23 rd August: 13 th Sunday After Pentecost

Listen!

Either show the pre-titles scene from the Doctor Who episode ‘Listen’, or present the following dialogue from it.

At the very beginning of that episode, the Doctor tells us to ‘Listen!’. All through Solomon’s prayer at the dedication of the Temple — skim through the verses we left out and you’ll soon see — Solomon repeatedly asks God to listen. In our gospel reading, some of those present exclaim how hard it is to listen to what Jesus has said. What is it with this listening?

Of course, we all want to be listened to, especially by God. There are few experiences more disheartening than the feeling of shouting into a cement bucket when we try to pray, all sound disappearing, with not even an echo, and certainly no sense of God hearing our cry. As human beings, we are created for community that, by definition, requires communication at a deep level.

There is a difference between listening and hearing, in English at least, hearing being something difficult to avoid unless we are hearing impaired, when the absence of the sound of voices, music, laughter, and even passing traffic, can leave a huge gap in our perception of the world around us. Listening, on the other hand, is more active. True listening means giving our full attention to the speaker, focusing on them, what they are saying, not planning our response to words already gone. This kind of being listened to helps us hear ourselves, as we speak, and as our hearts are stirred in response to the openness and truth the other speaker gives us. Why else would the art of listening have become so professionalised that we have counsellors and therapists always on hand to listen to words that would otherwise be lost in our noisy modern world?

Listening to God — both hearing and listening — is vital for the Christian, just as the confidence that God hears and listens to us is essential for our growth in faith. Sure of God’s patient attention, we can come in prayer to offer thanksgiving, praise, sadness, anger, grief, confession, joy, all the circumstances of our lives.

The listening that Solomon asks of God is the same; the words used for listening and hearing in both our Old Testament and gospel readings are the same all the way through: shama in the Hebrew, and akouw in the Greek. Both of them mean both hearing and listening. The king, as representative of the people of Israel, pleads with God to hear with compassion and understanding when his people turn to the Temple, which was to be the throne of God on Earth. If Solomon wants God to listen to himself and his people, however, that listening has to work both ways.

In last week’s passage from 1 Kings, Solomon asked for a listening heart — again, that word shama — a heart that could understand the people he was to rule. Solomon had begun his reign having listened to his father, David’s, words of advice, which made him a tad bloodthirsty in securing his claim to the throne; only some time later did he come to realise the necessity of being able to hear and understand other people and God. Being granted such a heart, Solomon became renowned for his wisdom, because his in-depth listening enabled him to hear what people were really saying — in effect, to hear the music behind the words. Towards the end of 1 Kings 3, we read of Solomon adjudicating between two women who each claim the same child as their own. The King’s perceptiveness enables the true mother to be identified. His fame spreads far and wide, even to the far south of Arabia, to the place we know as Yemen, prompting the Queen of Sheba to travel to Jerusalem to see this man for herself, and she was left breathless by the encounter. Sadly, Solomon’s wisdom, his listening heart, seems to become somewhat hard of hearing in his later years.

By chapter nine, Solomon is so deaf to the cries of his people that he extracts forced labour and increased taxes from them, to maintain his own household in splendour at the expense of the poor of the land. As his wealth and his army grow, Solomon gives up his devotion to Yahweh, God of Israel, following instead the gods of his many wives. The king with the listening heart, the son promised to King David, the one privileged to build and dedicate the Temple, neither hears nor listens now. The scene from today’s reading is the pinnacle of Solomon’s reign. Already he is becoming too focused on himself — he is the promised son, this is the Temple he has built — and it’s all downhill from there.

Perhaps it was similar for those disciples who turned away from Jesus in our gospel reading, deeming his words about eating his body as the bread of life simply too hard even to hear, let alone listen to, incorporate into their faith and life. NRSV and TNIV both have ‘who can accept it?’ in verse 60, but the Greek word is akouw, ‘hear/listen’. Who can hear, listen to, accept, live by, the difficult things Jesus taught, the hard and sometimes unwanted words from God?

How hard we find it to accept Jesus’ words may depend upon how we understand them. For some, the bread and wine of Holy Communion are, in some mysterious way, Christ’s body and blood. For others, it is the word of God in scripture, the gospel of Christ the Incarnate Word, that is the bread of life by which we are sustained. How hard we find it to receive other difficult and challenging words from God — about our lifestyle, our work and family choices, how we use our money or how we vote — has a tremendous impact on how well we continue to listen for, to listen deeply for, the word of God in our lives as Christ’s disciples.

The disciples who gave up on Jesus when they found his teaching too much to bear may previously have been as dedicated as any others. Perhaps they had left home, family, and work commitments, just as had Peter, James, John, Matthew, or any of those whose names we know. Perhaps among them were some who had received healing at Jesus’ hands. We cannot know, at this distance, and it may seem futile to speculate, but it’s still worth bearing in mind that we can all fall by the wayside, lose our enthusiasm, the warmth of our first love for God, as time goes by.

Listen, really listen, this week for the sound of God’s voice in the circumstances of your life.

Hear God call your name afresh, take his word deep into your heart, and live by it. The presence that is always near us is God — not a terrifying lump under a bedspread, or nothingness at the end of the universe, or something deliberately hiding, as in Doctor Who — and the voice that always calls to us is Christ’s. God calls us on, challenges us to move forward, never to reach a pinnacle of faith and then decline. Listen!