There is a wonderful moment in Mark’s Gospel when Jesus warns his disciples about the “yeast of the Pharisees and that of Herod.”

The disciples immediately begin discussing the fact that they have forgotten to bring enough bread.

You can almost feel Jesus looking at them in disbelief.

This would already be amusing enough, except for what has happened shortly beforehand. These are the same disciples who have watched Jesus feed thousands of people from a handful of loaves. Not once, but twice. They have personally helped distribute the food and gathered baskets of leftovers afterwards.

Yet now they have one loaf between them and apparently think Jesus is concerned about lunch.

Jesus responds with a barrage of questions. Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Do you have eyes but fail to see? Do you have ears but fail to hear?

Then, after reminding them of those enormous feeding miracles, he asks once more:

“Do you still not understand?”

The answer, apparently, is no.

The scene is funny, but Mark is doing something more serious than making the disciples look foolish. Their failure to understand becomes one of the recurring themes of his Gospel. Again and again, the people closest to Jesus hear what he says, watch what he does and still struggle to grasp what any of it means.

The interesting thing is that they are not outsiders.

They are disciples.

Peter Gets the Right Answer and Still Gets It Wrong

A little later, Peter appears to have his great breakthrough.

Jesus asks the disciples who people say he is. Various possibilities are offered before Jesus turns the question directly towards them.

“But who do you say I am?”

Peter answers:

“You are the Messiah.”

At last, someone understands. Except almost immediately, Jesus begins explaining what being the Messiah will actually involve. He will suffer, be rejected and killed before rising again. Peter cannot accept it. In fact, he takes Jesus aside and rebukes him.

There is something extraordinary about the scene. Peter has correctly identified Jesus as the Messiah and, within moments, effectively tells him he has misunderstood what it means to be the Messiah. Jesus responds with one of the strongest rebukes in the Gospels:

“Get behind me, Satan.”

Peter has the right title but the wrong understanding.

That distinction is important because it reveals something deeper about the disciples’ confusion. They are not merely poor listeners who struggle with metaphors. Much of the time, they are trying to fit Jesus into categories they already understand.

They can imagine a victorious Messiah. What they struggle to imagine is a Messiah whose victory comes through suffering. They understand power, but they struggle with self-giving. They understand status, but Jesus keeps talking about service.

In other words, they recognise Jesus before they understand the kind of Jesus they have recognised. That may be one reason the disciples in Mark can function not simply as failed followers, but as mirrors held up to every generation of Christians.

The Kingdom Keeps Turning Their Expectations Upside Down

Jesus tells the disciples again that he will be betrayed and killed. Mark explicitly tells us they do not understand what he means and are afraid to ask him.

So what do they discuss instead?

Which of them is the greatest. Jesus has just spoken about his approaching death, and his closest followers respond by producing what amounts to an internal league table.

Once again, Jesus teaches them. Anyone who wants to be first, he explains, must become last and servant of all. He places a child among them, challenging their assumptions about importance, status and who deserves attention. You might imagine that lesson would settle the matter.

It doesn’t.

Not long afterwards, James and John approach Jesus with a request. They would quite like the best seats when he enters his glory. Jesus has just predicted his death for the third time, and they are thinking about seating arrangements.

What follows is one of Jesus’ clearest descriptions of how his kingdom differs from conventional forms of power. Gentile rulers, he says, “lord it over” others. Among his followers, it must be different. Whoever wants to become great must become a servant, and whoever wants to be first must become slave of all.

Then Jesus points to himself.

“The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.”

This is more than advice about good leadership. Jesus is redefining greatness around his own mission.

The disciples repeatedly imagine the kingdom using familiar categories: power, recognition, hierarchy, victory and status. Jesus keeps replacing those categories with service, sacrifice, humility and the cross.

That may explain why they struggle so much. The problem is not simply that Jesus speaks unclearly. Sometimes what he says is perfectly clear, but the disciples struggle because his teaching overturns almost everything they assume about power, greatness and victory.

Mark is particularly relentless about this, but the pattern is hardly unique to his Gospel.

The Man With the Towel

One of the most notable examples appears in John’s account of the Last Supper.

Jesus gets up from the table, wraps a towel around himself and begins washing the disciples’ feet. Peter is horrified.

“You shall never wash my feet.”

We can understand his reaction. Foot washing was associated with lowly service. Peter believes Jesus is Lord and Messiah, so the idea of Jesus kneeling before him and performing the role of a servant simply does not fit his understanding of how authority works.

Peter thinks he knows which way the hierarchy is supposed to operate.

Jesus turns it upside down.

When Jesus tells Peter that unless he washes him, he has no share with him, Peter immediately swings to the opposite extreme and asks for his hands and head to be washed as well. It is such a wonderfully Peter-like response. He goes from absolutely not to apparently requesting the deluxe package.

Once again, Jesus has to explain.

Peter is still learning what kind of Lord he is following. The foot washing matters because Jesus is not merely teaching humility in the abstract. He is embodying it. The one Peter calls Lord takes the lowest place in the room.

Christian theology sometimes talks about the self-emptying or self-giving character of Christ. Whatever technical language we use, here it is made visible with a basin, water and a towel.

The disciples keep expecting power to move upwards. Jesus keeps showing them a power that bends down.

Easter Does Not Suddenly Make Them Experts

You might imagine the resurrection finally fixes everything.

Jesus has repeatedly told his followers that he will rise. Yet when Easter arrives, the Gospel narratives are full of disbelief, fear, bewilderment and confusion.

The resurrection, and eventually the gift of the Spirit, transforms them, but not by magically downloading perfect theology into their minds. They still have to learn.

Acts opens with a detail I find particularly wonderful. Jesus has risen from the dead and spent forty days appearing to the disciples and teaching them about the kingdom of God.

Forty days.

After everything they have seen, they ask him:

“Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”

They are still trying to understand what he means by kingdom.

That does not necessarily mean their question is completely foolish. The hope for Israel’s restoration belonged deeply within Jewish expectation. But it does show that even after Easter, their understanding remains unfinished.

They are still being formed, and that is where I begin to find all of this immensely reassuring.

Jesus Gets Frustrated, but He Does Not Give Up

It would be easy to sentimentalise these stories and suggest that Jesus simply does not care whether his followers understand him.

That would not be true.

Jesus clearly wants them to understand. After all, sometimes he sounds frustrated. Sometimes he rebukes them sharply. Sometimes he asks how they can possibly have missed the point after everything they have witnessed. Their misunderstandings matter because misunderstanding Jesus can eventually lead to misunderstanding discipleship itself.

If we imagine Jesus primarily as a route to power, we may create churches obsessed with power. If we imagine greatness as status, we may build Christian communities around status. If we forget the servant with the towel, we may become remarkably good at using Christian language while operating according to values Jesus repeatedly challenged.

Understanding matters. But frustration is not the same as rejection.

Jesus does not look at Peter after another misunderstanding and decide he chose the wrong man, or replace James and John because they remain remarkably preoccupied with status. Mark’s Gospel portrays their failure brutally. They misunderstand, fall asleep, scatter, and eventually abandon Jesus.

Yet even then, the story points towards restoration. After the resurrection, the message is that Jesus will meet his disciples again in Galilee.

Failure is not the final word.

That may be one reason scholars have seen the disciples in Mark not simply as incompetent characters, but as mirrors held up to every generation of Christians.

Perhaps Discipleship Has Always Worked This Way

I sometimes think Christianity has become uncomfortable with the idea that faith might involve a lifetime of learning.

We can give the impression that spiritual maturity means having everything settled. You should know precisely what you believe, understand difficult passages, possess answers to awkward questions and preferably never change your mind.

Certainly, learning, theology and Scripture matter. What we believe inevitably shapes how we live. But the Gospels refuse to give us disciples who begin with complete understanding. Instead, they show people whose assumptions are gradually dismantled through the experience of following Jesus.

Perhaps that is part of discipleship.

We follow before we understand everything. Then following Jesus exposes the things we only thought we understood. We discover that some of our assumptions about God, power, success, belonging or faithfulness were incomplete. At that point, we have a choice.

We can either double down and cling to what we already believe or remain teachable.

Perhaps the greatest spiritual danger is not misunderstanding something. It may be becoming so certain that we can no longer hear Jesus asking:

“Do you still not understand?”

There Is Still More to Learn

I strongly suspect there will be plenty more occasions when I come downstairs and discover something has been left open that really should have been closed.

I will probably raise my arms again and ask the familiar question.

“How can you still not understand?”

But I will explain it again because she is my daughter, and misunderstanding something does not end the relationship. Perhaps there is something of grace in that.

The disciples misunderstood Jesus repeatedly. He corrected them repeatedly, yet he kept teaching them.

Perhaps faith is not the story of people who eventually reach the point where they never misunderstand Jesus again. Perhaps it is the story of people who remain close enough, humble enough and teachable enough to allow him to keep changing their minds.

And if that is true, then “Do you still not understand?” may not only be a rebuke.

It may also be an invitation.

There is still more to learn.