prophet Isaiah did, when he was told to preach to a people whose hearts would be irredeemably hardened against his words. In Isaiah's day it seems that Israel had become so infatuated by pagan idols that they could neither see nor hear that God had judicially abandoned them to spiritual blindness and deafness themselves.
It's that divine decree from Isaiah 6:9 which Jesus is quoting when he speaks in verse 10 of listeners who cannot understand. The Galilean masses, according to Jesus, are in a similar spiritual state to the Jews of Isaiah's Jerusalem. They are incapable of comprehending the new revelation of the kingdom of God which he had brought because their minds are prejudicially closed against it. Some commentators go so far as to conclude from verse 10 that Jesus deliberately adopted a strategy of concealment, of hiding his true opinions from the masses. They suggest that he was so disillusioned with the Jewish people and convinced that like Isaiah's Jerusalem they would reject him in the end, that he deliberately camouflaged his message to confirm them in their condemned state of unbelief.
It's an arguable theory, but I think it somewhat overstates the case. After all, if Jesus wanted to conceal his message from the crowds altogether, why preach at all? And what are we to make of the impassioned exhortation, 'He who has ears to hear, let him hear'? That certainly sounds as if he desires an intelligent response to his words.
I think it's closer to the truth to interpret Jesus as saying in verse 10 that he uses parables as a kind of filter. Among the thousands who come out to see him for all the wrong reasons, he believes there are some who are genuinely open to the truth. A tiny minority, maybe, amid that vast, spiritually deaf multitude; but though few, they did have ears to hear. His parables were a filter that identified those true disciples. Those who came to Jesus looking for just a political leader, a
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