“If today you hear God’s voice, harden not your hearts.” We hear this challenging refrain in our psalm today, because we all know it is easy for our hearts to become hardened in different ways. As believers of Christ, we certainly do not want hard hearts, but in the busy world we live in, in the cynicism, criticisms, frustrations, and anger that seem to be everywhere, we may easily develop hearts that get hard and jaded. The grace of God calls out to us today in the holy season of Lent, challenging us to renew our hearts and to return to the Lord.
But what characterizes our modern world is nothing new. In our first reading, it says that Jeremiah proclaimed God’s message to a stiff necked people, to a people who had definitely hardened their hearts to God and to life in general. God reminds his people through Jeremiah that he had already sent them prophets and servants, but that often they had been rejected. We also can reject God’s message in our minds, in our hearts, and in our actions. We do so as we get mad in traffic, as we lash out in an email or a text in anger, as we fail to show compassion and mercy to our brothers and sisters, in the way we do not make our faith a priority in life.
English author Charles Dickens wrote: “Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.” That is good advice. Let us not turn our hearts away from him, not matter how much of a temptation that may be. Let our hearts not become hardened.
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