A Sign - Matt 16:1-12; Mark 8:11-21

After feeding the 4,000, Jesus and His disciples went into a ship “and came into the parts of Dalmanutha. And the Pharisees (and Sadducees) came forth, and began to question with him, seeking of him a sign from heaven, tempting him.” What kind of sign do you think they want? It doesn’t say so specifically, but I think adequate signs out be something like turning bread into stones or leaping from a great height and being caught by angels. Interestingly, those are the same signs that Satan asked Jesus to perform, “if” he was the Son of God. What comparison does that make between the Pharisees, Sadducees, and the Prince of Darkness himself? Jesus “sighed deeply in his spirit,” which indicates to me, just how tired he is of all their crap, but he doesn’t turn hostile, he doesn’t get violent, he answers them in a way that demonstrates that he is full of love, but that they are acting inappropriately. I know that when I get snotty with the Lord, he will correct me in a way that I am unable to misunderstand, but also so that I know that I can go back to him after I’m done licking my wounds.

Jesus tells those who came asking for a sign that they were able to tell the weather patterns by watching “the face of the sky; but can y not discern the signs of the times?” The IM comments, “The Savior rebuked the Pharisees and Sadducees for insisting that He show them a sign from heaven. He declared that they were able to forecast the weather based on he appearance of an evening sky, yet they were unable to discern the ‘signs of the times,’ by which the Savior meant the evidence that He was the promised Messiah.” Jesus continues, “and there shall no sign be given unto it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas.” At first I didn’t understand what he meant by the sign of the prophet Jonas, but the IM quotes Elder Bruce R. McConkie as teaching, “Jonah’s burial in and coming forth from the ‘great fish’ symbolizes the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ.” Jesus is telling those Jewish leaders that the only sign they will get from him will be his death, burial, and then his resurrection from the dead after 3 days. Between everything he has already done and what he’s going to do, if that wasn’t enough to convince them that they should at least not fight him tooth and nail, then nothing else that he does will convince them. We know that signs and miracles do not convert; they only strengthen what is already there.

Why would the Pharisees and Sadducees ask for a sign if they weren’t going to change their mind anyway? There were probably trying to “catch” Jesus doing something so that they could accuse him of a crime and have him killed. The IM quotes Elder Neal A. Maxwell as teaching, “why does this generation seek a sign? queried Jesus with a deep sigh. The more wicked ad adulterous the people of a particular period, the more they demand signs as a condition of belief. Sensual individuals crave ad live by sensations. Disciples, instead, walk and ‘overcome by faith,’ accepting gratefully the evidence of things not seen which are true.”

Jesus and the disciples leave the questioning Pharisees and Sadducees, and get in a boat headed away. Jesus tells his disciples, “Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.” The disciples don’t understand what he’s talking about and assume that he’s speaking literally of bread, and Jesus is not pleased. He says, “O ye of little faith, why reason ye among yourselves, because ye have brought not bread?” Because the disciples forgot to take any bread with them on their voyage, they assume that Jesus knows and is speaking to them about bread literally. Jesus asks them if they remember how many baskets of extra food they took up after the feeding of the five thousand ad also of the four thousand, and asks, “How is it that ye do not understand that I spake it not to you concerning bread, that ye should beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees?” When they remembered that Jesus is able to create much out of nothing, as they had seen him do several times previously, “then understood they how that he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the doctrine of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.” The IM quotes Elder Bruce R. McConkie as teaching, “Thus to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees is to shun their false doctrine, their concept that the Messiah must prove his claim to divinity by signs, for instance. Similarly, today, the warning is to beware of the leaven of any group whose false doctrines and antichrist philosophies work to keep men from accepting the truths of the restored gospel.”

I think that for us, in our time, it’s easy to look at the apostles and think that they should have known better or that they were sinful because they couldn’t recognize what Jesus was teaching when they experienced it first hand. I think it’s important to remember that they didn’t have the Holy Ghost with them, and that would have made a huge difference. It’s also important to remember that all this was new to them, the idea that the Messiah had come to save all mankind, not just the Jews, that he came as a mortal man born to a mortal woman, not coming down in a blaze of glory like many of them expected. And finally, I think that it’s important to remember that these events were happening in front of them and all of their reactions are on the spot, real life happenings. We’ve had our whole lives to study these events and what everyone else has been thinking about them for the last 2,000 years, so it’s easy to judge their gut-check reactions from our cozy house with 2 millennia of perspective and a life time of study.