Homily: Are You Listening?

Year B / Ordinary Time / Twenty-fifth Sunday

Readings: Wisdom 2.12a, 17-20 / Psalm 53.3-4, 5, 6 and 8 (R/v 1b) / James 3.16-4.3 / Mark 9.30-37

“Are you listening?”

“Are you listening?” asked the teacher of the noisy class he was instructing for the Science practical.

“Are you listening?” demanded the wife of her husband, glued to the football channel and ignoring her worries about the kids.

“Are you listening?” the boss said to the employee he was correcting again for  the same error made.

“Are you listening?” 

It is a frequent question we have been asked, and one we ask of others too.  If we are honest, our answer would be that sometimes we just weren't listening. We weren’t listening because we were probably distracted and following the devices and desires of our own hearts. 

I’d like to think that “Are you listening?” is the unspoken question Jesus is really challenging his disciples to answer in today’s gospel passage. Why? Here is Jesus working to raise a family of disciples, teaching them his ways, only to find them listening to their desires to live their way.

Our gospel passage begins with Jesus teaching his disciples about hardship, suffering, death and resurrection. These things are ahead of him, and also ahead of his disciples But they aren’t listening attentively enough; they talk among themselves about greatness and glory, and how these should lie ahead of them. They speak like most human beings do: caring for self and self-interests.

Doesn’t this focus on greatness and glory sound a lot like our endless, feel good conversations, talks, seminars in Church that Jesus has saved us and we don’t have to do anything more? Yes, there are some scripture readings, and perhaps some homilies, that speak about suffering and its redemptive role in Christian discipleship. Paul describes this in this way: suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character, hope, and how hope does not disappoint us because it is God’s love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit. 

But aren’t our hearts really captivated by our very human dreams that we’re already saved for greatness and glory? Don’t we want conversations, sharings and homilies about good times than challenging ones? Don’t we much prefer the happy, Good News of Christmas than the painful Good Friday truth that it is in dying that we are born to eternal life? 

“Are you listening?” Jesus is asking.

What should we be listening to? To this: that the way to salvation, God’s glory and greatness for us, lies in our dying to self for others. 

Jesus teaches this as the way, the truth and the life that will lead him into God’s glory and greatness. He wants those who follow him to do the same. 

This is a hard teaching. For many of us, this is probably the least acceptable teaching of Christianity. Many walk away from it. You and I know many who have done so. But let’s not be so quick to point them out. What about you and I? Haven’t we at times not onlywalked away but also ran very far from Jesus’ teaching when we heard the call to sacrifice ourselves for another’s life? How many times? May be like me, you’d admit, “too many”.

So how can we begin to learn this teaching Jesus gives us and learn how to live fully? By paying attention to Jesus’ words and action as he draws a child into the midst of his disciples.

By placing a child before his disciples, Jesus counsels them and us to be child-like. We will always be able to learn his teaching when we are child-like.

The child Jesus drew into the middle was probably hanging around Jesus and his disciples: curious about them and open to hearing Jesus’ words. I’d like to imagine that he was probably disobeying his mother by being out and about, and not at home. Yet, here is a child whose heart was not yet so fixed in unrelenting ways and whose curiosity kept him open to learning. Perhaps, this is why he hung around and listened to Jesus, a little longer perhaps than most others would.

Could Jesus be challenging you and I to measure ourselves against this child? To become more child-like in how we listen to his teaching, and more so, to consider the quality of how we receive it. Do we do so with openness, curiosity and welcome? Do we make his teaching our own? Or, do we pick and choose? Or, will we turn and walk away from it again? 

Jesus also draws this child before his disciples and us as a reminder that these little ones will save us into God’s greatness. How so?  Because they will invite us to die to our desires and live selflessly to give them life to the full. 

In Jesus’ time, children, like women, orphans, lepers, tax collectors and prostitutes were banished to society’s edges. They were the poor; they were best forgotten. It is the same today: as Pope Francis observes, the poor still embarrass us, and we hide from them.  

But Jesus teaches that it is these poor—the last, the lost and the least—whom we must place before ourselves and serve wholeheartedly. For Jesus, greatness is not about reversing the first/last order.  He is insisting on a radically different way of understanding what being first, being great, means: it is about taking on God’s humble, self-denying way to become one like us and to serve us to the end, even onto death. 

Putting aside our desires so another can have a better life. This is always a hard teaching to listen to, and a truly challenging call to live it out well in everyday life.

Yet, this teaching must be for us Christians hope-filled. Hope-filled precisely because when we can listen to those who reach out to us in their poverty, suffering and pain to be with them, to uplift them, to forgive them, and to give them life, we will be surprised by who we will really encounter in those moments. 

For then, we might glimpse in their faces the face of our crucified Jesus, and hear in their cries the loving timbre of his voice. And as we recognize Jesus in crucified sisters and brothers, we will remember and believe even more in what Jesus crucified did for you and me and all peoples: he rose from the dead that we might enjoy the glory of life’s bounty in God. 

“Are you really listening?” Jesus is asking us. 

What will your answer be?

Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore

Photo: www.johnbarettblog.com