David Cowles
Aug 29, 2024
“We have been shown our sign…and it’s a simple one. The sign is that there are signs!”
Everybody wants a sign. Is God there? Is God listening? Does God really care about me? “Then show me a sign!” Be honest, the thought has crossed your mind…and not once. Maybe not every day…or maybe!
Don’t be ashamed. We live by signs. So does the entire biosphere. Signs tell bacteria to reproduce, birds to migrate, trees to defoliate, bears to hibernate, etc. Signs tell us where we’re going and how to get there.
Signs also enable predictions – I didn’t say ‘accurate predictions’ – but predictions. Squirrels gathering acorns is a sign that winter is on the way. Unless you’re ‘skint’ (or under age 25), I’ll bet you check the markets from time to time for ‘signs’ of what may be ahead for your IRA or 401k or Pension.
Asking God for a sign somehow feels different though. It feels blasphemous…and ungrateful…and selfish…and it is! But relax, you’re not to blame.
In the Gospels, Jesus is asked for a sign on a few occasions. How droll! According to the Gospel accounts, Jesus spent three years whistle-stopping all over Galilee, curing ailments, driving out demons, feeding multitudes, and walking on water. “What do I have to do to get an ‘Amen’ around here? What sign exactly are you looking for?”
Any high school student of debate would do well to study the Gospels. Jesus is a master of repartee. He regularly turns skeptics’ questions against them. And he is rarely at a loss for words.
Exception: he does get a bit flustered when asked for a sign. No wonder. His whole life is a sign. What more could anyone want? What is it that they don’t see? What would constitute an acceptable sign for this lot? So he gives answers his followers cannot understand. He mentions ‘the sign of Jonah’ and his own looming death and resurrection.
Of course, he answers correctly, but for once he is talking above the heads of his audience. Let’s start with Jonah. Without getting into detail, Jonah was swallowed by a whale but coughed up on shore 3 days later, alive. It is, of course, a classic symbol of death and rebirth but I doubt Jesus’ audience understood it as more than just another run-of-the-mill miracle.
References to his own future death and rebirth were, of course, totally incomprehensible at the time. So back to Jonah. Obviously, Christians see in Jonah’s ‘adventure’ a reference to Jesus’ own passion. But there is something else here too.
When Jonah lands naked on the shore, he has been created anew. The Book of Jonah is as much a Creation account as it is a book of Prophecy. Jonah represents Being itself (Stephen Hawking, were he more theistically inclined, might have referred to Jonah’s whale as a ‘white hole’). Jesus incarnates Being. Christ is the whole, born and reborn, the Alpha and the Omega.
But back to signs. “There can be no sign,” because everything is a sign! That’s what the World is: a tapestry of signs. Whether you call it Maya, or Urðr (Old Norse), or Doxa, or Logos, or Phenomena, it is the obverse side of the World; it is the world we see – and it is meaningful. We have been shown our sign…and it’s a simple one. The sign is that there are signs!
Does this make Jesus the world’s first semiologist? Perhaps! Archibald MacLeish once wrote, “A poem should not mean but be.” Turning MacLeish on his head, we would say, “The World should not be, but mean!” Being is the province of God; meaning is the province of the World (logos).
This is perhaps what Jesus had in mind when he said, “…The very hairs of your head are all numbered.” Because the World is meaning, every element in that World, every hair on every human head, has meaning. To be is to mean, to mean is to be!
Fast forward 1500 years. The so-called Renaissance and the pseudo-Enlightenment that followed disenchanted the World. Logos (meaning) was replaced by Techne (technology). The world was no longer something to decipher; now it was something to manipulate. The magnificent, crystalline world of signs was shattered, leaving the shards we call ‘tools’.
Imagine some Philistine scrapping the pigment off the Mona Lisa and using it to paint his kitchen – Mad Max has nothing on the Renaissance & Enlightenment. But salvation would come - in the persons of Melville, Proust, Eliot, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, et al.
Since 1875, the intellectual project of the West has, unwittingly, been the re-enchantment of the World. Picasso, Dali and Pollack; Einstein, Heisenberg and Bell – it’s happening right here, right now!
But above all these, the true Savior of the age, was the great James Joyce. All his work, but especially Ulysses, was an effort to recover and represent the semiotic content of the physical and social world. Vivisecting a single day in the life of a single city (Dublin, June 16, 1904), Joyce showed how every event, every detail points at something beyond itself.
With great respect for the Council of Nicaea, it is hard to read the Gospels, especially John, and not feel that you live in enchanted space. It is impossible after reading Ulysses. He even describes the phenomenal world as ‘signatures of all things I am here to read’.
Everything is a sign, ‘a cascade of signification’ in fact. That is The Sign! The Sign of signs. The Sign is that ‘everything signifies that which gives it meaning’. But meaning is regressive: A means B but B means C. Our job, per Joyce, is to peel away the layers of the semiotic onion, until…logos – the source and end point of all signification - is revealed.
The logos, of course, is Christ. Jesus answers the skeptics 7 times in the Gospel of John alone. Reprising YHWH in Exodus (3: 14), Jesus simply says, “I am.” That is the sign. Not that I was born, died and resurrected, but that I am!
While the World was still enchanted, a medieval Irish poet (possibly St. Dallan) wrote of God: “Naught is all else to me save that Thou art!” Whatever “is to me” is a ‘sign’ and the sign, for Dallan, is that ‘God is’. We have our sign!
John spells it out in his opening verses (1 – 4): “In the beginning was the logos (word or sign) and the logos was with God and God was the logos…all things came to be through him (logos) and nothing that came to be came to be without him (logos). In him (logos) was life…”
Ultimately, there are innumerable signs but only one ‘signified’, God. The sign of signs is not the birth, death, or resurrection of Jesus; it is the existence of the Christ: “That I am”.
David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at dtc@gc3incorporated.com
