A reading of the holy gospel according to Mard. Let us revise that. This is an excerpt from Saint Luke. While Jesus was in one of the cities, there came a man full of leprosy. When the man saw Jesus, he fell on his face and besought Jesus.
Lord, if you will, you can make me clean. And Jesus stretched out his hand, touched the man saying, I will be clean. Immediately, the leprosy left the man. And Jesus charged him to tell no one, but to go show yourself to the priest and make an offering for your cleansing as Moses commanded for a proof to the people. But so much the more the report of his cure went abroad And great multitudes gathered to heed to hear Jesus and to be healed of their infirmities.
Now notice this, but he withdrew to the wilderness and he prayed. Jesus did. And this is the good news of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
There are many items in this particular excerpt from our lord's life and this notice this isn't a parable or presented as a myth or as a fictional story. This is supposed to be history. It is something we can point to as happening as having happened in our Lord's life. There are a number of very odd and mysterious things about it. As a matter of fact to let you in on a little secret, our Lord's whole existence was mysterious.
But somehow, some people, sometimes, somewhere have an idea that we in our great and glorious amplitude of intelligence are supposed to embrace it all, to understand it all, and yet we understand everything about nothing. Now the point I like to make this morning is this, that our lord withdrew by himself to pray. The reason this I stress that is that today you hear so much stress about community, about man being a social being. You know it's phrased in all kinds of ways, but we are losing sight or let let me rephrase that. It is possible this is much safer.
It is possible to lose sight of the basic truth that there is no such thing as collective salvation anymore than there is any such thing as collective guilt. We enter into salvation. We are saved singly, individually. Now we're losing sight of this. Not that everything that we're doing in this line is wrong, of course not.
But the point is the basic truth, the basic fact is there is no such thing as society. There is no such thing as community. All you have are individual human beings. There's no epiphenomenon called society or humanity or the poor or the rich. These are all these are all fictions of the mind.
With a reality of the end they have a reality but not as a concept. The reality is where? In the nitty gritty actuality of individual human beings. Individual human beings. Religion is personal and we must never forget it.
There's no such thing as collective salvation. There is no such thing as collective confession or collective penance or any of this stuff. It's individual. We talk about the group. There's no such thing as group.
You see in some languages we would be able to express that in an abstract term as groupiness. We have some words like that in English like humanity. But we're very scarce of these abstract terms in English. So there's a great danger here, a real danger. Grand Maison years ago, years ago I was in the seminary and that was before 1935.
He wrote a very important book that every seminarian in those days had and the title of it was La Religion Personnel. There is no other kind. There is no other kind. And we have gotten so way so far away from this. And it can never be forgotten because when you forget the individual human being, what have you left?
What have you left? There you have these fine phrases of Marxism which elevates the these abstract terms into concrete realities which don't don't exist. They don't exist. Now our blessed lord here we have the practically, you can go back and now I'm not exaggerating. In every important incident or happening in his life, he withdrew to be by himself alone in prayer.
Every single time. No man is collectively born and no man is and collectively dies, and no man collectively has his sins forgiven, and no man collectively has his sins washed free and he enters into the sanctifying grace of God which we call the road to salvation. It's individual. Individual personal religion. Now, you see, the church is a viable institution.
Institution. It's a concrete living thing made up of human beings. It has no reality outside of the individual human being wherever they'd be, in the sanctuary, outside the sanctuary, wherever. The church has these magnificent concepts of the mystical body. How often do you hear that phrase?
It's being forgotten. We talk about community. What do you mean? What do we mean? A YMCA, Salvation Army, welfare WPA, what?
We have a concept called mystical body where we are one with the church. And when we go back to our blessed lord, see, he didn't shortchange what we call social worship. He didn't he our blessed lord did not exclude what we call technically social worship. That is where I join my brethren in some kind of prayer or if it's the prayer of the church we call that or should call it liturgical. Now, our our blessed Lord gives us an example in all of this.
We find him where? In the synagogue where he rose and took his place and where he read and where he spoke and where his hearers were astounded because Christ in the synagogue spoke as one with authority. He just didn't take a book and say, take it. He spoke as one with authority and they were astounded that the son of Joseph the carpenter could be so eloquent and so learned. So and this is a and and look at all the times our lord went up to Jerusalem to the temple.
Look how his family obeyed the well, the what shall I call it? The obligations of being a good Jew. They fulfilled them and Christ did too. Take this instance right today, he cures the leopard. The law says that when someone is cured whatever this leprosy business is, they must go and present themselves to the high priest and be declared clean.
And those words are in quotations in the text. It's very difficult to give that out. But anyway, notice how our Lord follows that. Notice how he notice how our Lord uses externals. For example in today's text, why all this fuss about putting out his hand and using words?
Did Christ have to do that? And yet will be very careful to say in almost every instance where our Lord cures somebody, he goes through some kind of an external manifestation. That's so that people can see and to hear what's going on. You can't tell me that Christ had to take mud and smear it on somebody's eyes or ears or take spittle in order to cure them. Why did he do it?
Well, I don't know. He never told me. But the thing is he did it. And so like in everything else, if you want to know how to be a Christian, look at Christ. It's that simple or that terribly hard difficult way.
But that's what we have to do. I say look at Christ as well as we can see him and we're and we'll never never go wrong, never go wrong if we try to model our thinking and our actions on Jesus Christ. Notice I said thinking first, That's terribly important. And so today, I mean in our times, January 1981, we have to reaffirm this. We have I know that there have been times in the church when we have been excessively individualistic and forgot the fact that man is a social being, but that's not that's just an exaggerate just a mistake.
That's just an error. We say that was an error, we ought to correct it. You cannot divide a human being, you can't slice him up. It's not a lemon meringue pie. We are a totality, simultaneously social, simultaneously individual and personal.
You can't you can't separate the out the two out. If you do, you're in trouble, you are in grave trouble. Grave trouble. Because man is not a collectivity. You man is not a herd.
Human beings are individual personal things, individually created by God almighty. Every single human being we believe is the creation of God. I don't care how the biological process goes, he's not a human being till he has a soul. And that we say is a unique, unique creation of God and that's a individual human being. And our holy father, present holy father slamming this around hard as he calls it, the irreversible value of the individual.
He stressed it in Poland, he stressed it down in Mexico and Brazil. And so we come back to this idea when we kneel down before God, we should do it in union with our fellow human being. We are social beings. But when you do it, you've got to do it as an individual. Religion is a personal thing.
I believe I'm sorry. I confess my sins. I'm responsible. Oh God have mercy on me, a sinner. You can't sin for me.
You can't assume my guilt and I can't assume yours. And this is a lot of malarkey, this collective guilt stuff. Just you see if there's nothing but collective guilt, how about collective responsibility for the good? You don't hear anything about that. And so today, I've been away for a few days, I've been having my little troubles too, but and my joys.
But the thing is, there are times when one thinks seriously about one's relationship with God Almighty. And when you do, you'll find yourself standing alone before God. The name of the Father, and the Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.