Posted by The WORD in other words (2009) by Fr Oliver Quilab SVD – Germany
Tuesday 5th Week of Lent
In the course of my pastoral ministry I have become all the more convinced that listening is a life-giving art that has to be constantly relearned and practiced well. It is a creative process of give and take where we love and are loved.
When we are truly listened to, we are created anew as fresh ideas emerge and our identities unfold and expand. A good listener helps us come to life, to be happy and free. If a good listener laughs at our jokes, we become funnier and funnier; if he does not laugh, even the tiniest jokes inside of us wither and die.
Just as good listening creates, poor listening destroys. We know when someone is truly listening to us or when they are absorbed into their own thoughts. One type of failed communication is selective hearing—a case where people only listen to what they want to hear, or even worse, mask everything they hear with their expectations. Selective listeners do not listen in order to really understand the other person’s heart or idea, but rather are listening to transform it into their idea or to discredit it altogether.
Jesus must have felt his human energy drained every time he encountered selective hearers in his ministry. The evangelist John describes these hearers as people who refuse to see the Light. In our Gospel episode we read Jesus’s clear statement of his departure, his divine identity, the necessity to have faith in Him, and how the cross and resurrection will reveal most concretely his identity as “I AM.”
The selective hearers only speculate that Jesus may be contemplating suicide. According to Jewish historian Josephus Flavius, the Jews viewed suicide as consigning a person to “the darker regions of the nether world” because it was a crime “abominable to God.” When Jesus says they will die in their sins because they cannot go where He is going, they think He is saying that He himself will die in a sinful way. Their reaction to his words shows that either they are missing his message entirely or are hardheartedly rejecting it. This reference to suicide ironically boomerangs back onto the selective hearers — their unbelief is suicide because they choose to reject His offer of the Light of life.
St. Paul states, “Fides ex auditu” or (“Faith comes from hearing.”) Saving faith is a gift that can only be received by a listening and attentive heart. When we listen to The Word, do we listen to what He is really telling us or are we selective hearers?
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