Today’s gospel tells us what happened immediately after Jesus fed the five thousand men with the five loaves and the two fish. It was already dark when Jesus and the disciples discussed how to feed the crowd. Thus, today’s episode must have occurred late at night. Jesus went up on the mountain to pray. But the disciples were on the lake struggling with the wind and waves. When Jesus walked on the waters to their boat, the disciples didn’t recognize him but mistook him for a ghost. They were fearful. Even when Jesus calmed the wind, they were still in shock. And at the end, St Mark comments, “for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.”
The darkness of that night and the wind and waves symbolize the darkness and confusion that dominated the disciples’ minds and hearts. St Mark calls this state being “hardened.” Somehow their hardened minds and hearts prohibited them from accepting Jesus as the divine Son of God even after they had witnessed the feeding of the five thousand with the five loaves and the two fish. We may feel it unbelievable to feed thousands of men with a few loaves of bread. But wouldn’t it be even stranger to be unable to recognize this miracle as a divine work? None of the disciples called Jesus ‘Lord,’ ‘the Messiah,’ or ‘the Son of God.' On the contrary, they exclaimed, “It’s a ghost!” as St Matthew reports of the same episode.
St Mark does not tell us what made the disciples’ hearts hardened. Probably different things blinded each disciple. They could have been worries about worldly things, greed, ambition, and so on.
When we are hardened of our hearts, we are closed to truths. Even when we witness facts, we don’t recognize what they are. Say Jesus is walking by you, but with a hardened heart, you won’t see him.
In this pandemic, I see many people take this epidemic as a crisis of or an opportunity for the economy, civil rights or politics. But I doubt if they could provide any practical and effective solutions to this health and medical crisis. Hardened hearts keep us from truths from earth and truths from heaven as well.
