“If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”
The responsorial Psalm of this Sunday has as its response the above phrase, this has prompted me we should return to the remembrance and understand that the Mass, the Eucharistic celebration as a moment and an event of listening. Listening to the voice of God who speaks to us through his Son and through the Church. In a special way, God speaks to us through the sacrifice of His Son Our Lord Jesus Christ, the celebration of the Mass in all its parts. During the Mass God commands us to hear Him, so that we may obey His will and express our love for Him.
There is a moving episode in the Old Testament after the Babylonian exile, when the people had turned away from the divine law. The priest Ezra finds the book of the law of Moses and gathers the people together to read this law. Moved by hearing God’s revealed word, the people wept and prostrated themselves in worship (cf. Nehemiah 8: 5-6, 9).
Like the people of Israel during the time of Ezra, in line with the responsorial of this Sunday, we, too, must renew such an attitude of being touched by the Word of God in the Holy Mass. There is an intimate connection between the proclamation of God’s Word and the celebration of the Eucharistic sacrifice. Benedict XVI on this truth has this to say: “Word and Eucharist are so deeply bound together that we cannot understand one without the other: the Word of God sacramentally takes flesh in the event of the Eucharist. The Eucharist opens us to an understanding of Scripture, as Scripture for its part illumines and explains the mystery of the Eucharist” (Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini n. 55).
Our Lord Jesus Christ is Himself the intimate connection between the revealed and proclaimed Word of God and the Eucharistic mystery, since he is the Incarnate Word come down from Heaven, the true Bread who, by His body and blood sacrificed in the Mass, gives life to humanity.
Therefore, it is important to remember that we need silence and contemplation in order to listen to “His word”. We must always be properly disposed to listen to the words, prayers and hymns. We must listen not only to the readings proclaimed during Mass, but also to the other elements that compose the whole rite of the Eucharistic celebration, the Collect, Preface, the various prayers and chants. Listening is a vital aspect of active participation of the faithful.
Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, is the loftiest example of fruitful listening to God’s Word:
“As we contemplate in the Mother of God a life totally shaped by the word, we realize that we too are called to enter into the mystery of faith, whereby Christ comes to dwell in our lives. Every Christian believer, Saint Ambrose reminds us, in some way interiorly conceives and gives birth to the word of God: even though there is only one Mother of Christ in the flesh, in the faith Christ is the progeny of us all. Thus, what took place for Mary can daily take place in each of us, in the hearing the word and in the celebration of the Sacraments” (Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini n. 28).
May the Holy Spirit with his gifts lead us to true listening, recollection, and contemplation of and obedience to the Word of God. That we may be always disposed to the reception and obedience to the Word of God.
Fr. Justus