Catholic Commentary
Jesus's Testimony About John the Baptist (Part 2)
15He who has ears to hear, let him hear.
Matthew 11:15 is Jesus's exhortatory formula calling listeners to receptive, spiritual hearing rather than mere physical audition. The phrase signals that the preceding teaching about John the Baptist is weighty theological revelation demanding active appropriation by individual hearers, echoing Old Testament prophetic tradition while establishing that understanding requires volitional choice and interior faith.
Hearing the Gospel is not automatic—it requires an interior willingness that God's grace invites but never forces.
The Book of Revelation's echo. The phrase reaches its fullest liturgical deployment in Revelation 2–3, where the Risen Christ ends each letter to the seven churches with "He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches." This frames the entire Matthean and Lucan usage retrospectively: the voice calling to attentive hearing is not merely the earthly Jesus but the Risen Lord and the Holy Spirit, still uttering this summons to every generation of the Church.
Why "let him hear," not "hear"? The construction in Greek (ἀκουέτω — third-person imperative) is deliberately indirect. It does not command the crowd collectively; it invites each individual to a personal act of appropriation. This is the grammar of freedom. Jesus does not coerce understanding; he summons it. The revelation about John — and by implication, about Jesus himself — is there for the taking. The question is whether any given hearer will take it.
Catholic tradition reads this verse through the lens of a two-level anthropology of hearing: the external reception of sound and the interior assent of faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that faith is "man's response to God who reveals himself and gives himself to man" (CCC 26), and that this response is never coerced but always a free act enabled by grace. Verse 15 dramatizes precisely this theology: grace speaks (in the words of Jesus about John), but the human soul must cooperate with that grace to receive the revelation fully.
St. Augustine's insight is especially germane. In De Catechizandis Rudibus, he warns that not all who hear the words of Christ hear Christ himself. Hearing in the full sense requires what he calls cor mundum — a purified heart — which is itself the fruit of prior grace. This creates no contradiction for Catholic theology: God's grace is prevenient (it goes before the act of hearing) and yet human freedom is genuinely engaged.
The Council of Trent's teaching on faith (Session VI, Decree on Justification, Chapter 5) affirms that hearing the preached word is the beginning of justification — "faith comes from hearing" (Rom 10:17) — but that this hearing must be animated by interior movement, lest it remain sterile. Matthew 11:15 thus occupies a central position in the Catholic theology of evangelization and catechesis: the proclamation of the Word creates the possibility of hearing, but the Church must also form hearts capable of receiving what is proclaimed.
Furthermore, the Magisterium's teaching on the sensus fidei — the supernatural instinct of the faithful to recognize divine truth (cf. Lumen Gentium 12) — can be seen as a communal, ecclesial fulfillment of what Jesus invites in verse 15. The Church as a whole possesses "ears to hear" in a way no individual alone can, which is why attentiveness to Scripture within the community of the Church remains the normative context for genuine hearing of the Word.
In an era of relentless noise — notifications, competing narratives, algorithmic content designed to capture attention rather than form it — Matthew 11:15 reads like a diagnosis and a prescription simultaneously. Jesus's call is not to hear more but to hear better, and hearing better requires the cultivation of interior silence.
Concretely, this verse challenges the contemporary Catholic to examine the quality, not just the quantity, of their engagement with Scripture and the Church's proclamation. Do we receive the Sunday homily as mere information, or as a word addressed to us personally? Do we read Scripture looking to have our existing views confirmed, or with the humble openness that lets God surprise us — as Jesus's contemporaries were being invited to be surprised by the claim that a desert prophet was Elijah?
The ancient practice of Lectio Divina — slow, prayerful, receptive reading of Scripture — is the Church's most direct answer to Christ's imperative. Spending even ten minutes with a short passage, asking "What is the Lord actually saying to me today through this text?", trains the spiritual ear that Jesus is calling into action. The ear that hears Elijah in John can also hear Christ in the ordinary, unexpected moments of a modern life.
Commentary
Matthew 11:15 — "He who has ears to hear, let him hear."
At first glance, this seven-word saying appears almost throwaway — a transitional phrase before Jesus moves on. In fact, it is a theological thunderclap, and Matthew's placement of it here is deliberate and precise.
The immediate context. Jesus has just completed an extraordinary declaration about John the Baptist (vv. 7–14): John is the greatest man born of woman; he is the fulfillment of Malachi's prophecy of the returning Elijah (Mal 3:1; 4:5); he is the hinge between the Old Covenant and the Kingdom of heaven. This is staggering theological content — the identification of a living man as the eschatological precursor, the claim that the Kingdom is now present and being "taken by force" (v. 12, biastai). Verse 15 functions as a seal placed on this revelation, signaling: what has just been said is weighty, hidden, and demands active penetration by the hearer.
A prophetic formula with deep roots. The phrase echoes throughout the Old Testament prophetic tradition. Ezekiel repeatedly confronts Israel with the paradox of a people who have ears yet do not hear (Ezek 12:2; cf. Isa 6:9–10; Jer 5:21). Jesus consciously employs this idiom to cast himself in the role of the prophet who speaks to a spiritually dull Israel — yet with an eschatological intensification: the moment of decisive hearing is now. The stakes are no longer merely national; they are eternal.
The Parable Discourse connection. Crucially, Jesus uses this exact phrase as the concluding refrain of the Parable of the Sower (Matt 13:9) and throughout his parabolic teaching (Mark 4:9, 23; Luke 8:8; 14:35). Its appearance here in chapter 11, outside the parable discourse, alerts the reader that Jesus's plain speech about John is itself parabolic in character — it conceals as well as reveals. Not everyone standing in the crowd will understand that John is Elijah. Understanding requires a gift: the willingness to receive.
The typological-spiritual sense. The Church Fathers recognized in this formula a distinction between physical and spiritual hearing. Origen (Commentary on Matthew) observes that the human ear, as a bodily faculty, receives sound without choice — but the "ear" Jesus invokes is the interior faculty of the soul that must choose to be receptive. It is the ear of faith, not of biology. Jerome (Commentary on Matthew) connects it to the Shema of Israel (Deut 6:4 — "Hear, O Israel") and argues that Jesus is calling his listeners to the same radical, total receptivity to the Word of God that defined covenant fidelity in the Old Testament.