Lent, at heart, is a school of listening. Today’s readings circle around a single plea: hear the Lord and let that hearing soften what has grown hard. The Scriptures move from Jeremiah’s lament over a people who will not listen, to the psalm’s urgent refrain, to Jesus’ decisive act of liberation and his call to choose for the Kingdom.
When the word is banished
Jeremiah recalls God’s simplest covenant command: “Listen to my voice; then I will be your God and you shall be my people…so that you may prosper.” The tragedy is not God’s silence but Israel’s refusal. They “turned their backs,” stiffened their necks, banished faithfulness, and; stark phrase; “the word itself is banished from their speech.”
That line cuts close to contemporary life. Public speech slides easily into branding and slogans; private speech into sarcasm or weary compromise. Words once native to covenant life; faithfulness, repentance, mercy, obedience; can feel foreign on the tongue. Jeremiah does not scold so much as name a grief: when we stop listening, we start hardening. And hardness spreads; into families, communities, institutions; so that even God’s tireless sending of “all my servants the prophets” meets a wall.
Lent answers that grief with a seasonal grammar: fasting clears static, almsgiving rehumanizes relationships, and prayer retunes the ear. Yet all three practices are in service of one thing; listening to the living God.
“Harden not your hearts” is a path, not a slogan
Psalm 95, the Church’s daily invitatory, refuses to give up on today: “Oh, that today you would hear his voice: harden not your hearts.” It weds worship to docility; singing and kneeling, praise and yielding. Hardness is not only rebellion; it is often self-protection developed from disappointment or fear. The psalm does not shame that impulse; it calls it by name and offers a different posture: bow, kneel, let yourself be shepherded. The alternative to hardness is not sentimentality but surrender to a trustworthy Guide.
The finger of God and the return of speech
Luke shows what God’s voice does when welcomed: it drives out what silences us. Jesus frees a man afflicted by a mute spirit; he gives him back his voice. This is not a parlor trick. Creation itself began with God speaking; redemption restores speech; praise, truth, confession, intercession.
The crowd’s reaction is telling. Some demand a more spectacular sign; others smear the work as demonic. Jesus meets both cynicism and sensationalism with plain clarity. If evil is casting out evil, evil is already undone. But if deliverance comes “by the finger of God,” then the Kingdom has arrived; quiet and real, like a surgeon’s sure hand.
That phrase, “finger of God,” reaches back to Exodus: the plagues recognised by Egypt’s magicians and the tablets written at Sinai. Luke hints at a new exodus. Jesus is the “stronger one” who overpowers the strong man, strips his armor, and distributes the spoils. The “armor” can look like self-justifying narratives, secret habits, grudges, fear of being known. Christ does not negotiate with these; he disarms them. And the “spoils” he shares are concrete: a freed conscience, reconciled relationships, courage to speak truth in love, a capacity to worship without pretense.
Neutrality, Jesus says, is an illusion: “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.” Lenten discernment sharpens here. Either speech is restored to praise and communion, or it decays into accusation and dispersal.
The modern habit of suspicion
There is a contemporary echo of the Beelzebul charge. In a culture trained to unmask, we can become fluent in suspicion: every charitable act is “virtue signaling,” every moral claim a power play, every miracle a trick. Genuine critical thinking is a virtue; corrosive cynicism is not. One tests spirits; the other makes trust impossible. The first seeks truth; the second refuses to see grace even when it heals a neighbor.
Lent invites a gentler vigilance. It asks for discernment that recognizes both the reality of evil and the nearness of grace, and that allows joy when God’s work appears; especially when it liberates the voiceless and restores communion.
“Even now”: how to begin again today
Joel places mercy on the calendar of now: “Even now, return to me with your whole heart.” If God is this immediate, then practices can be concrete and modest:
- Set a daily listening appointment with the Lord. Ten quiet minutes with today’s Gospel; reading slowly until a word or phrase meets the heart; can soften what has been rigid. End simply: “Speak, Lord; your servant is listening.”
- Let the Stronger One remove armor in confession. Bring not only failures but also the defenses that keep them in place; rationalizations, secrecy, resentment. Name them plainly; receive absolution as disarmament.
- Give speech back to someone. Make a phone call you’ve been avoiding. Ask a real question and listen without composing your reply. Or restore praise in the home: a blessing over a meal, a thank-you said aloud.
- Fast from accusing language for twenty-four hours. When the sneer rises, ask: is there any trace of God’s finger at work here? If so, bless it; if not, ask for the courage to resist evil without imitating it.
- Pray for unity where division has become normal. Jesus ties the fall of a house to internal fracture. Choose one relationship, team, or parish setting and do one act this week that gathers rather than scatters.
Today, the Kingdom is near
Jeremiah’s sorrow, the psalm’s plea, Joel’s “even now,” and Luke’s liberation converge on one truth: God is not stymied by our hardness. He keeps speaking, keeps sending, keeps freeing. The Kingdom is not an abstraction but an arrival; quiet, decisive, at the level of a single healed tongue, a single reconciled conversation, a single heart made supple again.
If today you hear his voice; and you will; let the Stronger One have your defenses. Let him write his word, once more, where it cannot be banished. And let speech return: thanksgiving, intercession, a simple yes.