Here in Mark 8:10-21 the disciples were fresh off of the feeding of the 4000 in the Gentile region of the Sea of Galilee. They take sail back to a Jewish area to be met by Pharisees seeking a sign. The oddity of this request of another sign is best understood when considering that they had arrived on the scene 8 months earlier when Jesus had fed the 5000.
Instead of realizing that Jesus was the long awaited Messiah, they choose to see a violation in the ceremonial washing by the disciples. They wanted a grandiose sign; fire at night or bread from heaven and didn’t realize that Jesus had given them “bread from heaven”. In the next sentence Mark tells us that Jesus again sets sail with His disciples who had forgotten bread and are clueless as to what all of this meant.
This leads to Jesus words illustrating the dangers of hard heartedness as it relates to not seeing God. The true seeker of God is not the person looking for God to break into their world in some supernatural event. Instead the true seeker of God recognizes that God is already here and has left evidence of this fact every where the seeker looks. God is not to be found in just what man calls the sacred places, He is to be found in making the common places sacred!
Poet Elizabeth Barret Browning wrote, “Earth’s crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only he who sees, takes off his shoes to rest, sit round it, and pluck blackberries.”