Mark 8:11-13

The Secular Reveals the Sacred

Mark 8:11-13 – Some Pharisees Ask for a Sign

11 Some Pharisees came out and began to question him,
testing him out by asking from him a sign from heaven.

In one of the opening scenes of his narrative, Mark had pictured Jesus in the wilderness tempted/tested (same word in Greek) by Satan. At the time Mark gave no hint of the content of the tempting/testing. It would in fact take shape in three separate incidents, in each case by a different group of Pharisees. This was the first.

12 He sighed deeply, and then said,
“Why does this generation seek a sign?
Listen to me,
No way will a sign be given to this generation."

In Mark’s view, to ask for a sign from heaven, something supernatural, apparently spectacular and detached from his clear purpose, was a temptation. Jesus refused to give one. Perhaps in Jesus’ mind, the works he had done, and the interpretation he had given to them, in themselves were sufficient evidence of the intervention of God’s Kingdom in history. Their intrinsic truth, and Jesus’ own integrity, were sufficient to convince anyone who was interested and open to conversion. There was no need for more. To look for more was distraction.

For Mark, this incident and its meaning were obviously important. He said that the question led Jesus to sigh deeply. The very origin of the question was satanic. Mark wrote to educate his readers, his Christian community. Discipleship was not about heavenly signs but the concrete task of implementing the Kingdom: building a world where every person was respected, the world’s goods were shared and enough was provided for all.

Jesus was not in the business of signs from heaven: the genuine sacred was not a matter of separateness, of the special, or even of the “religious”. God called and people collaborated in the realm of the secular, in their day-to-day encounters with each other. There was no separation of sacred and secular. There was nothing in human interactions (and in their social, cultural and political expression) that was separate from people’s partnership with God.

Jesus’ response also raised the issue of people’s sense of God. Was God a God who disregarded, as it were, the ways in which he had ordered the world, and instead intervened on call, pulling the strings, and allowing people to be free from the natural consequences of their choices? Such a concept of God might have kept people in a perpetual state of infantilism or adolescence, never learning to grow up. In Mark’s view, the God of Jesus, as would become obvious as the narrative moved towards its climax, would not intervene even to save Jesus from death. God respected the choices that people made, even their choices for evil and the devastating consequences that followed from them.

Jesus’ God, while remaining always supremely free to react with his world as he chose, worked from within persons, deeply respectful of their integrity and their freedom. 

Jesus’ repudiation of signs from heaven brings into question again the issue of those stories in the narrative where Jesus appeared in fact to give supernatural signs to his disciples, specifically his calming the storm, and his walking on water. It also suggests that his exorcisms and healings were accepted in the culture of the day, not specifically as signs, but as concrete illustrations of the action of God at work in the world, the in-breaking of the Kingdom. They were not signs from heaven, but the reality of the Kingdom.

Jesus leaves Galilee

This incident was the climax of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee. It also marked his deep frustration. After this Jesus would pass only incidentally through the region. This encounter was the last he had with Pharisees in Galilee, though they would emerge again in Judaea - to test him twice more.

13 He left them,
got back onto the boat
and went off to the far shore.

With the disciples, Jesus crossed the lake in the direction of Gentile territory.

Next >> Mark 8:14-21