Listening to the Voice makes us people of God!

Listening to the right voice

THE WORD IN LENT 2026 - SATURDAY FIRST WEEK

Deuteronomy 26: 16-19; Matthew 5: 43-48

Listening to the right voice - at the end of it, we are back to where we began this week. We are constantly bombarded with voices in this world - the voices that sound right and just, the voices that cry out for settling scores, the voices that claim to achieve something good by any means, the voices that calculate, measure, compare and balance on scales the words and actions of others in order to repay in the same coin!

Are we going to listen to all these voices - which are at the same time loud and logical? Or are we going to discern the right voices to heed to? The Word today declares - if you keep all his commandments... you will be a people consecrated to the Lord, as he promised. That is the secret: we shall be made people of God not by listening to interesting voices, loud voices, logical voices or the voice of the majority, but by listening to the Voice of God, and the Voice of God alone!

We have it in the Gospel: but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. That is the Voice. The other voices we hear would call this naivety, or  utopian! But that is the right voice to hear, the voice that comes from the right source, the voice that can set us apart, the voice that has made the covenant with us that we shall be His people and He shall be our God. 

If we have to be people of God we have to listen to that voice... and love, forgive and be perfect. Our perfection cannot go by any voice we hear - egoistic, polemic, vindictive, violent or competitive. It has to be that One Voice that we have to listen to - and that alone can make us the people that we have been created to be. We may have doubts whether we can really listen to that Voice and live up to this command. Lent is a time that comes to assure us that we can, because we belong to that Voice, that Voice which makes us people of God.