Listening to God is living for God
THE WORD IN LENT 2026 – TUESDAY SECOND WEEK
March 03 - Isaiah 1:10, 16-20; Matthew 23: 1-12
Listening to God is living for God, and living for God is living
for the other - that is what the Word of God has been telling us these days as
the week started… and today we have an explanation as to what it means to live
for the other. We are presented with goodness and justice as the basic signs of
living for the other.
Living for the other is all about goodness, that is, being good to
the other, doing good to the other and giving the other the best that we can.
It has to be necessarily preceded by justice which is fundamental to goodness,
because it is giving what is due to the other, without any compromise on it.
While the former is a noble gesture, the latter is a moral obligation.
Living for the other is a wonderful disposition, but it has to
first start with the disposition of joy over the other who has the possibility
of a good living. When the other has a success, when the other has a life that
is eventful, when the other has an experience that is happy, I have to first be
happy about it and not begrudgingly push it aside. Further, I cannot seek to
destroy that possibility and rejoice over it. The latter is what we see
happening much in the world today, filled with jealousy and malice, all
justified by tendencies such as self-realisation and fulfilment.
We cannot be people who live for the other, merely by our words. We
have to see this in our action. The thoughts of justice and acts of goodness
have to become real… beginning with the closest to us – for the danger is when
we speak of the “other” we might tend to think of someone far from us, removed
from us. In fact, we are sometimes most cruel to those who are closer to us –
out own people at home, the friends we take for granted and our colleagues whom
we fail even to recognise sometimes.
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