A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Just remember what I said the other morning with regard to our blessed lord and that his remarks about how we should entertain when we give a big dinner. So today, our lord is speaking to the multitudes. And Saint Luke says, now great multitudes went with Jesus, and he turned and said to them, the multitudes, if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and his own mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters, yes, even his own self, he cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple.
For which of you desiring to build a tower does not first sit down and count how much it will cost, whether he has enough to complete it. Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and cannot finish the building, everyone who sees it will begin to mock him saying, this man began to build and was not able to finish. Or what king going to encounter another king in war will not sit down first and take counsel whether he can with 10,000 men, meet him who comes against him with 20,000. And if not, while his enemy is yet a great way off, he sends the of world. The And cannot be my the disciple.
People And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. You may ask, was anyone so foolish as to take literally what our lord today said about hating your mother and your father and your mother and your kids and everything? The answer is yes. My considered opinion, viewing the way human beings have conducted so far as I've read some of their histories, nothing is so foolish that you can't get a crowd to follow it.
And sometimes, the more foolish it is, the more people follow it. Did our lord say what we've just read? There's no there's no doubt about it. What did he mean by this? Is he going around telling children to hate their mothers and fathers, wives to hate their husbands, husbands to hate their wives, everybody to hate everybody else, and that the standard of following him is a universal hate of everything else?
And when he says that all you have to do to follow him is to take his cross up and surrender everything to him, is he take is he telling us that with absolute literalness? What is Christ saying if he isn't if he isn't indulging in the absurd? And pronouncing and a a doctrine, if you take it seriously, literally, that would contradict all his whole, view of life, his whole conception of duty of parents and children and family and the rest. So what is Christ telling us here? Well, he's telling us one thing for sure.
We have to make a choice and that a human life is involved in great complexity. We may try to simplify it, but it it no matter what we do, it is involved, it is complex, it is multifaceted. And the good life, the life of following Jesus Christ means weaving our way among it all. And there's the problem. There's the problem.
Is a husband not supposed to love his wife and his children and support them and work hard for them? Isn't the wife supposed to do her part in keeping the family together and sew down for all whatever our vocation or the place we find ourselves in life? We have duties to perform. We have responsibilities. There are the 10 commandments.
Honor your father and your mother is one of them, I believe. And so our blessed lord is asking here for nothing less than everything. But in doing this, the everything he asks for includes everything we ought to be doing. There's the point. There's the point.
I can't love God and hate my neighbor. Saint Paul has said this. Saint James has said this. I can't go out and tell everybody how much I love God and do nothing, nothing at all in the way of service. Faith without good works, James says, is dead.
And Luther kicked that little letter out. He said it was furious, the straw epistle. It so contradicted some of his pet doctrines. And so here again, what our lord is saying is very simple, but it is so universal that we have to put him first above everything, even above ourselves. The first commandment isn't to love self.
The first commandment isn't to love neighbor. The first commandment is to love god. And the second is to love self, and the third is to love neighbor. This makes sense. This is Christian.
But today, we start at the very we start with number three and make that everything. We are great humanitarians. We are great altruists. And so today, as we listen to these words of our lord, they are severe. But remember, let's again, as I've said morning after morning, let's bring this doctrine into our daily lives.
If we don't, it's foolishness. Foolishness. Foolishness. Rene Bazin has a a I forget the novel in which this occurs, but he has a a very well, it's was dramatic to me as I recall reading it. He has this very good French lady going to mass every single morning, being very pious, being good to the poor, the parish, a a really ideal woman.
She's a she's a dragon with her own need when she gets home. See, it's so easy to be nice outside of our circle. As I say, it's easy to love the Eskimo or the the underprivileged in India or something of that sort. What we're asked to do is to love God in our daily lives, and that means to put him first in everything, in all our simplest choices. And if you try that, you will see that that's calls for a pretty large measure of heroism heroism because Christ never never remotely told us was easy.
Now how do you how do you account for this, a little parable that's stuck in between here? First, our lord telling us how we have to love how we have we have to hate everybody and put him first. He ends with that, then he puts this business in about building a house. What's your what's your understanding of that? My understanding is this, he's giving us a warning.
He's saying, look, what I'm telling you is something big. It's a magnificent thing you're being asked to do. Can you do it? Have you the resources? The answer is, Lord, I do not have the resources.
I can't do that on my own. And then as I hasten to add, furthermore, you never asked me to do this on my own. As a matter of fact, Lord, you said I can't do anything on my own. That's what Jesus said. So let's take him at his word.
Let's put it all together. And when we put it all together, there is when we come to the true Jesus Christ and his doctor. And one of its most dominant, if not the dominant truth is his first in everything. Name of the father, the son, the holy spirit. Amen.