WHY WE DON’T LISTEN

“Let anyone with ears listen,” (Mt. 13:9) Jesus says to the people as he tells them a parable. Why did he have to say that? Didn’t they specifically come out to listen to what he had to say? Why would they not be listening? Even more, why would he have to say the same thing to us today were we the audience? Don’t we all have ears? Don’t we all listen? Obviously not.

It is just as obvious why we do not. We not listen because, deep down, we really do not want to hear what is being said. We do not want to hear what is being said because we do not want to do what we are being told we must do. Then when we do not hear what has been said, we somehow believe we have an excuse for not having done what we know we should have done in the first place.

But we have no excuse. That, I think, was part of Jesus’s message from Day One. Those who heard him whenever he spoke had no excuse for not understanding what he was talking about. What he was saying was not rocket science even if there was no such entity back then. The Gospel message was clear and to the point. The only excuse they would have was that they were not willing to listen to his words. They were not willing to take his message to heart and make it their own, make it part of their own lives.

We truly have to listen to the Gospel message. We have to be open to what is being said and willing to make it personal and take it personally. That is the first part of Jesus’ message. The other part is that what is heard takes work to be understood. Jesus wants us to not only listen and listen closely to what he says, he wants us to think about it and think about it deeply, in the recesses of our minds and hearts.

The parables are not simply good stories, and interesting ones at that, fine word pictures. They have a deep meaning. But to discover that meaning we have to think about what has been said, what the words mean, how they apply to our personal lives, what we are to do with what we have learned, and so forth.

Of course, the final part of Jesus’ message is that we have to actually do something. We have to put into action what Jesus’ words are calling us to do. That, I think, is the real reason why we don’t listen to that message: it isn’t easy to live out in our daily lives. It takes work, often hard and demanding and sacrificial work. And we are not always that willing to go that far.

Jesus did not tell parables just to hear himself speak. He spoke so we could hear and listen, could understand ourselves better, could learn how to live our lives to the fullest. None of that comes from a simple hearing of a parable. It comes from a life-long listening, listening to and hearing the message again and again and again, learning something more each time and putting it into practice each day.

That will never make the sometimes-difficult task of living out our faith easier, but it will make worthwhile, as we have all discovered.