Mark 4:11-12

‘And he said to them, “To you is given the mystery of the Kingly Rule of God, but to those who are without all things are done in parables, in order that seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest it should happen that they turn again and it should be forgiven them”.'

‘To you is given.' This is a way of saying ‘God has given you' without using the name of God (compare His use of the passive tense in such a way in Matthew 5:3 and often). ‘To you is given' compares with Jesus' words in John 6:65, ‘no man can come to me except it were given to him of my Father'. It is saying that by nature man is blinded to spiritual truth, and that it is only as God's undeserved love acts on a man that he comprehends and responds to the truth (compare Matthew 11:25).

‘The mystery of the Kingly Rule of God.' In the New Testament a ‘mystery' was something previously hidden but now revealed. It was an ‘opened secret', and because these disciples sought, it was to be opened to them. For this idea of the secret things of God compare Deuteronomy 29:9; Amos 3:7; Psalms 25:14; Proverbs 3:32; Job 15:8. The LXX uses the word ‘musterion' of the secret God reveals to Daniel (e.g. Daniel 2:19). Thus God's secret was now being revealed, the secret that the Kingly Rule of God was now present and spreading. Compare Matthew 13:35.

‘To those who are outside.' Compare Mark 3:31. All who hear His words, but do not seek their deeper meaning, are spiritually ‘outside', just as His mother and brothers were ‘outside' earlier, so that they were not welcomed as His ‘brother, sister and mother' (Mark 3:31).

Jesus is aware of how easily men could become like the hard ground on which seed could not grow. If they were told the significance of the parable before their hearts were opened they would just become hardened. They would see and not perceive, they would hear and not understand, and His fear was that they may then prematurely ‘turn again' and receive a transient ‘forgiveness' (see Mark 4:16) which was not real and lasting, a spurious experience. That has been the lot of many a man. It was the lot of Judas. But Jesus wanted true seekers, not those with a mere casual interest. Thus it was necessary to preach a partly hidden message which would lead those who wanted to know the truth to seek further, while leaving the remainder untouched but unhardened.

‘Done in parables.' That is as hidden sayings, riddles (compare Psalms 49:4; Psalms 78:2; Proverbs 1:6; Ezekiel 17:2), something to entice thought without being too openly apparent.

‘In order that (hina) seeing they may see, and not perceive, and hearing they may hear and not understand, lest (mepote) it should happen that they turn again and it should be forgiven them” The quotation is taken from Isaiah 6:9. Its being quoted in the third person instead of the second, and the use of ‘forgive' instead of ‘heal', is paralleled in the Targum (Jewish commentary) of Isaiah (Matthew 13:14 onwards reproduces the LXX). The New Testament writers used different sources for their quotations in Greek (just as we may quote Scripture from different versions).

At face value this appears to be declaring that God's purpose is that they might not see or hear in case they should turn again and thus find forgiveness, that is, that God is specifically acting in them and blinding their minds and their thoughts in order to prevent them from finding forgiveness.

Taken in this way it must be seen as being an example of God being seen as the final cause of all that happens. We can compare how in 2 Samuel 24:1 ‘the Lord' (YHWH) causes David to number Israel, whereas in 1 Chronicles 21:1 it is Satan who does so. The idea behind the first statement is that God is the great First Cause and that it is God Who is in the end sovereign over all that happens so that He is even seen as responsible for allowing Satan to do what he does. And who can deny that that is true? If this is accepted it can thus be argued that in the same way God is here taking the responsibility for what men do, even though it is not directly His doing. In other words it is then saying that if men and women close their eyes and their ears lest they be converted, then in the end it is God Who has done it, for He made man as he is.

However, other suggestions have also been made. These mainly depend on taking hina (in order that') and mepote (‘lest') and not accepting them at face value. For example it has been suggested that ‘mepote' may possibly translate an Aramaic word used by Jesus (dilema) which means ‘unless'. This would then mean that turning again and being forgiven was to be seen as a possible alternative to not hearing and not perceiving. But it is not what mepote usually means.

In the Hebrew of Isaiah the word certainly means ‘lest' and may thus be seen as signifying that in God's purposes only the few are chosen (Matthew 22:14), and the same applies to mepote in the Greek.

An alternative is to see Jesus as speaking ironically. He may be saying that if God did not prevent it they might superficially ‘turn again and be forgiven', but that it would be in a way that was transient and passing, and not real. That is then to be seen as the ‘turning again' that He is trying to prevent. It is saying that He does not want superficial repentance. It would have in mind, for example, what happened with Israel at Sinai. There too there was a turning again and a receiving of a kind of forgiveness, but in many it was not genuine so that they soon turned back to their own ways and in the end perished in the wilderness. And the same happened again and again throughout their history (consider Isaiah 58:1). The point here then is that He did not want that to happen again. If there was to be repentance He wanted it to be genuine and true, and thus He acted to prevent them coming to a position of false repentance. This way of looking at it actually fits well with the idea of Jesus' use of parables in order to prevent men becoming case hardened.

For the truth is that men have an infinite capacity for discovering methods by which they can be put in the right with God without the actual need of a true submission to Jesus Christ, through, for example, making gifts of money to the church, by means of a stereotyped confessional, or by signing a decision card. In Jesus' day it may well have been through offering the appropriate sacrifices without considering the need for genuine repentance, giving money to the Temple or the observance of certain feasts (see Isaiah 1:11).

Another alternative is again to see it as ironic and as suggesting that the emphasis must be put on the last phrase each time, thus ‘in order that seeing they may see  and not perceive', and hearing they may hear  and not understand, with the words in italics indicating the position that they deliberately take up. Then the subsequent ‘lest' is put at their door. They have deliberately not perceived and not understood because the last thing that they want is to have to turn again and be forgiven.