Difficult to Ignore

We’ve all been there. You call your child to dinner from another room. Silence.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you come?”

“I wasn’t listening.”

Because hearing is not the same thing as listening, Jesus says in today’s Gospel lesson, “They look but do not see, they listen but do not hear or understand” (Mt. 13:13). He is not speaking about a failure of hearing. The words have arrived, but they have not been allowed to take root.

Perhaps that is one of the great dangers of religious life itself. We can become so familiar with holy words that we stop hearing them. We can know the stories without allowing them to disturb our comfortable lives. We can become conversant in the language of the Gospel while resisting its power to transform us.

There are moments in history when a contradiction becomes difficult to ignore. People begin to say, “Something isn’t right.” They look around and see individuals speaking the language…