Week 16 Thursday (Year 1)

Readings: Exodus 19.1-2, 9-11, 16-20b; Daniel 3.52-56 ; Matthew 13.10-17

In the first reading today God makes his presence felt in no uncertain terms - lightning and smoke and crashing thunder. The people do not actually see God for the density of the cloud but there is no mistaking God's presence. The volume increases as Moses converses with God until eventually he disappears into the cloud for a more intimate encounter with God from which he will then report back to the people.

What a contrast the gospel reading is! There is no smoke or fire, no thunder or lightning, no trumpet blast getting louder and louder. Instead there is Jesus teaching in parables and then sitting with his disciples and explaining to them why it is that he does so. The puzzle of the parable takes the place of the cloud. To some the parables remain impenetrable, he says. Simple as they seem to us, perhaps we do not understand them correctly either, even when we think we do. Especially when we think we do.

So they (we?) see but do not perceive, hear but do not listen, receive his words but do not understand. Jesus quotes Isaiah saying that all this is in the first place a matter of the heart. The kind of perceiving, listening and understanding which allows us to penetrate the parables, to enter the cloud, to be in more intimate contact with Jesus and, through him, with the Father, is not a matter of bodily organs or human intelligence. It comes from elsewhere.

'O that today you would listen to his voice', we read in one of the psalms, which continues 'harden not your hearts'. In order to enter the cloud where God dwells we need an open heart, a tender heart, a docile heart. Any heart of stone, closed and hardened, needs to be replaced with an open heart, a human heart, a heart made malleable by God's Spirit, capable of believing and hoping and loving. Only in that way can we perceive, listen and understand. In a sermon for Christian unity Rowan Williams says that we will be disposed to hearing the voice of God when we are silent enough, free enough, patient enough and loving enough.

The way in which God reveals himself in Jesus is anticipated in the other great theophany of the Old Testament, the revelation of God's presence to Elijah which is no longer in wind and fire and earthquake but rather in the 'sound of fine silence', in the 'still, small voice'. The dark cloud in which God dwells now takes the form of parables. Let us not presume that they are easily understood, and certainly not without the voice of the Spirit whispering their meaning to hearts ready to receive it.

It gives us a programme if we want to hear the voice of God: work on your heart until it is silent enough, patient enough, free enough and loving enough for such an encounter. Then you will see and listen and understand.