27 March 2025 - Thursday of the 3rd week of Lent
Homily
The Prologue to the Rule of Saint Benedict takes up many of the teachings and even some of the expressions that we already find in the beautiful text from Jeremiah that we heard as the first reading of this Mass. 'Listen to my voice' (says the Lord, through the mouth of Jeremiah), "“Listen to my voice: I will be your God, and you shall be my people”. So all we have to do to belong to God's people is listen to His Word. Dialogue with God in prayer is never a purely individual thing. This dialogue brings us into communion with all the other ‘hearers of the word’. It is this very dialogue that makes us a ‘People’ or a ‘Church’. This word of Scripture was the fundamental intuition of the great German theologian, Karl Rahner, who, in one of his first works, which was also a work of philosophy, published in 1941, at the beginning of the War, described the human being as being essentially, by his very nature, a ‘hearer of the Word’ (Hörer des Wortes), since it is by the very Word of God that we are created.
When God speaks to man, it is to call him to set out on a journey. The text from Jeremiah that we heard continues: ‘...you shall walk in all the ways that I command you, that it may be well with you’.
If we go back to the Prologue to the Rule of Saint Benedict, which I mentioned at the beginning, it begins: “Listen, O my son, to the precepts of the Master - the Master is Christ - and incline the ear of your heart, so that you may return by the way of obedience to Him from whom you have turned away by the way of disobedience”. So here too it's a question of setting out on a journey.
A little further on, in the Prologue, Benedict sets a scene. He shows us God crying out at the crossroads: "Who wants life and happy days? And if you answer ‘Yes, it's me’, Benedict continues, I'm going to write my Rule for you. So, according to Saint Benedict, the aim of the monastic life is to have Life and to be happy. And to do that, you have to follow the path of conversion. And that's why Benedict says that the monk's whole life is a Lenten journey, because it must be entirely a journey of conversion, that is, of returning to God by the path of Obedience, that is, by the path of Listening.
For, as the end of Jeremiah's text reminds us, if we do not listen, the truth will have disappeared from our mouths - not only will we not be able to speak the truth, but we will not even be able to live in the truth.
That's quite a programme for Lent.
Armand Veilleux