Mark 8:11 Commentary and Bible Study

The Pharisees may have been with him the whole time. Matthew's Gospel says the Sadducees are there too, so it is Pharisees and Sadducees. This is already the third time in the Gospel record that they tempt him, asking him a sign from heaven. We need a sign, they said, and it must be a cosmic sign, a heavenly sign. Some people think that they had in mind – and they probably included this – manna from heaven as in the time of Moses. You could call that a heavenly sign because the manna came from heaven, as it were. But equally it suggests that they demanded some movement among planets or stars, some miracle involving the moon or the sun: something really marvellous and spectacular. In doing this they were trying to belittle the healing miracles. They could not deny the healings and the casting out of demons. All the people saw these things; they were amazing, astonishing. Only God could have done such things and how that registered in the minds of the Jews and the Pharisees and the Sadducees, they had no answer to this. So their tactic was this: they would try to make the healings of a lower order. ‘Oh, yes, that’s a lower kind of miracle. Why can’t you do some great thing, like causing the stars to fall at night, or a total eclipse of the sun, or some astronomical transformation. Only then will we believe that you are the Son of God.’The reason they ask for this is that they didn't believe he could give a sign from heaven, so by challenging him in this way, they thought they would expose his inability, his inadequacy, and thus bring him down in the estimation of the people. The people thought he was from God, because he could do these amazing, compassionate healing miracles on thousands, which no one had ever done before and no one else could do. His enemies therefore had to take him down – ‘Give us a sign from heaven.’ Maybe some of them even thought that he would attempt to do this. ‘Perhaps he is getting so big in his own estimation that he will try it, and then he will look foolish, because of course he will fail.’ But one way or another they sought to bring him down, and expose him, because they didn't believe in him. The Pharisees and some of the Sadducees would stand in the front row, as it were, and they would see a cripple healed marvellously, and life surge into his limbs. But their hearts were so hard and they so hated the message of Christ – repentance and forgiveness and new life – that they were determined to believe he accomplished this by some demonic power, and he was not who he claimed to be, or who he was said to be: the Son of God and the promised Messiah. So this seeking a sign from heaven from him, this tempting him: it is scornful; it is derisive.