The Sign of Jonah

The Sign of Jonah
Matthew 12.33-42

We all like to play at being amateur detectives. Every year another crop of novels appears, and sometimes plays and movies as well, in which a wicked deed has been performed and nobody can figure out who did it. Some of the greatest names in fiction have created almost equally famous heroes and heroines, with Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes the best known of a distinguished list.

The ability of the detective lies mainly in this: to spot the one or two most relevant clues out of the mass of information, mostly irrelevant, which blinds the rest of us. As we read the novels, even if we are experienced students of this sort of writing, we all too easily get caught up in the plot, in the lives of the central characters, in the hundred and one fascinating details, and miss the often quite obvious thing that would have told us the truth all along...

Taken from Matthew for Everyone – by Tom Wright