We prize listening as one of those key skills for success and happiness in life. It’s the quality of a good leader, the hallmark of a good friend. By cultivating “active listening” you can—the self-help books promise—succeed in the business world and improve your relationships. In short, by listening, you can work, live, and love better. 

If listening is so important to our natural social lives, how much more so might listening be to our lives as children of God? In our first reading at Mass today, we get a negative example from our forefathers in the faith as they wandered through the desert. Rather than listening to the Lord in faith, they held his word in disbelief. “They were not united in faith with those who listened” and for that reason, “the word that they heard did not profit them.” We who “have received the good news just as they did” (Heb 4:2) thus hear a strong admonition to heed the word of the Lord “so that no one may fall after the same example of disobedience” (Heb 4:11).

The Lord has called his people to listen time and again: “if only you will listen to me, Israel!” (Ps 81:9). We find the culmination of God’s attempt to reach us in the very person of the Lord Jesus. On the mountain of the transfiguration, in the presence of Peter, James, and John, there came a voice from the cloud: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” The apostles fall on their faces in fear. But the Lord Jesus approaches them, saying, “Rise, and do not be afraid.” What response comes after this? The apostles listen, and their listening leads to an entirely renewed focus on the Lord Jesus. As Matthew puts it, “when the disciples raised their eyes, they saw no one else but Jesus alone” (Matt 17:5–8). The apostles lift their eyes and fix them on the Lord Jesus. They listen to his words in faith, and come to the vision of his face. They see “no one else but Jesus alone.” 

We see a simple truth in the apostles’ experience, a truth that Saint Paul puts so simply and profoundly: “faith comes from what is heard” (Rom 10:17). The only thing worth putting all our trust in are the words of the Lord Jesus. In a world just like that of our forefathers in the desert—a world where we’d like to trust only those words that make sense to us—we can ask for the gift of faith, to believe as the apostles did. “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68).

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Image: Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Annunciation