NOTES for Mar 7:31-37
Jesus does not seek popularity: He asks people not to proclaim on every street corner the healings He performs. Yet according to the Evangelist's testimony, those who were healed did not listen to Him very well. Such disobedience might seem strange unless one knows fallen human nature well; once it is known, however, these people's behavior becomes quite understandable.
The nearest and simplest explanation is messianic expectation. The general verdict, “He has done everything well,” is not accidental. “Well” here means correctly, in the way a prophet or the Messiah ought to act. People expected quite specific actions from the Messiah, above all demonstrations of God's power—the very miracles and healings that Jesus did perform in abundance. Next, according to the messianic ideas widespread in those days, Jesus was supposed to declare Himself the Messiah publicly and begin preparations for the messianic war, whose outcome would be the establishment on earth of the messianic Kingdom with Him at its head. This is precisely why those who were healed saw no need to conceal what had happened. They were sure that the requests for silence were only camouflage for the time being, and that very soon the Man who had healed them would in any case declare His messiahship publicly.
Here another, more general spiritual problem of fallen humanity is revealed, one usually called self-will in spiritual literature. It consists in the fact that a fallen person is generally incapable of following any logic of conduct but his own. It would seem natural to do precisely what Jesus asked—to keep silent about what He had done. After all, it was He who performed the healings, not those who were healed.
The point, however, is that a fallen person easily fits even what happens according to the laws of another world, the laws of the Kingdom, into his own limited logic. He readily incorporates events of the Kingdom into his own picture of the fallen world, confident that he understands everything correctly and is therefore acting correctly as well. If such a person considers it necessary to spread the news of a healing everywhere, he will do so, even though he did not perform it and the One who did asked him to remain silent. It is this all-embracing logic of fallen humanity, founded on the laws of the fallen world, that prevents a person from seeing the Kingdom.