Reading and Questions for Reflection 

Lenten Series Week 1March 5: Called to Hear

Excerpt from The Listening Life: Embracing Attentiveness in a World of Distraction, by Adam S. McHugh. InterVarsity Press, 2015. 

Listening is often presented as a balm for making our relationships go more smoothly and peacefully, for making us more aware of the needs of people around us. The interpersonal reasons are valuable and essential, but I think there are also deep intrapersonal reasons for learning how to listen. When listening has been hard, these personal motivations are what have kept me going. I have devoted and redevoted myself to listening because it is making me into the kind of person I wish to be. The beginning of discipleship is listening. At the sound of Jesus’ voice, his first followers dropped their nets and followed him.

Of course, discipleship must involve more than one episode of listening; it is an ongoing journey of listening. Disciples are walking listeners. If we think that discipleship is lacking in today’s church, then perhaps we should place an emphasis on people learning how to listen. Listening is important enough to Jesus that he devotes his first parable to it (Mark 4: 1-20). In Mark’s Gospel Jesus frames the parable of the sower with the opening word “Listen!” and the closing exclamation “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” Overtly about a farmer indiscriminately scattering seed on different types of soil, the story is actually about different types of hearers. There are the path hearers—those who don’t really hear at all, deflecting and dismissing Jesus’ words. There are the rocky listeners, who let the word penetrate a little but then reject it because of adverse voices of struggle and persecution. Third are the thorny listeners, who listen a while longer but slowly allow the subtle power of seductive voices—the accumulation of wealth and the sparkle of material things—to suffocate the word. Finally are the true and fruitful listeners, those who receive the word deep into themselves, where it does its proper work of flowering and bearing fruit. This last group would seem to be the ones who, in Jesus’ words, have “ears to hear,” by which he seems to link listening and comprehension, treating ears as organs of understanding. 

Those with hearing ears have a level of attunement to the deeper meanings embedded in Jesus’ teaching. Later in Mark’s Gospel Jesus cautions his followers to be careful about how they listen, because how they listen will determine how much they understand. What seems to separate the different types of listeners is the amount of effort that they put into listening. What we lack in understanding we can make up for in asking questions. The true listeners are those who stay, who crowd around Jesus and ask him the interpretation of the parable. This is the kind of listener God desires: those who pursue and seek and relentlessly question. They sit with Jesus’ words like an old friend that you know yet really don’t know, chewing and digesting, continuing to seek greater clarity and depth of understanding. They don’t just ask the first question; they also ask the second and third questions. They exhaust others with their questions. As has been noted by many biblical scholars, the parable of the sower not only describes different types of hearers, but it leads to the very divisions it describes. Jesus’ parables sift out those who are hard of hearing, who merely want to be entertained and see the new rabbinic celebrity. Those hearers scatter after Jesus finishes teaching while the true listeners stay.

I taught this parable to college students for years, and I marveled at how our classroom setting would inevitably mirror the original setting of the parable. After the class was over, most students would head back to the dorms, but there would be one or two students who stayed and asked question after question or wrote on their manuscripts, laboring to understand what Jesus was saying and the implications it had for their lives. I always wondered whether these were the students with ears to hear. 

Listening makes us into disciples—those who learn, who follow and who submit to the Lord. And listening also makes us into servants. What is a servant if not an obedient listener? We could rephrase Jesus’ famous words about servanthood like this and keep his same meaning: “You know that the Gentile rulers tell people what to do, and their great ones expect to be heard. It is not so among you; whoever wishes to be great must listen, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be listener to all” (see Mark 10: 42-43). In Jesus’ upside-down kingdom, the tables are turned. Those in the position to tell people what to do must become listeners. In the Gentile world, listening flows from the bottom up, but in Jesus’ kingdom, listening is top-down. Too often we try to gain control with our words. Listening, done well, gives power away. A commitment to listening is one of the best antidotes for power and privilege. A servant listener does not dominate the conversation. Servants take the attention off themselves and focus their attention on the needs and interests of others. The call to servanthood is at the heart of the gospel; it is the call to humble ourselves, to empty ourselves of our own agendas and egos and submit ourselves to the Lord and to others. Servant listening is a practice of presence, in which we set aside what might distract us and what we think should happen in a moment or conversation. It is an act of humility, in which we acknowledge that no matter who we are listening to, we come to learn. Servant listening is an act of surrender, in which we lay down our verbal weapons, our preconceived notions, our quick advice and our desire to steer the conversation toward ourselves. We release our grasp on the terms and direction of the conversation. 

We love to talk about listening. It’s easier than actually listening. There is much lip service paid to listening, but listening is a service of the ear, the mind and the heart. Listening is an act of servanthood, and serving is hard. There are no accolades in serving. When a servant is doing his job, no one notices. If we wish to imitate Jesus and become servants, we must learn how to listen.

Questions for Reflection

1. Read Mark 1:16-20. What do you think the disciples heard in Jesus’s call that made them leave their nets and follow? 
2. Read Mark 4:1-20. What kind of hearing do you think you usually fit into?
3. Can you remember a time when someone ministered to you by listening?
4. The author says, “Listening, done well, gives power away.” Do you agree? Why or why not? 
5. Where do you think you are being called to listen?