By: Susan K. Wood, SCL
Last Sunday, the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, we had Word of God Sunday. This week’s readings continue with the theme of listening and speaking, this time the word of God mediated through prophetic speech. In the first reading from Deuteronomy the people don’t want to hear the word of God directly. They complain: “Let us not again hear the voice of the Lord , our God, nor see this great fire anymore, lest we die!” So God in effect says, ok, you don’t want to hear me, I’m ok with that. I’ll send a prophet and you can listen to him.
The internal reference is to the experience on Horeb/Sinai In Deut. 4:10-12 where the ten commandments were given accompanied by the theophany, that is, God’s manifestation. There Moses said to the people, “…you approached and stood at the foot of the mountain while the mountain was blazing up to the very heavens, shrouded in dark clouds. Then the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of the words but saw no form; there was only a voice. He declared to you his covenant, which he charged you to observe, that is, the ten commandments…” So, in the reading today, the people are saying that they no longer want to hear this voice out of the great fire. Just as Moses acted as a mediator between God and the assembly, so the later prophets continued the prophetic office of Moses. God puts his words into their mouths as he did with Moses, and the prophet speaks in God’s name. Presumably, it is easier to listen to the prophet than the voice of God because he is like the people, one of their kin.
This reading sets up the Gospel for today where Jesus is the prophet who teaches with authority in the synagogue. Jesus is our kin, a human being like us, but perfectly mediates the holiness and the word of God. He is himself the word and the word was God. The man with the unclean spirit immediately recognizes that Jesus is the Holy One of God, but the other people only recognized Jesus’ authority after they witnessed the unclean spirit depart from the man he had possessed. The evil spirit in the man resists the holiness of God and knows and fears the power of Jesus to destroy his influence. Jesus heals him by the power of his word alone. The healing of the man possessed reinforces the authority of his teaching, which derives directly from his relationship to God and is associated with his identity in this text as the Holy One of God.
Mark tells us that Jesus’ fame spread throughout the land. However, we, the readers of the Gospel, know how fickle this fame was, for the people eventually kill the prophet. This passage occurs in the first chapter of the Gospel of Mark, which marches relentlessly from this early fame to the cross. This is, after all, the Gospel that has been described as a passion narrative with a prologue. In this liturgical year, these few weeks after the Christmas season are a prologue to Lent, which begins in just two and a half weeks. Mark’s narrative of Jesus early ministry prepares us for the journey to the cross. The predominant themes of the first two chapters of Mark are the calls to discipleship and narratives of healing. We are called to accompany Jesus. He both heals us to enable us to travel with him and, as his disciples, he calls us to heal others. The focus today, however, is the recognition of Jesus as the Holy One of God and authoritative teacher.
How fickle we people are! We do not want to listen to the voice of God out of the great fire. We rebel in the face of the law associated with the prophetic word. When God draws near in human form, we reject the messenger as well as the message.
The first step of this rebellion is refusal to listen, refusal to hear. Isn’t the world of fake facts and alternative realities south of the border a refusal to listen to evidence, to reason, to one another? A common hearing, a common listening is constitutive of community. When that is no longer possible, community fractures, splintering into a thousand pieces so that when common hearing and listening are no longer present, the fabric that wove it together is no longer discernable. This is why truth is so important, for it is the common point of reference that makes dialogue across differences of opinion possible. Perhaps the greatest tragedy in the recent political events in the States was the death of truth, replaced by personal opinion and personal preference without grounding in fact or reality. I’ve had students who think that religion is all personal opinion. I have my truth and you have yours and we are both right, never mind that there might be an inherent contradiction there. So we don’t need to work through those differences or even try to understand one another or even dialogue with one another. We can each just live in our own personal reality. Is this what we are experiencing in our political life? In our personal life? In our religious life?
In the first reading today Moses spoke to all the people, saying: “A prophet like me will the Lord, your God raise up for you from among your own kin; to him you shall listen.” Today we are called to deep listening. The three readings give present us with a straight arrow that aims us toward Jesus, the Holy One of God, who teaches with authority. The first reading tells us to listen to the prophets. The second reading tells us to focus on the things of the Lord and not to get distracted about the things of the world. The Gospel presents us with the prophet Jesus, who speaks. All we have to do is listen.
Before we can proclaim God’s word or teach, we must listen. The opening sentence of the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelations (Dei Verbum) begins, “Hearing the word of God reverently and proclaiming it confidently….” (DV 1). The prophets continually implore the people to hear. The Hebrews thought that the ear was the gateway to the soul. The great commandment in Deuteronomy begins, “Hear O Israel, The Lord is our God, the Lord alone! Therefore, you shall love the Lord, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being and with your whole strength.” Jesus, the prophet, repeats this commandment and adds, “and your neighbor as yourself” (Mk 12: 29-31).
Hearing requires discernment to distinguish authoritative teaching from false teaching, but such discernment cannot bypass profound listening…listening to the word of God in scripture, to the word mediated through prophetic voices, to Jesus’ authoritative teaching, to the word of God mediated through the wisdom of tradition, to the word of God in the cry of the poor and those who suffer, to the word of God in the signs of the times, and to the word of God embedded in the sanctuary of our hearts.
A series of early Church Fathers held that Mary conceived Jesus through profound listening. Jesus became flesh through Mary’s hearing and assent to what she heard. Jesus, is, after all, the word of God received by hearing. Yet how difficult truly hearing is for us. The gospels tells us over and over again that “they look but do not see and hear but do not listen or
understand.” Isaiah said, “You shall indeed hear but not understand, you shall indeed look but never see. Gross is the heart of this people, they will hardly hear with their ears, they have closed their eyes, lest they see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and be converted, and I heal them” (Is 6:9-10). Listening requires being open to change, to being open to nothing less than a converted heart, a heart converted to love of God and love of neighbor that heals our world as Jesus is newly enfleshed in the world through this prophetic mediation of not only proclaiming the word, but first hearing it. Today’s readings give me a direction for the coming Lenten season….a renewed resolve to listen more deeply.