Ordinary IV: If Today you Hear His Voice

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. 

A theme that runs through today’s Old Testament reading, psalm and the passage from Mark is the voice of God.  

In the passage from Deuteronomy, God speaks to His people through Moses, saying that another Prophet, like Moses, will be raised up from among the Israelities and that the Israelities must listen to his words. 

The Lord says to Moses:

“I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command. Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable.”

God, transcendent and eternal, speaks to His people through His prophets. 

The Prophet that God will raise up from the ranks of the Israelites, after Moses, will be His voice to His people. 

Through the cooperation of this Prophet, God’s eternal voice be heard in this transient world. 

This theme of God’s voice continues today’s psalm. 

The psalm response says: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts”. 

The narrator of the psalm also makes reference to the story from Exodus, when he says “Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work.”

In Exodus, the Israelites run out of water in the desert after their flight from Egypt, and so turn against Moses and Aaron, questioning God’s care for Israel and becoming quarrelsome and agitated.

“Is the Lord among us or not?” the Israelites ask. 

Moses, by striking the rock at Horeb and bringing forth saving water, acts as the voice of God in the midst of the Israelites. 

The water that Moses brings forth, by God’s will, is God’s answer to the questioning of the Israelites: “Is the Lord among us or not?”

In this instance, actions perhaps speak louder than words. But we can still understand the gushing of water from the rock at Horeb to be the voice of God, just as clearly as though it were mediated through the mouth of Moses.

And so the psalmist urges us to listen, for our hearts to be open to hearing God’s voice expressed through his works as through the words of His prophets. 

The theme of God’s voice finds its clearest exposition in today’s reading from Mark, although in this story the theme is expressed differently. 

In Deuteronomy, Moses, who is also prophet of God, is alluding to the raising up of another prophet, on whom God will bestow authority to speak with His voice.

But Jesus’ authority in Mark is different from Moses’ in Deuteronomy. 

Because Jesus, the Son of God and Second Person of the Godhead, is necessarily greater than Moses. 

Moses is fully human: his authority derives from God’s ordinances. He interprets the voice of God as faithfully as he can. 

In Mark, the Scribes in the synagogue also interpret and promulgate a given tradition. But they do so on borrowed or bestowed authority. 

Jesus speaks with authority that is self-originating, as one who is consubstantial with the Father, and from whom, with the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeds. 

In Jesus, the voice of God is no longer mediated by Moses or Aaron, who shared Jesus’ humanity but not his divinity and oneness with the Father.

In Jesus’ voice we have the words of God Himself.  

And this seamless continuity of voice, between God the Father and God the Son, being distinct but nonetheless of one substance, is what makes Jesus’ voice authoritative.  

The word “authority” in fact appears this passage from Mark twice:

“They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”

Also:

“What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

God’s sovereign voice, mediated through Moses and a prophet that is to come in Deuteronomy, alluded to poetically in today’s psalm, reaches its perfect realisation in the person of Christ Jesus in today’s story from Mark. 

But what does it mean for the voice of God to be incarnate in the world? 

How does God’s voice sound in this broken world?

Mark makes it clear that the voice of God will encounter resistance in this word, notwithstanding Jesus’ singular authority. This resistance comes from the forces of evil. 

It is, perhaps, tempting to see the story of the man and the unclean spirit through the lens of modern psychiatry, or to extrapolate the story as a representation of the inner demons we grapple with in our daily lives. 

Yes, our understanding of mental illness has thankfully changed over the centuries and yes, Sacred Scripture is shot through with poetical and metaphorical language that helps articulate the sublime as well as the personal. 

But in approaching Mark’s story purely from this vantage point we necessarily water it down, diluting its theology of spiritual struggle and individualising its vision of structural forces that conspire against the reign of God. 

Thus, we make the cardinal sin of turning Mark’s urgent, uncomfortable story into something that is perhaps too comfortable. 

Mark is saying that the Gospel of God, perfectly embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, will meet fierce opposition from the forces of evil in the world. 

The Unclean Spirit recognises the voice of God in Jesus, because in Jesus it recognises an existential threat. Ironically perhaps, it is swifter to recognise the divinity of Jesus’ voice than many of his own followers. 

The forces of evil are viscerally threatened by the Incarnate God, and the means by which God became incarnate, the Blessed Virgin Mary, because in Jesus is not only instrument of our redemption but also the bringing together of God and man, while in Mary is the perfect alignment of a fully human will with God’s uncreated energies. 

Mark also seems to be saying that in evil’s counterattack against the Gospel lies the struggle of our faith. 

As David Jacobsen says “The struggle over evil is where the gospel of God’s reign meets the world.”

We see, in an empirical way, this conflict between the Gospel and the forces of evil in our social systems: the indifference to poverty, the persecution of the outsider and the culture of avarice.  

In a more personal way, we see the forces of evil work against the reign of the Gospel in our sometimes fractured relationships with ourselves and each other, in our malice and weakness and our desire to control others. 

But as Christians, we also see the twin hopes of the Gospel of Mark: that, being God, Jesus’ voice carries the full authority of God, and that his voice, God’s voice, has the power to banish evil. 

Jesus does not need to resort to magic, herbs or incantations to drive out the Unclean Spirit. He has only to give a command that the Unclean Spirit cannot disobey. 

This is because the authority of Jesus’ voice, God’s voice, extends over all things, including the forces of evil

The challenge given us in today’s Gospel--the struggle of the Gospel against evil--is answered by the passionate entreaty of the psalm: “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.”

Amen.