Biblion Bible Commentary
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The Face of the Sky
Matthew 16:1-4
1 The Pharisees and Sadducees came, and testing him, asked him to show them a sign from heaven. · WEB
Two parties who agree on nothing else combine to ask for a sign, and are told they can read the weather but not the times.
The Pharisees and Sadducees came, and testing him, asked him to show them a sign from heaven Matthew 16:1.
The two names in one sentence is the first thing to notice. Pharisees and Sadducees disagreed about the resurrection, the angels, the authority of the traditions and the running of the temple — the book will later record a council in which setting them against each other is enough to break up the meeting Acts 23:6–8. Here they arrive together. Opposition to him is doing what nothing else could.
The request is refused in the earlier account in a sentence Mark 8:1–26. What this Gospel adds is the reason it is absurd.
"When it is evening, you say, 'It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.' In the morning, 'It will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and threatening'" Matthew 16:2–3.
These are farmers' and sailors' rules of thumb, the kind everybody in a Mediterranean country carried in their head. The men asking for a sign from heaven are perfectly capable of reading the sky. They do it every morning, on evidence far thinner than what has been in front of them for three chapters.
"You know how to discern the appearance of the sky, but you can't discern the signs of the times!" The inability is not a defect of intelligence or of method. They use the right method daily on the weather. What fails is the willingness to apply it where the conclusion would cost them something.
"An evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign, and there will be no sign given to it, except the sign of the prophet Jonah" Matthew 16:4. The answer is the one already given to the same demand Matthew 12:39, and the repetition is itself the point: the question has not changed and neither has the reply. The only sign on offer remains the one that has not happened yet.
He left them and departed. No argument, no further work in that place. It is the same withdrawal his own town received Matthew 13:58, for the same reason.
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