A reading of the holy gospel according to Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, not everyone who says to me, lord, lord, shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my father who is in heaven. The verb there is to do. I welcome back on that. Everyone then who hears our lord is speaking now.
Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. Then the rain fell and the floods came, the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall because it had been founded on a rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. Then the rain came and fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell. And great was the fall of it, And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. The other evening, I was in a at a dinner party, I guess that's what you call these affairs, and we got on a number of topics and dear old Martin Luther came up, you know, in the ecumenical spirit and all that kind of thing. And I referred to him as a heretic and one very good Catholic said, well, what you say he was a Luther was a heretic? How? Well, the first thing I said, and it wasn't too well said, was, well, what what did he think about the Eucharist?
But then we got on this other topic, faith and good works. Now after that fine celebration of the dinner party, I came back and I got sir Thomas More out, who is now a saint of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Thomas More, while he was in the tower waiting to be executed, he never knew what minute it was going to happen, and he spent over a year and a half under those conditions. He wrote a dialogue of comfort against tribulation. And in the very so I came back and reread the first part of that where Thomas More deals with this question, which is brought up in today's gospel in the words of our lord.
That is what is the relation between faith and good works? Now as you probably will recall, Martin Luther went when he was about 25 no. He's more than that, about 27 years old. He went through after a very a period of great discomfort and angst as we say, frustration when he hit the heights of feeling close to God and when he hit the depths when he almost despaired, something happened to him. He tells us it that it did.
And it had to do with his reading of Saint Paul that salvation is by faith. And of course, Luther added one little word, alone. Alone. That is not in Saint Paul. Now the great thrust of Luther was that what counts is faith and what doesn't count is what you do.
That the totality of salvation is faith. Now you see, when you get into this today, everybody is saying, well, what did he mean? Maybe he didn't mean what he seems to be to be meaning. We're dealing with translations. Hundreds of years have gone by.
It's the same thing with all this business of Newman and the Oxford movement and the relationship of the English church to the Roman Catholic. The point is ask the contemporary what they thought. And when when Saint Thomas More faces up to this right in the beginning of this dialogue of comfort against tribulation, which he wrote in the tower when he knew he was going to die at any minute. This is important. He was writing this to himself.
Now in the very beginning of that dialogue, Thomas More takes up this question, and he says he is not going to debate it. He said, first of all, because the protestants can't agree on what they mean. Secondly, because they change their attitudes. And thirdly, he says, because we can resolve this in love. Because we all agree in some way or other that we've got to do good.
See? Remember that. However, a a good honest to god Protestant figures this out, they are still responsible for doing good. This is a bit of a little bit of inconsistency in there, but this is the way it is. And so here is the great mystery.
I'm not going to solve this. I've I've touched on this many times, but there is probably no single truth of religion lives down for this. You see how different the atmosphere is? How many times have you read within the last year a discussion about the dogma dogma of the Catholic church? Everything is about morals, which comes down to such things as a celibacy of the clergy, artificial contraception, abortion, sterilization, these are all moral questions, every one of them.
But in those days, the sixteenth century, the century of reformation, men's minds and women's minds were on truth. What is the teaching of god about this? Now I'm not condemning Luther, but because he reacted to a situation of his times that demanded reaction. I've just been reading Erasmus, And he's he's another very much of a contemporary of Luther and Thomas More and all this was happening. He was shuttling back and forth between The Netherlands and down into Switzerland and down to Italy and over to England.
So Erasmus is a very good contemporary witness to what was going on. So Luther and of course, you're going into a lot of things, but remember that in Luther's time, at least in Germany that Luther knew, there was an overwhelming emphasis upon doing. And there were exaggerations and aberrations and great errors about it because men were a little bit enthusiastic about raising money for Saint Peter's. So let's admit that. Let's admit that the occasion called for reformation and Erasmus, and there were plenty of people in Christendom who wanted a reformation, who wanted a council, but they couldn't get it going.
But you see, how can you reconcile any such idea that salvation is by faith alone with what you've just read, which are the words of our lord. Now take James without faith without good works is dead, said Saint James. And Luther, of course, kicked that epistle out. He called it the straw epistle. So how do you reconcile this?
How do you reconcile the great truth that we cannot save ourselves, that salvation is from God and Jesus Christ through faith. That is absolutely true without any shadow of a doubt. Nothing that man can do as man, as a human being, as a creature of God exclusively as that, nothing that he can do can bring him into salvation. One iota bit. We needed a savior, Jesus Christ.
But now at the same time, you've got to bring in what our lord says on more than one occasion just to put it on that basis, that we have a part to play in this, an essential part, a part that is absolutely necessary that God does not save me against my will. I can thwart it. I can frustrate it. I can live without cooperating with God's grace. I can do all of these things.
I can stand up with this first Adam and say, I will not serve. Non servion. I can do it. Therefore, you had these two great truths that salvation comes from god through faith, and yet I have my essential contribution to make. I am responsible for my eternity.
Think it over.