Home > Jesus is God in Mark's Gospel
Mark ends the sea narrative with a sobering note: the disciples did not understand about the loaves because "their hearts were hardened."
Mark 6:52 - for they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.
Jesus is making His way across the waves to the other side. They see Him and they think “ghost” because they hadn’t understood the Feeding the 4,000 miracle.
Mark is making a direct polemical connection to the Exodus:
Psalm 95:8–9 - *do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah,
as on the day at Massah in the wilderness,
when your fathers put me to the test
and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. *Psalm 106:13 - But they soon forgot his works;
they did not wait for his counsel.
The New Testament author of Hebrews points out how the Israelites quickly forgot what God had done and hardened their hearts against Him.
Hebrews 3:8–9 - not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, on the day of testing in the wilderness, where your fathers put me to the test and saw my works for forty years.
By applying this specific phrase to the disciples, Mark is placing them in the same position as the Israelites at Mount Sinai or the Red Sea. They are standing in the presence of Theophanic glory (God manifesting Himself), but their human faculties are too dull to process that the man in the boat is the God of the burning bush.
This "hardness of heart" is the same terminology used for Pharaoh. It suggests that the revelation in Mark 6 was so massive—so clearly a claim to be Yahweh—that the human mind, apart from spiritual illumination, naturally recoils from the weight of such a reality. Jesus isn't just a miracle worker; He is the God of the Exodus standing on the water.