Week 26 Friday (Year 1)

Readings: Baruch 1.15-22; Psalm 79; Luke 10.13-16

This summer, 2025, I prepared retreat talks on the verse from Psalm 94(95) which is the Alleluia verse before the gospel today: 'O that today you would listen to his voice, harden not your hearts'. Because today is the penultimate day in the entire series of retreats given this summer the appearance of this verse, on which I have been offering meditations for some months, seems like a 'nod from on high', a kind of blessing or endorsement of what I and the various communities I've worked with have been doing.

To hear the voice of the Lord requires a heart that is open and 'soft', ready to receive and to learn. God's speaking can be picked up along various channels if we have a heart ready to hear. Through creation and the prophets, in the events of Israel's history and its wisdom literature, in the teaching and actions and paschal mystery of Christ above all. And Christ points us in further directions, to the neighbour who speaks to me of God in one way or another, even to my enemies, to the Church in its preaching and its sacramental life.

I am tempted to say that God is shouting at us, or at least in spite of what often seems like his absence and his silence, there are many ways in which to listen out for God's voice if we 'tune in' in the right way.

The heart sometimes becomes hard for very understandable reasons - fear, hurt, betrayal - but sometimes for reasons that are not so good - boredom or self-centredness, even indifference and cruelty. We know we are to be compassionate as our heavenly Father is compassionate but we know also that we need God's love poured into our hearts if those that remain stony are to be replaced with human hearts. We need God to prepare the good soil to receive the seed of God's Word and bear fruit.

Truly to hear the voice of the Lord means living out in our lives what we hear, building our house on rock in that way, not listening and then forgetting but actively putting it into practice. In times of repentance and renewal, as in the first reading from Baruch, we will lament the fact that we have not listened well to God's voice. And the gospel reading reminds us that we are to be not only listeners and spectators but speakers and witnesses, God speaking also through us as we seek to stay with Jesus on his way to Jerusalem.