to speak to you after my resurrection, as Jonah came from the bottom of the sea to Nineveh.” In this manner, our Lord cuts off every pretense for their wicked demands, by threatening that he will be their Prophet after his resurrection, since they do not receive him while clothed with mortal flesh.

¹⁶⁵ “Il entend qu’ils sont enfans bastars;” — “he means that they are bastard children.”;” — “he means that they are bastard children.”