There are two episodes in this passage, both conversations:
1. Between the Lord and the Pharisees and Sadducees vs. 1-4,
2. Between the Lord and the disciples vs. 5-12.
The Lord rebuked both groups for failing to read the signs they had been given. But the Pharisees and Sadducees receive the sterner rebuke for demanding a sign in the first place; the disciples had not demanded one.
The disciples He called 'men of little faith,' but the Pharisees and Sadducees He called 'evil and adulterous.' The blindness of the disciples is relatively innocent, obviously, but the blindness of the Pharisees Sadducees is not; theirs is guiltily motivated. The Lord ended His conversation with the disciples by warning them to beware of the attitude that prompted it: it is a 'leaven,' a corrupting thing.
The key to the understanding of the passage, it seems to me, lies in the difference between the two. What was wrong with the attitude of the Pharisees and Sadducees, and what was wrong with the attitude of the disciples?
Look at them each in turn.
The Pharisees and Sadducees first demanded a sign "from heaven."
What they wanted was a sign like the manna from heaven that had authenticated Moses, or the fire from heaven that had authenticated Elijah. Signs out of the sky are more obviously from God than the healing of sick people and the casting out of demons. The healings and exorcisms, they reckoned, could have been done by the power of Beelzebub; they had so accused Him already. (12:24)
What is wrong with wanting such a sign? If a man claims to speak for God, is it unnatural to ask him to show his credentials? If he is from God, then what he says will be important and you had better listen, because it is God Himself you will have to answer to if you do not - so you need to be sure. How can you be sure? How do you tell if a man and his message are really from God?
The answer the Jews gave was: that he can do signs - perform marvels which demonstrate that he is possessed of a power that is more than human. "The Jews seek signs," as the apostle Paul later lamented. What is wrong with that? Two things.
1. A wrong attitude
What is wrong with it first is the assumption which underlies it that God is to be identified only with what is abnormal. Unless you can do magic tricks, you cannot be from God. But that can be true only if the thing that really distinguishes God is that He is a magician. Is that what makes God GOD - that He can put on a show? Is magic the mark of divinity? God is the Creator, so He can manipulate nature. But is that all He is?
Immanuel Kant the philosopher used to say that there are two wonders you cannot explain by anything in this world: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. Which is the better clue to God: creation or conscience? Which of the two gets closer to the real truth about Him?
It is not enough to know that God is the Almighty; we need to know what sort of almightiness it is. Is it good, is it evil, or is it neither? Does morality have no connection with God at all? Is He interested in right and wrong? Where does our notion of right and wrong come from if not from Him Who created us? Is not the moral dimension as real and vital a part of our life in this world as the physical dimension? Does the sort of people we are on the inside not matter as much as the way we look on the outside? We know it matters more. The moral dimension of life is more real and important than the physical, and we owe that to God the same as we owe the physical. That God is good matters more than that He is clever, that He is moral more than that He is mighty. So character is a truer mark of a man's closeness to God than charisma.
What does any ability He may have to do tricks tell you about God? The sort of God He showed Himself to be in Jesus, at the Cross especially, is much more important than that He can hurl thunder-bolts out of a clear summer sky.
The Pharisees and Sadducees were looking for the wrong things. What authenticates a man when He claims to be from God is not his showmanship but his character. What the Pharisees and Sadducees demonstrated by the very demand they made of Jesus, therefore, was just how ignorant of God they were. They were looking for the wrong things. And that reveals how far wrong they had gone. The thing that sensitises us to God, our conscience, they ignored.
That is what has always happened when we demand signs from God before we will believe in Him: we have already ignored our conscience or we would not be making that sort of demand.
That is why Jesus called them "evil and adulterous": He meant 'adulterous' in a spiritual, not a literal sense. Spiritually they had "gone after other lovers," to use the language of the prophets. The reason they demanded of Jesus that He do a magic trick was so that when He declined - as He must if He were truly Godlike, for God is not a magician as we have said - they could say, "Aha, then we shan't listen to you." Their pompous requirement was a smoke-screen they threw out to hide their unwillingness to believe in Him. They cast doubt on His authenticity as a ploy to avoid having their own questioned. There was something wrong, not with Jesus, but with them.
That is what Jesus meant by what He said to them about the weather: "You can read the weather," He said, "but you can't read the signs of the times. You can interpret things physical, but you can't interpret things spiritual. Something's gone wrong with your (spiritual) eyes."
And that too is why He said, "No sign will be given to you except the sign of the prophet Jonah."
What sign was that? A man preaching. That is all. When Jonah went to the Ninevites, that is all they saw. They knew nothing about Jonah's adventures with a great fish before he came to them. He was not sent to them to give his testimony; he was sent to call on them to repent. If there was any capacity left in them for a true response to God, Jonah's preaching alone was all that was needed to stir it up in them. Either they had ears for God when He spoke to them, or they did not. If they did not, no miracle stories would have made any difference.
The statement in Matt. 12:40, "For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth," is Matthew's comment, I think, on what Jesus said about Jonah, not a remark Jesus added Himself. But fair comment it is, for the one sign that God has wrought which is sufficient to meet all the demand we need ever make of Him for one is that He raised Jesus from the dead; and the point about that sign is that it tells you, not that He is a magician, but that He is never going to let the truth die that Jesus embodied in His life.
This raises a real question over us all. What effect on me has the plain, simple statement of the truth Jesus taught? Does something in me 'leap up' with recognition when I hear it? If it does, I do not need signs, and I will not be asking for any. Truth has its own power of persuasion and needs no other support.
2. The wrong object
But if it does not so affect me, there is nothing else that can be given me that will be of any use. Whatever else I were given, if anything were given, would be beside the point. I would believe in the miracle, not in God Himself.
That is the second thing that is wrong with asking for signs. They do not get us any nearer to God when they are given: all they do is take our attention away from Him and fix it on the trick. It is to Him we have to respond, not to magic tricks; it is God, the living God, in Whom we have to believe, not 'powers.'
The saddest comment on the state of heart the Pharisees and Sadducees were in is the last bit of verse 4: "So He left them, and departed." There was nothing more to be done that even the Son of God could do.
This passage puts us on the carpet before God. What is needed is not a demand for a sign, but a plea that He touch my heart.
The conversation with the disciples was about bread. They were worried about literal bread, that they had neglected to buy in enough; Jesus was concerned about spiritual bread, that they had nourished their minds on the wrong sort of spiritual diet. They were preoccupied with purely material concerns. Here they were miles from any shopping centre, and the 'esky' was empty. In the language of Jesus Himself from the Sermon on the Mount, they were "anxious about their life, what they should eat or what they should drink." (Matt. 6:25) He had said to them then, "Don't be. Your heavenly Father knows your need. Don't waste your energies on the pursuit of material gain - trust God to look after that side of your life. Devote your energies to the pursuit of spiritual gain."
He is saying it here again. "Why are you worried about bread? I have told you you can trust God to look after all that; haven't the two episodes where God supplied our need of material bread reassured you? He more than supplied that need. Why, we had basketsful left over. It is the spiritual food you eat you should be concerned about. Don't feed on a 'Pharisee diet'. It is 'leavened'."
The recent demand the Pharisees made for a
sign was all the evidence the disciples needed to see how badly they
suffered from spiritual malnutrition. The signs of malnutrition are
bloated bellies, skinny limbs and staring eyes. That was the
Pharisees:
• bloated bellies - a swollen appetite for 'bread,' in the sense
even song-writers today use the word, to mean money and all things
this-worldly;
• skinny limbs - weak where they should have been strong to do
high service to the King of Kings;
• staring eyes - selfishly preoccupied with their want of
fulness.
The "leaven of the Pharisees and the Sadducees" was the same false teaching against which Paul inveighed all His Christian life. It was a leaven he knew about only too well - he had fed on that diet all his pre-Christian life.
The Sadducees were the worldly materialists of the day, the Pharisees were the religious formalists of the day. The combination of the two produces the kind of 'Christian' whose ambitions are worldly, and who hides them (from himself as well as others) under a cloak of outward religiosity and pride in his 'principles.' It is the frame of mind in which you are wholly occupied with the outwardness of everything in life, and not its inwardness. Paul said exactly what Jesus said here when in Rom. 10:2 he wrote: "I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but it is not enlightened (it is blind). Being ignorant of the righteousness that comes from God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God's righteousness. For Christ is the end of the Law-way, that every one who has faith may be rightwised with God."
It is how we are in our heart toward God
that matters ...
• whether it is Him we are looking to for satisfaction, not to
this world and what we can get out of it by our own effort to suit
our own fancy;
• whether we are humbly trusting God to dispose all things in
our life for our true and lasting good, not proudly self-reliant in
the boastful confidence that we know what is good for us, and need
no-one to be telling us.
That is the "leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees."
Beware of it. It starves you to death.
Notice that this episode falls between the section that has shown Jesus to be the one who brings healing and nourishment to the world, and the section in which Peter will confess Jesus to be the "Son of the living God."
These are episodes set within the fourth book of Matthew's Gospel whose theme is the Church. The Church is the community of those who know that Jesus is the Son of God and the Saviour of the World. And the 'cautionary tale' we have considered is there because it is addressed to the Church. It is intended as a warning against a temptation that never really leaves us: to let the living spirit of faith in Jesus and service to the world degenerate into self-preoccupation.
Jesus first, Others next, Yourself last really is the secret of joy.
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