Children balk when parents give them a chore to do like cleaning up their rooms. “You can’t play video games until your room is in order,” commands Mom. “You don’t want me to have any fun, do you” retorts the child. Mom wants her child to learn to take personal responsibility, and to be a contributing member of the household. In short, Mom wants to help her child grow up. The child, however, doesn’t catch on to this. They conclude that their mom just likes to pick on them and take away their fun; they miss the deeper message.
Jesus had the same problem with his disciples. So often they did not catch on to what he was saying. We see this today (Mark 8:14-21).
“The disciples had forgotten to bring bread, and they had only one loaf with them on the boat. Jesus enjoined them, ‘Watch out, guard against the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod.’ They concluded among themselves that it was because they had no bread.”
The disciples thought Jesus was getting on their case for being irresponsible about bringing food. Their minds were on their stomachs. Jesus was on a different plane. The leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod was the false spirituality that they were promoting. Most people bought into the shallow, yet misguided, thinking of the religious and political leaders. Jesus was warning them not to follow the crowd, but to tune into the deeper truth that he was teaching.
“When he became aware of this, he said to them, ‘Why do you conclude that it is because you have no bread? Do you not yet understand or comprehend? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear?”
Sure, the disciples heard the words that Jesus spoke with their ears, but they did not hear with their hearts. They caught onto the connection between leaven and bread, but not between false teaching and the truth. Jesus had quite a challenge trying to penetrate to the hearts of these men who were more preoccupied with having lunch than in understanding the Kingdom of God.
He then reminded them of the two recent incidents in which the five thousand and the four thousand people were fed miraculously with the multiplication of bread. In the first case there were twelve baskets of fragments left over and in the second case there were seven. The disciples remembered the two numbers, twelve and seven, but they did not catch on to the deeper significance. Numbers in Hebrew thinking had great significance. Twelve and seven were numbers of completion or fulfillment. Jacob had twelve sons, the perfect number. God rested on the seventh day, marking the completion of creation. God was trying to communicate with the disciples that the great time of fulfillment had come, and the were living in the midst of it. Yet they didn’t catch on; they didn’t make the connection.
Nothing happens in our lives by accident. God is always teaching us, always trying to get our attention. Do we not have the same problem as the disciples, eyes that don’t see and ears that don’t hear? How we need to listen with our hearts and not just our ears.
We have been given the Holy Spirit in our hearts to understand what God is doing and saying in our lives. When we ask the Holy Spirit within us to awaken us to the voice of God, he will.
