“Whoever rejects you rejects me. And whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.” Jesus is calling all of us to ponder whether we really listen to him or reject him, especially as he speaks to us through his emissaries, the apostles, their successors and others, and as he speaks to us through the evangelists and apostles who have been the Holy Spirit’s instruments to give us God’s word. “Whoever listens to you listens to me,” Jesus says. Either God’s word will be received or rejected. Jesus described the spiritual hardening of the arteries at the end of today’s Gospel in terms of what happens to him and what will likewise happen to us. “If today you hear voice,” we sang, “harden not your hearts” (Ps 95).
Job, having heard God speak, responded with humility, putting his hand over his mouth and listening to what God had said verbally and through his works, rather than seeking to lecture God. God almost seems to joke with Job asking how old he is compared to God.
After Job finally succumbed to his grief and to his physical suffering and began to question God’s wisdom and goodness, God spoke to him reminding him that he was the commander of the morning, who holds the ends of the earth, who has entered the sources of the sea and knows the breadth of the earth. This is something God taught Job in today’s first reading.They didn’t recognize who was among them. Matthew’s Gospel, which is either a more detailed account of the same words or the description of a similar scene, Jesus said that the Queen of Sheba had come to hear Solomon’s wisdom, and the Ninevites had repented at the preaching of Jonah, but there was a greater than Solomon and Jonah among them, and they hadn’t received the wisdom and repented. He didn’t find, however, profound conversion in the three cities of Galilee and threatened that they would go to Hell rather than be exalted. Matthew - in Sodom and Gomorrah, the inhabitants would all have repented. In the Gospel, Jesus reproves Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum for their failure to respond profoundly to all that he did among them, saying that if what he did in those cities had been done in the debauched pagan cities of Tyre and Sidon - and, according to a similar passage in St.Today’s reading and feast drive home that point. That way begins by recognizing who God is and how he acts, receiving his work, words and will, and responding to him with reverence, faith and perseverance.
#MEETINGBAR HOW TO#
Today the Lord responds to that prayer for guidance we repeated several times in the Responsorial Psalm, indicating to us not only the beginning of that path but how to persevere in following the Lord to eternal life.
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