Bible Study series: Mark 4:10-12. Are you hungry enough to dig for their meaning?
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Let’s begin.
Scripture: Mark 4:10-12
10 And when he was alone, those with him and the twelve asked about parables. 11 He said to them: “To you the mysteries of the kingdom of God have been granted; to those outside everything is in parables, 12 so that:
‘They see intently and do not perceive;
They listen with the act of hearing and do not understand,
In case they turn and it is forgiven them.’” [Is. 6:9-10]
Comments:
For those interested in a literary feature of this story, the placement of this pericope (pronounced puh-RIH-koh-pea) or section of Scripture between the introduction of the parable and its explanation is called intercalation (“sandwiching”). (Other scholars just see this pericope to be a continuation of the use of parables.) If this pericope is an intercalation, it communicates that if you don’t work hard to understand it right now, then you may be a victim of irony (you think you know and you should, but you don’t actually know). You should see yourself in this mild rebuke about the purpose of parables. They are for the hungry who dig deeper. See just below for a more thorough explanation of irony.
10-12:
Apparently, Jesus had more than just the twelve with him. Remember: he sent out seventy (or seventy-two) (Luke 10:1-12; 17-20). And a large contingent of women followed him too (Luke 8:2-3). Whoever it was who asked, they were more than just the twelve.
After two introductory points about a Hebrew idiom and the granting to know spiritual truths, let’s tackle this entire pericope as a whole.
First, yes, there is a Hebrew idiom “hear with hearing” = “hear intently,” but I like what BDAG, considered by many to be the authoritative lexicon of the Greek NT, says: they hear with “the act of hearing.” So I kept it. I put some key words in quotations because there is irony. They seem to hear and hear, but in in reality they do not.
“mystery”: modern translations say “secret.” It is used 28 times. Now let’s define the term.
BDAG, a thick Greek lexicon, says: In the Greco-Roman world, a mystērion is about mystery religions, “with their secrets teachings, religious and political in nature, concealed with many strange customs and ceremonies. The principal rites remain unknown because of a reluctance in antiquity to divulge things.” In other words, Greco-Roman mysteries were about concealment.
In contrast, in the NT, it will be about disclosure of God’s plan, revealed only in part in Bible prophecies, and now these mysteries were fulfilled and completely revealed in Christ. As God’s plan moves from one age to the next, this is called eschatology (the study or science of last things or a shift in ages that God ordains).
Commentator Strauss on 4:11-12 and mystery:
Its primary sense in the NT is not something strange or mysterious, but rather something formerly secret that God has now revealed to his people. In the context of Jesus’s ministry in Mark, the secret to which the disciples are privy is that the power and presence of the kingdom of God breaking into human history through the words and deeds of Jesus the Messiah. Jesus’s healings, exorcisms, and offer of forgiveness to sinners are all sure signs of the kingdom of God.
Next, Jesus says that the disciples have been “granted” to know. What does that mean? Some sort of predestination to know, while others sit in ignorance by God’s plan, so that he would not heal them if they really did have hungry hearts (v. 15)? Not quite. This grant or gift to know is predicated or built on the condition of their heart. Originally, God predicted that the majority of Israel would reject Isaiah’s ministry (Is. 6:8-13). Why? They were being corrupted by their environment; they did not drive out bad influences—the Canaanites and the surrounding cultures and their religions—in their lives, so their hearts were becoming dull and sinful. There is a certain class of people who just don’t get it. Do they have hope, or are they doomed by their own thick heads and broken moral compass? Whatever your answer to that double-sided question, God was reaching out to them, so it is not likely that he caused their hearts to become wicked. Instead, their hearts were shutting down because of bad human (and demonic) influences, and then God was letting them go to figure things out—all the while sending Isaiah and many other prophets to speak the truth to their self-deceived hearts. No, God is not the author of corrupt or sinful hearts, but they can get that way on their own. Then God takes them as they are.
With those two acknowledgements, let’s move on to the significance of the brief statement in the whole pericope. This statement is about knowledge and ignorance and hunger and complacency, two sets of opposites. What do you know and not know? When does your hunger for God propel you out of your complacency or self-satisfaction?
The issue of knowledge and ignorance boils down to irony. Let’s illustrate it. First there is comic irony. I have used the illustration of Hogan’s Heroes, the sitcom of the 1960’s and early 1970s. Col. Klink boasted that there has never been a successful escape from Stalag 13, but the inmates could come and go as they pleased. He was a victim of his self-deception and “self-ignorance” and absence of knowledge. He was a vain man.
Then there is tragic irony. Oedipus the king was considered wise, and he was to a certain degree. And now a plague was attacking the city-state of Thebes. Thebans were dying. He thought that he could figure out the cause and threatened anyone who may be it. He learned at the end that he was the cause. He gouged out his eyes. He was the victim of irony because he thought the cause was someone else and he huffed and puffed as king, but he caused his own downfall. He abdicated and left the city. His ignorance was left behind, and his knowledge grew. Therefore, he was no longer the victim of irony—in the end. He reached true knowledge.
A biblical example: Job and his friends were very eloquent about matters that were far above them. They were wise to a certain and spoke great poetry, so let’s give them partial credit, but when God came on the scene, they had to repent. They did not know as much as they had first believed. What little knowledge they had misled them to miscalculate their level of knowledge.
So now the simple of heart—the disciples—could (seemingly) understand, after an explanation—the parables. But not the crowds. Jesus knew that he was on his way to Jerusalem, to be rejected by the religious establishment and the people as a whole, so he intended that he withhold the mystery of the kingdom—himself and his teaching—from them, because their hearts were dull and heavy. They were oppressed by the Romans, so this too distracted their knowledge away from the truth; they fell victim of their own conceit. They insisted on the Messiah being a conquering hero, but he was a mystery, revealed gradually. They were ignorant of God’s plan of a Savior who would save people from their own sins and not the Romans.
So, who qualifies to break the irony? How? The complacent or self-pleased do not qualify. They are happy with the status quo or they are hungry for the wrong thing—the conquering hero, again. They were living in irony because they were hungry for external deliverance, and not an inward work of God. This is ironical, because many of them went out to seek John’s baptism and the forgiveness of sins, and maybe many received it. However, Jesus was different. He worked miracles. He could deliver the people from the Romans. No, sorry. They were self-deceived.
So who qualifies to understand the ways of God? They humble and hungry. They allow God’s plan to unfold as he wants, not as they want. The disciples would eventually catch on, but some not even until the resurrection, and some not even until after Pentecost. Then their knowledge grew by leaps and bounds, because by faith they allowed God to unfold his plan, and they submitted to it, even when they did not understand it entirely. Eventually they understood the mystery and came to know the truth and leave their irony behind.
God speaks to them in parables instead of plain teaching because they are stubborn and dull. Parables do not promote stubbornness and dullness, but parables make it easier to remain in that condition. What little alertness they have will be taken away or certainly not fostered and watered.
Finally, let’s go for a general consideration of the kingdom of God. As noted in other verses that mention the kingdom in this commentary, the kingdom is God’s power, authority, rule, reign and sovereignty. He exerts all those things over all the universe but more specifically over the lives of people. It is his invisible realm, and throughout the Gospels Jesus is explaining and demonstrating what it looks like before their very eyes and ears. It is gradually being manifested from the realm of faith to the visible realm, but it is not political in the human sense. It is a secret kingdom because it does not enter humanity with trumpets blaring and full power and glory. This grand display will happen when Jesus comes back. In his first coming, it woos people to surrender to it. We can enter God’s kingdom by being born again (John 3:3, 5), by repenting (Matt. 4:17; Mark 1:5), by having the faith of children (Matt. 18:4; Mark 10:14-15), by being transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son whom God loves (Col. 1:13), and by seeing their own poverty and need for the kingdom (Matt. 5:3; Luke 6:20; Jas. 2:5). The kingdom has already come in part at his First Coming, but not yet with full manifestation and glory and power until his Second Coming.
Here are some of my posts about the kingdom of God:
1 Introducing the Kingdom of God (begin a ten-part series)
Bible Basics about the Kingdom of God
Questions and Answers about Kingdom of God
Basic Definition of Kingdom of God
Isaiah is the background, and in his ministry he was commanded to preach, even though it would do no good. God had already pronounced his judgment on ancient Israel (Wessel and Strauss, p. 756). And so it is with Jesus’s ministry. He was called to proclaim the good news, but judgment is coming, for Jesus was destined to be rejected by the Jerusalem establishment and then judgement would fall.
I add: Only those who were hungry and perceptive would escape judgment. Many people followed him during his ministry, but would they be insightful and perceptive enough to grasp the gospel told through parables? We know that thousands converted to the Messiah after Pentecost (Acts 2:41; 4:4; 6:7; 21:20). They were the insightful and perceptive ones.
GrowApp for Mark 4:10-12
1. Are you spiritually dull? If so, how do you get out of the lethargy and complacency?
2. If not, how do you keep yourself spiritually astute, alert, and open?
RELATED
10. Eyewitness Testimony in Mark’s Gospel
2. Church Fathers and Mark’s Gospel
2. Archaeology and the Synoptic Gospels
14. Similarities among John’s Gospel and the Synoptic Gospels
1. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels: Introduction to Series
SOURCES
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