A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus called the 12 together and gave them power and authority to overcome all demons and to cure diseases. He sent them forth to proclaim the reign of God and to heal the afflicted. Jesus advised them, take nothing for the journey, neither walking staff, nor traveling bag, nor bread, and no money. No one is to have two coats.
Stay at whatever house you enter and proceed from there. When people will not receive you, leave that town and shake its dust from your feet as a testimony against them. So the 12 set out and went from village to village, spreading the good news everywhere and curing diseases. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. There are some expressions of our blessed lord which are rather startling, or at least if they're used today, they can have startling consequences. For example, you take where he said, Don't throw your pearls before swine. I was present on an occasion when that expression was used, and it caused quite a disturbance, believe me. And yet it's a quotation from our blessed Lord, Don't throw your pearls before pigs.
If any of you have seen a pig's die, you will have some idea of what he was referring to when he said, Don't throw your pearls into a pig's dye. You couldn't recover them even with a fine tooth comb in many instances, unless it's pigs up in Norway or Denmark, where they'd know how to raise pigs, very hygienically. So that's one of the expressions of our blessed lord. Don't throw your pearls before swine. Have you ever thought what that means?
In other words, what he's saying is that there are instances, there are situations in life where you don't throw good money after bad. You get out of the mess. You put your pearls in your hip pocket and beat it, and use them to better use than throwing them into a pigsty. Now here's another sentence. Here our blessed lord sends his 12 out, and he gives them power over demons and power to cure diseases.
And he says in some villages, they're not going to accept you. Now Christ says, now you just stay in there and just stick in there and keep hitting your head against the stone wall, and in the end, why justice will triumph and truth will become king. What does he say? He says, get out. Leave the place.
Shake its dust from your feet. Get rid of it. Forget it. Now in other words, our blessed lord is telling us in no uncertain language that there are certain things in life too precious to be thrown away. And therefore, it is silly, absurd in some instances to try to do the impossible for some reason or other.
And as I say, we we have very good evidence of and justification for that in our blessed lord. Because I say that statement is don't throw your pearls before swine, that's a pretty a pretty severe statement, and it can be used with untoward consequences. Now in our own lives, you see, some people have an idea that they're supposed for example, they're supposed to love everybody, whatever that means. But, you know, we're supposed to love everybody. Alright.
Christ says love everybody. What does it mean? Does it mean we play the part of a fool Or what? When you're driving your car along the road and you there's a hitchhiker, do you stop and and let the hitchhiker in, or what do you do? Well, within the last four weeks, a priest of this archdiocese took took on a hitchhiker and got battered up good and proper.
And that for the second time. What do you do? So obviously, there's a virtue called prudence. Our blessed Lord didn't talk in these terms. He talked in much more concrete terms.
Don't throw your pearls before swine. When you go into a village and you try to give them the good news, when you try to give them the message, if they don't receive it, get out and shake the very dust of the place off your feet. Because it's hopeless. It's hopeless. You see, one of the one of the things that is very clear in this matter of people changing their lives, And sometimes what seems to be a radical change in our in our life, like as, for example, Saint Paul, from one in one minute, being a a a thorough enemy of the Christians, of these people following the new way, and then all of a sudden, he seems to do a complete flip flop and becomes the outstanding apostle to the Gentiles.
It seems in a very abrupt change. Well, the facts will show you it wasn't as abrupt as it looks. It was not as abrupt as it looked. There were plenty of evidences with Saint Paul that you were dealing with an honest, a sincere man, a man who believed in God, a man who wanted to do God's will, a man who wanted to God to do God's will no matter what it cost him. He was giving his all to what he saw to be God's will.
And then when all of a sudden he sees that he was mistaken in the direction his effort should take, he becomes just as energetic on the new course. All he's done is change course. And so it you can make applications of this in your own life. And there remember, nobody could stand up before you and tell you how you should handle any given situation that might come under this kind of principle. It's a very delicate and a very sensitive situation.
In many instances, you need a third party. You need an objective judgment. You need somebody to tell you, have the are you wasting your time? Are you throwing your pearls before swine? If you are, forget it and get out.
In many instances, we can't make that judgment ourselves. We're too close to it. We're too emotionally tied up with it. We have all kinds of feelings of of maybe of anticipated guilt if we don't do it. All kinds of emotions, sentiments, passions, feeling.
We're in no position to make a prudential judge. We need the advice of somebody else. It doesn't have to be a genius at all. Just a person of good common sense. A person of good common sense who can see the situation, they'll be able to tell you whether you're being invited to throw your pearls before swine or whether, as our blessed lord tells his disciples, you're wasting your time.
Leave that village. Kick the dust off your feet. You know, they're pretty brutal words. Now you'd say, well then when I then then when I'm faced with what seems to be a hopeless situation, I should do nothing about it. No.
That doesn't follow. That doesn't follow at all. What does follow is, in a given situation, it may be that at this time under these circumstances, you cannot do anything about it. You can't do anything about it. You know there was instances when the disciples came back to Jesus, and they said, look, Lord, we couldn't do this.
We we couldn't cure these people. We couldn't get chase out those demons, whatever that means. Notice, they faced failure, and they gave up. They came back and told Christ. And then Christ said, they are cast only out only by mortification, by fasting, by penance.
So there is something we can do. Christ didn't say to forget. Christ didn't say kick the dust off your feet and forget them. He said to leave, get out. There is no situation so hopeless that something can't be done about it with god's help.
But here, you see, you're we are no in no instance can we expect god to take away man's responsibility, his autonomy, his obligation to himself to make the decisions on his own. God couldn't can't do that without destroying us. And since he loves us, he does not destroy us. We have the power of destroying ourselves. That's an ominous power.
It's terrible, but we have it. We can stand up with Satan and say, I will not serve. And so this message of our blessed lord today, when he's sending his apostles out, notice, he's telling them this before they go. He's telling them this before they go. So they so that when it happens, they won't be taken by surprise.
They won't be startled. They'll know what to do. And so I I repeat, when we're faced with a situation that seems to come into this category, go slowly. Go slowly. It needs careful thought, yet you need advice.
But in the last analysis, our blessed lord did say unequivocally, he did say, don't throw your pearls before swine. And he also said, if they won't hear you, leave that village and cast the dust of it off your feet. Our lord said that. In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.