As preached by Brother Christopher
Holy Wisdom Church
“So take care
how you listen... my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God
and put it into practice.”
Have you ever
had the experience of watching the evening news and then when the telecast was
over, wondered what you just heard? I know I have. It has helped to remind me
how listening is an active process that requires intention as much as attention
and is not something automatic. We live at a time when listening isn’t
something to be taken for granted. How many times have you said something to
someone and soon realized that they didn’t hear you at all? I remember early in my monastic formation
learning that during the first centuries of the Church when books were precious
and limited in number, how the early monks would memorize passages of
scriptures after having simply listened to them in common. They would then
meditate on them and interiorize them, making them a storehouse of wisdom that
translated into action. That sounds astonishing to us in our day, but it points
to how serious they took listening.
The first reading from the prophet
Ezekiel describes a different aspect of this: what I would call “pseudo-listening”.
We might characterize this as listening to be entertained, turning the word of
God into a lullaby. The people love to hear the gracious words flowing from the
prophet’s lips but they have no effect on their behavior. They listen to words intended
to challenge, to provoke positive change, but no one acts on them. And so we
feel the frustration of the prophet, who realizes that their pseudo-listening
is going to result in a disaster that ultimately leads them into exile.
In this morning’s gospel from Luke
we see how serious Jesus takes real listening. Those who truly hear him, who
really get it and put his words into practice he describes in the most intimate
of terms: they are truly his mother, brothers and sisters. They are part of his
family, with all of the bonds such a connection implies. Yet here is where
things get a little sticky. Are we as a Church really taking care how we
listen? Would Jesus identify us as his mother and brothers and sisters? For
example, what would he make of Orthodox Christians fighting against one another
in Ukraine, or at times what feels like our insensitivity to those suffering in
the mid-east, or risking starvation in parts of Africa? Or the horrific
conditions in Haiti? But let’s even bring it closer to home: what about how
some minorities are currently being treated here, to the poor in our midst who
are struggling to feed their families, or those suffering from mental health
issues who can’t get assistance? What
would Jesus say about the scandal of Christian divisions, where we seem to have
grown comfortable with an immovable status quo? I don’t pretend to have easy
answers to any of these issues, but shouldn’t the Church have a more prophetic
voice in addressing life’s most pressing challenges? That has to come from our
listening intently to the Gospel and acting on it. That involves each of us.
This past Friday we celebrated the
Feast of the Entry into the Temple, which reminded us of the Theotokos as an
example par excellence of one who listened to the word of God throughout her
life and then acted on it. Jesus highlighted this later in the gospel of Luke
when a woman raised her voice and said to him, “Blessed the womb that bore you
and the breasts that fed you.” And he replied, “More blessed still are those
who hear the word of God and keep it!” For Jesus, that’s where Mary’s virtue
really lay: her hearing the word of God and then keeping it. May we benefit
from her example and try our level best to hear God’s word to us and to keep
it.
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