27 March 2025 - Thursday of the 3rd week of Lent
Homily
The Prologue to the Rule of Saint Benedict takes up many of the teachings and even some of the expressions that we already find in the beautiful text from Jeremiah that we heard as the first reading of this Mass. 'Listen to my voice' (says the Lord, through the mouth of Jeremiah), "“Listen to my voice: I will be your God, and you shall be my people”. So all we have to do to belong to God's people is listen to His Word. Dialogue with God in prayer is never a purely individual thing. This dialogue brings us into communion with all the other ‘hearers of the word’. It is this very dialogue that makes us a ‘People’ or a ‘Church’. This word of Scripture was the fundamental intuition of the great German theologian, Karl Rahner, who, in one of his first works, which was also a work of philosophy, published in 1941, at the beginning of the War, described the human being as being essentially, by his very nature, a ‘hearer of the Word’ (Hörer des Wortes), since it is by the very Word of God that we are created.