Blindness of the Heart
In the previous blog, we looked at the story in Mark 3:1-5 of Jesus healing the man with the withered hand and His first reference to "hardness of heart". Later in the chapter (vv. 22-30) Jesus, replying to the Pharisees' accusation of being demon-possessed) says that if a man blasphemes the very life that God has graciously given, there is no way he can receive forgiveness, but will walk in an over-abundance of condemnation.
In the next section, Mark turns from the Jewish leaders to Jesus' own family. He concludes by saying, "whoever does the will of God is My brother and My sister and My mother." The question is, "What does it mean to do the will of God?" Jesus doesn't specify, but in the context, you might assume that it means to do everything in life with a tender heart that comes from receiving the love, grace, and mercy of God.
If you're with me thus far, look where that leads us next...the parable of the soils! Jesus first recognized hardness of heart at the beginning of chapter 3, later explained this condition to the Pharisees, at the end of the chapter will perhaps refer to it in regards to His family, and now will pull His disciples aside to give detailed instructions about this condition. It is so important, that in vs. 13, Jesus will say that if you don't understand this parable it will be impossible to understand any others. This is strikingly close to the conclusion given to the Pharisees that if you blaspheme the Holy Spirit you can never receive forgiveness.
My point through all of this is that Mark understands the rejection of Jesus and His message to be a result of hardness of heart. He will continue to illustrate this throughout the rest of His gospel, which we will see later. However a question I want to look at now is, where did Mark/Jesus get this idea from? Was it unique to Jesus, or did He perhaps read it somewhere else?
After Jesus speaks the Parable of the Soils to the multitude, the disciples ask Jesus privately what it meant. After questioning how they could not understand it, He tells them why He speaks in parables:
Mk 4:12a - so that ‘Seeing they may see and not perceive, And hearing they may hear and not understand;’
Most scholars (see NET note) believe that Mk 4:12 is a paraphrased quote of Is 6:9.
Is 6:9-10 - And He said, “Go, and tell this people: ‘Keep on hearing, but do not understand; Keep on seeing, but do not perceive.’ “Make the heart of this people dull, And their ears heavy, And shut their eyes; Lest they see with their eyes, And hear with their ears, And understand with their heart, And return and be healed.”
It is obviously related, but notice that the order of the verbs (seeing and hearing) is reversed. This is where Jeremiah enters the picture.
Jer 5:21, 23 - ‘Hear this now, O foolish people, Without understanding, Who have eyes and see not, And who have ears and hear not: But this people has a defiant and rebellious heart; They have revolted and departed.
This passage is also obviously related to the previous two, and gets the order of the verbs in agreement with Mark. Another striking point is that Jeremiah seems to be the fulfillment of Isaiah. God tells Isaiah to keep on preaching until the heart of the people becomes dull and their eyes cannot see. Jeremiah prophesies that it had already happened.
The evidence is scant at this point, but if we were to attempt to draw a conclusion, we might say the phrase originated with Isaiah around 700 bc and was paraphrased by Jeremiah about 100 years later. Although Jesus of course knew Isaiah, His quote in Mark suggests a greater influence of Jeremiah, which is in keeping with our understanding of the Jewish culture in that day, but more importantly it reveals Jesus' concept that the people's hearts were blind/hard in Jeremiah's day, and nothing had changed since that time. Jesus isn't speaking the parables in order to make the hearts of the people blind/hard (i.e., Isaiah), He does it because their hearts are already hard. This is a very interesting point that aligns with the concept that Jesus also rejected the Jewish Temple and most of the "progress" the Jews had made in returning to Israel. We'll get into the Greek of the matter next time.
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