 Brand Petrie was talking about humiliation. I'm sure that many of you are familiar with the Jewish prayer called the Shema. It's taken from Deuteronomy. It's the heart of the Jewish morning and evening prayer service. And it begins as follows. Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad. Here, O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is one. The prayer then continues with the great commandment. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. Now, this second phrase about loving God expresses our response. However, in order to respond, we must first listen. That is, also accept God's revelation. We must listen to God's word. Here, O Israel, hearing God's word is the theme at today's Mass. Our first reading from Exodus, Chapter 19, describes the arrival of the people of Israel at Mount Sinai and how God instructed them through Moses to prepare for his giving of the law and the making of the covenant. Now, this reading from Exodus, Chapter 19, covers a lot of ground. And in order to do that, our selection this morning actually omits some verses here and there. So you might want to go back and read all of Chapter 19 of Exodus in order to fill in these gaps. Now, in one of these gaps, the Lord is telling the people what they must do. He's instructing Moses and telling Moses what the people must do. And according to a literal translation of this Hebrew text in verse 5, it says, and now, if hearing, you will hear my voice and keep my covenant, you will be to me a special possession among all the peoples. The Hebrew construction here is redundant. It uses the verb here, shama, two times. That same verb that's in the shema, prayer. It uses that verb twice in order to emphasize hearing. The implication is, of course, that by such diligent listening to God, we will also obey God as well. And so the phrase, literally, which says hearing, you will hear my voice, is typically translated in our English Bibles with a reference to obedience. For example, the RSV says, if you will obey my voice, or the New American Bible says, if you obey me completely, after this injunction to hear, the initial response of the people to God's word is expressed a few verses later in verse 8. This is also omitted from the reading. But that response of the people is right on the mark. So Moses goes and tells the people, and their response is right on the mark. They say, everything the Lord has said, we will do. And so they are hearing God's word and also responding to it. They want to obey it. Everything the Lord has said we will do. So there's this emphasis on hearing on everything we've heard so far. And this hearing implies obedience. This is not true only for the Hebrew text, but also later this connection between hearing and obeying is also seen in Greek, like in the Greek New Testament. The Greek verb to hear, for I hear, is akouo, where we get words like acoustics. But the word for obey is related to that because obeying is related to hearing. The verb for I obey in Greek is hoop akouo. So it's just adding a few letters to the beginning of the word. So even the very words themselves show this connection between hearing and obeying. And so the people said, everything the Lord has said, we will do. However, as we know, this response of the people in Exodus was more the exception rather than the norm. The generation of the Exodus, those people were not always so diligent in hearing or in obeying or in doing everything the Lord had said to do. If you think about it, immediately after the people have the experience of the Exodus in chapters 14 and 15 of Exodus, when we get to chapter 16, what did the people begin to do? They begin to grumble. They begin to murmur. Not that we ever do those things, right? But they begin to grumble. The verb, the noun for grumbling is gangus mas in the translation of the Hebrew Bible in the Septuagint. We'll come back to that word. And so they begin to grumble against the Lord. Then the Lord gives them the manna. That's already in chapter 16. But then throughout that whole wandering in the wilderness, the people continue to disobey God. Moses has to put up with this generation of the wilderness wandering, that wilderness generation. And even when they get to the edge of the promised land at the end of the book of Deuteronomy, looking back on his experience of having to deal with this wilderness generation, Moses describes these people of the wilderness generation as children that have a blemish, as a perverse and crooked generation. Keep those words in mind. Children that have a blemish, a perverse and crooked generation. That's Deuteronomy 32 verse five. Deuteronomy 32 verse five. So even though the people of Israel, when they had this experience at Sinai, said they were going to do everything the Lord told them to do in experience, when they tried to live that out, they didn't fare so well. So what are we to do? Because we're wanting to hear God's word and obey and live it. Well, one thing that we might do is imitate the Philippians. Because Paul will explain that the Philippians are actually models of obeying the word of God. We just heard a talk on Philippians chapter two. And immediately after that Christ hymn in Philippians chapter two, Paul goes on to say how the Philippians are obedient. He asks them to continue to be obedient because he is acknowledging that they have been obedient from the first. Obedient as you have always been, says the NAB in chapter two verse 12 of Philippians. Or in the RSV it says, as you have always obeyed. And so they set a model for us on how to hear God's word and to respond with obedience. And then he goes on to explain what this carrying out of God's word will involve. He says, do so without grumbling. That same Greek word, gongousmas. So you might say, gee, maybe he's thinking about the grumbling of that wilderness generation. But it's only one word, so it's not so clear yet. But then as he continues in verses 15, the grumbling's in 14, in chapter two verse 15, you see that he's making an allusion to that verse in Deuteronomy 32 verse five. So he says, so that you might be children of God without blemish. Moses has said the children have a blemish. So you might be children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation. And the words in the Greek text are the same as in the Greek translation, the Septuagint of that verse in Deuteronomy 32 verse five. So Paul is alluding to Deuteronomy and explaining that the Philippians have to hear and obey, but not like that wilderness generation. Let's turn now to the gospel where we still see this theme of hearing. Now it's a question of hearing Jesus, of listening to Jesus in his parables. Indeed, our gospel passage comes from Matthew chapter 13. It's right after the parable of the sower. You see, yesterday was a memorial of Saint Mary Magdalene, a biblical saint, so we read a different gospel that mentions Mary Magdalene. But otherwise we would have heard the parable of the sower. And so today's gospel we continue reading from that same chapter 13 of Matthew's gospel where Jesus explains why he teaches in parables. And his explanation is unsettling as he refers to some difficult words of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus said, you shall indeed hear but not understand. Now this prophecy from Isaiah chapter six, verses nine and 10, actually appears in all four of the gospels. In the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it appears in connection with the parable of the sower. In John's gospel, the quotation from Isaiah six appears in John 12. After Jesus' entry into Jerusalem at the end of his public ministry where he laments that the people have not really understood, have not really listened to his message. Now the same passage of Isaiah is also quoted at the very, very end of the Acts of the Apostles where it's quoted by Saint Paul. At the end of the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul is under house arrest in Rome and he's speaking to the leaders of the Jews there in Rome and he quotes the same passage of Isaiah because he finds many of them are not listening to God's word and understanding that Jesus is indeed the Messiah and so he comments, as a result, this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles. They will listen, Akkuo, like acoustics, that same verb. So the salvation will go to the Gentiles, they will listen and so it is not only here, oh Israel, but it's also here, oh nations. There's a phrase actually, we do find that phrase in a different context in the book of Jeremiah. Here, oh Israel, here, oh nations. See, all people are called to hear God's word and respond to it, to obey it, to live it. God's mission for Paul was that he'd be the apostle to the Gentiles. As we read in the Acts of the Apostles, in his missionary travels, Paul typically began by preaching in the Jewish synagogue where he attracted some Jewish followers, some Jewish people who heard the message of the gospel. And in those synagogues, there were also Gentile worshipers, God-fearers who attended the synagogue and they also began to listen and at other times he would preach outside the synagogue and in that way he would draw other Gentiles to hear and accept God's word. We're studying Philippians here at this conference so let's look at the situation in Philippi. Paul evangelizes Philippi on his second missionary journey as we've heard and this is around the year 49 to 50, arrives in Corinth in 50, so Philippi is a little bit before that, as we read in Acts chapter 16. Now apparently there were very few Jewish people in Philippi and so Paul doesn't go to a synagogue there but he goes outside the city along the river where he hopes to find a place of prayer and there he finds some women and he begins to speak to them and one of them named Lydia is one of these God-fearing Gentiles, one of these Gentiles who were attracted to the Jewish religion and who were devout and what does the text of Acts 16 say? That Lydia listened, Akkuo the same verb and so the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying as Acts 16, 14 and her listening to God's word then led to a full response on her part because she, well she was baptized along with her household but then she also offered Paul and his missionary companions hospitality and so her full response included deeds of service. Her house then becomes the meeting place of the early Christians in Philippi as we read at the very end of Acts 16 and so my brothers and sisters both from our first reading and from our gospel reading we've ended up in Philippi and in the letter to the Philippians and in the description of Philippi in the Acts of the Apostles and we can learn from people like Lydia and we can learn from the Philippians how to hear God's word and respond to it and obey it and live it and that is what we've come to do that's why we're here at Steubenville so that the Lord will open our hearts and keep them open as we try to hear his word as we try to pay attention to God's word and respond fully. Now in this regard I'd like to quote some words of Pope Francis' apostolic exhortation the joy of the gospel, right that goes along with this theme of joy in the letter to the Philippians. Now in the joy of the gospel Pope Francis speaks for an extended section of the document about the homily at mass and about preaching the word but I would like to take some of a particular paragraph which is addressed to preachers of the word priests and deacons and I just edited a little bit so that it applies to all of us and just adjusting some of the pronoun so that we might hear this message of how we need to hear God's word and obey it and live it and so this is paragraph 151 of Evangelii Gaudium the joy of the gospel where the Pope writes we are not asked to be flawless but to keep growing and wanting to grow as we advance along the path of the gospel our arms must never grow slack and then the Pope continues by explaining that we have to always remember that God loves us that Jesus died to save us and he admits that often we will feel that our lives do not glorify God as they should and we will sincerely desire to respond more fully to so great a love so what is the secret according to the Pope of how we can respond more fully? He continues, yet if we do not take the time to hear God's word with an open heart if we do not allow it to touch our lives to challenge us, to impel us and if we do not devote time to pray with that word then we will indeed be false prophets, frauds shallow imposters, so the key if we want to respond more fully and avoid being frauds we all want to avoid doing that we all want to avoid being imposters, false prophets the key then is to hear, to hear God's word to allow it to touch our lives to allow it to challenge us the Pope is telling us that we have to devote time to pray with that word and so the Pope continues, we have to acknowledge our poverty and our desire to grow in our commitment and we have to abandon ourselves to Christ the Lord you see wants to make use of us as living free and creative beings who let, listen to this let his word enter their own hearts before then passing it on to others Christ's message must truly penetrate and possess us not just intellectually but in our entire being you see that's the secret then now this is not just for our own sake as the Pope just said this is rather for the sake of others so that we can evangelize others so that we can pass on the word to others and in this regard let me just refer briefly to another point, point 174 of Pope Francis' document where he says all evangelization is based on that word listened to, meditated upon, lived, celebrated and witnessed to and so the sacred scriptures are the very source of evangelization consequently we need to be constantly trained in hearing the word paragraph 174, so my brothers and sisters let us hear God's word and as Paul also tells the Philippians in chapter two verse 16 let us hold on to that word hear, oh Israel, hear, oh nations blessed are your ears because they hear God's word glory and praise forever