I am the Lord your God; hear my voice.

This refrain from today’s Psalm reminds us what our Lenten observances are about: conversion. Lent invites us to listen more closely and honestly to God calling us to right our lives. In our First Reading, the prophet Hosea describes God calling Israel to turn from sin and to return to Him. Indeed, God calls to rescue all humankind.

But God’s call in Lent that you and I work hard at being more faithful to, through prayer, fasting and almsgiving, must remind us of God’s daily call in our lives: to listen to him, to come to him, and, as the psalmist sings, to be fed by him with the best of wheat and the finest of honey. In short, God calls us to become who we truly are, his.

This is the call St Francis Xavier heard when he met St Ignatius, who taught him who he was, God’s beloved child. This is the call Xavier, with Ignatius and the first companions, discerned when they became Jesuits. And this is the call Xavier, the missionary, responded to when Ignatius sent him to preach the Good News in the Indies and the East. Indeed, Xavier listened and hearing God’s call, he responded.

We too listen to God’s call and respond. We do this whenever we comfort another in pain, whenever we bring light into someone’s darkness, whenever we forgive an enemy. Indeed, when we come home to God like the Prodigal Son, we have listened and responded. Our responses may not be as grand or as saintly as Xavier’s. But they are, like his, Christian.

What moved Xavier to respond in the manner he did? What moves us to do likewise? Jesus, whose name we all bear, Christian, and in whose Spirit, we move and live and have our being, is the answer.

In Jesus, we find the perfect model of one who listens to God’s Word and acts on it. The evangelist, Mark, reminds us in today‘s Gospel that God’s Word is this: to love God with all one’s heart, one’s soul, one’s mind and with all one’s strength, and also to love one’s neighbor as oneself. Jesus teaches the scribe that these are the greatest commandments. They are however not to be known or comprehended. They are to be lived.

Living them well is best expressed on the Cross. There, hanging on it is the fullness of love alive—Jesus loving God and loving neighbor selflessly. Jesus is the obedient Son: he listens to God, the Father, and responds in total self-sacrificing love. And it is in his dying on the Cross and then being raised by God that Jesus makes true and alive, those words he uttered in love to God, “Thy will be done,” for love of you and I.

Indeed, Xavier had no better model to live out his Christian discipleship than Jesus. Jesus’ self-sacrificing love was Xavier’s too each time he responded to God’s call. And Jesus’ words must have been Xavier’s in these moments.

When Xavier said "yes" to being sent on mission, he sacrificed the security of being a priest in Europe for the uncertainties of being an apostle to the peoples of Asia. When Xavier said "yes" to being a Jesuit, he sacrificed the riches, honour and fame an University of Paris education promised him for a life of poverty, prayer and preaching the Good News. Truly, when Xavier said "yes" to the truth that he is God’s beloved, he sacrificed nothing less than a life for himself to embrace a life for God and others.

I am sure we too want to be like Xavier. We want to make of our lives a sacrifice of love both to God and for another’s wellbeing, happiness and salvation. We want to be able to say with our saint, “thy will be done, Lord.” As Christians, we try our best to live the holy and good, moral and charitable lives Jesus calls us to. However, if we are honest this Lent, you and I must confess that this is a challenge and we sometimes don’t do it well as his disciples.

But we can have certain hope that we can join Xavier, do what he did and be like him. With him, we can praise, reverence and serve God in smaller but no less saintly ways.

Where will we find the hope to do this? Here, in what we will celebrate together shortly. In the Eucharist, the Risen Jesus offers himself to us in bread and wine to nourish us. And nourishing us, Jesus transforms our limited acts of human love into something more generous, more selfless, more divine.

And so, as we gather around the altar, like Xavier did many times in his life, let us pause and listen more carefully, and respond more generously, to our God who says to us today, “I am the Lord, your God; hear my voice.”