Charles Ellicott Commentary Matthew 16:2

"But he answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, [It will be] fair weather: for the heaven is red." — Matthew 16:2 (ASV)

When it is evening, you say, It will be fair weather — It is remarkable that some of the best manuscripts, including the Vatican and Sinaitic, omit these suggestive words entirely. However, given their singular originality, it is difficult to imagine them as a later transcriber's interpolation. We must therefore ask how to explain the omission. The words are not found in Mark, which shows that some reports of our Lord’s answer to the Pharisees did not include them. Perhaps the transcriber was unable to understand their meaning. It is also possible that this feeling, or the desire to bring the reports in the two Gospels into closer agreement, influenced the writers of these two manuscripts.

Turning to the words as they stand in the received text, we first note their form. The insertion of the words in italics somewhat mars the colloquial abruptness of the original: Fair weather, for the sky is red. Secondly, the use of “sky” instead of “heaven” hides the point of the answer. In substance, He answers, “You watch the heaven and are weather-wise about coming storms or sunshine. If your eyes were open to watch the signs of the spiritual firmament, you would find enough tokens of the coming sunshine of God’s truth—the rising of the day-spring from on high. You would also find enough tokens of the darkness of the coming storm, the ‘foul weather’ of God’s judgments.”

Even the fact that the redness of the sky is the same in both cases is not without significance. The flush, glow, and excitement that pervaded people's minds was at once a prognostic of a brighter day following the one now closing, and a presage of the storm and tempest in which that day would end.

It is a singular instance of how the habit of minute criticism can stunt or even kill the power of discernment that depends on imagination, that Strauss considered words so full of profound and suggestive meaning to be “absolutely unintelligible” (Leben Jesu, II. viii. p. 85).

In the outward framework of the parable, the weather signs of Palestine seem to have been the same as those of England. A clear red evening sky is a prophecy of a bright morning. The morning red—not simply “red,” but with the indescribable, threatening aspect implied in “lowering,” the frown of the sky, so to speak (compare Mark 10:22, where the same word is translated “grieved”)—makes people look for storms.