In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. We should recapitulate what we have been reading or heard being read. First you have and this is all from Saint Luke, the first three chapters of Saint Luke. And remember, the gospel was written probably at the latest in eighty AD.
Now, you have first of all the annunciation where something very odd, something very abnormal happened. We are told that an angel appeared to this Jewish virgin who was betrothed to a man named Joseph, and she is told this is going to be the mother a mother without having intercourse with a man. And she was she knew that that was impossible. And this angel said, no. No.
It's not impossible. Nothing is impossible to God. And then this angel or whoever whatever it is tells her, look. You're a cousin Elizabeth who's an old woman who's been sterile all her life, is now three or four months or five months pregnant, and she will have a baby boy. Mary is told the sex of the child, the unborn child.
Now, before all of this, we have Zechariah, the father of Elizabeth's boy. Zechariah, while he was doing his duty in the temple, he has some kind of a vision. And he's told that his wife is going to have a child. And he expresses wonderment. He expresses doubt about it.
How in the world can it happen? Here, they're two old people and everybody knows she couldn't have a child. She was sterile. And he comes out of the temple dumb. He's lost the power of speech.
Now Mary then immediately she's up there remember, she's up in Nazareth, up near the lake. She immediately leaves to visit her cousin Elizabeth, who's down near Jerusalem. And when she comes in, we have first the salutation of Elizabeth to to Mary. Elizabeth in the text recognizes that Mary is pregnant, and she's pregnant with something very extraordinary. And then our blessed lady replies in her magnificat.
And that was the end of that episode. Now today we have the final one of where we have the circumcision, or we had it yesterday, the circumcision of John. And of course, the question came up, what name shall we give the boy? Everybody said, he'll be called Zechariah after his father. And Elizabeth says, oh, no.
He's going to be called John. Well, they can't believe it, so they asked the father who's still not speaking, is still dumb. And the and Zachariah says, His name is John. And immediately he began to speak. These are the events which immediately precede the nativity of our lord, the birth of Jesus Christ, the son of god.
Now as I've said, these texts have come under tremendous criticism in the last fifty years or so, or long before that. But you see the criticism isn't it used to be that all this was a myth, that Christ was just the creation of some community of believers, and all of that, you know. No. Of course, today, that's all gone by the board. Nobody can hold that.
Nobody today can deny that Jesus Christ actually lived, and that he had a history, and that he died, and and that he he he performed some, let us say, wonderful or marvelous deeds, and that he was an extraordinary person. Nobody can deny this at all without being being absolutely absurd. So now we're dealing with an historical figure. No question about it. So now what do the critics do?
Now they try to downgrade that that person. That's the way things go. Now I'm not a biblical scholar. I'm not up here trying and I'm the I'd be the last one to have more sense than that to say that every word that we have read here is exactly exactly the literal absolute truth. That's ridiculous.
That you can't say that about anything that's written. Nothing that's written can you can say that that is the absolute truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It's ridiculous to even think it. What I am saying is, we are given here a certain number of facts. They are presented as facts.
I another thing to remember is that, as especially as regards John, it was public knowledge. As I as I said yesterday, the the birth of John was much more a public event than the birth of Jesus Christ. First of all, there was this preparation for John, this peculiar thing that happened to his father Zachariah. Zachariah is a very prominent person. He was no ordinary person.
He was not an anonymous citizen. He was a very prominent person, Zachariah, and his wife Elizabeth. Socially, ecclesiastically, politically, any way you want to look at it. So what happened to him wasn't a public knowledge. The fact that this that Elizabeth, an old woman who was sterile from her youth, had was having a baby, that was public knowledge.
And then the extraordinary event at his birth, that as soon as Zechariah writes his name is Johnny gets back his speech. These are these are simply presented as facts, as as public facts. And associated with that, we have our blessed mother and the events of her conception, and then of her visit to Elizabeth, and of the nativity of our lord. Now, these events were written down almost certainly earlier than eighty AD. Keep that in mind.
And then keep in mind that you're dealing with an oriental milieu, an oriental culture where people had a tenacious hold on what happened, on events. They weren't quick to write them down, they were quick to remember them. Now when you put all of this together and you have someone writing, say between '70 and '80, somewhere in there, and putting these things down, which are only about a second generation at the most from people who could have been personally acquainted with them. And remember, you're going from Galilee in the North to Judea in the South, It's not just a tiny little group of people you're talking about. When you put all of this together, ask yourself, would it have would it have been terribly difficult for for Luke to get a hold of this material?
Why? And furthermore, if someone invented it, there were people living who could have either could have easily stood up and contradicted them tooth and nail. And furthermore, you have not only of course, Luke gives us the most detailed story, but the the there as I have said many times, to date there has not been a single fact to contradict the four evangelists. Keep that in mind. Not a single fact.
And keep in mind that everybody on God's earth has tried to do it. Heaven and earth has been moved to destroy the reliability of these of these accounts. So we stand in 1980 on the eve of another anniversary of our lord's birth, and let us realize. Some of you or I hope all of you heard the president's speech last night. I hope you noticed that he made an explicit, explicit statement about the divinity of Jesus Christ.
He used that word. And you see and then he he said that, of course, Ed, the whole world acknowledges Christ as a good man. Of course, I don't. I don't. If all Christ was was human, you cannot say he was a good man, a man that it could have misled millions of people down the centuries, a man who was as arrogant as he was.
If he if he is not what he said he was, the son of god, then you have only three choices or two really, that he was a maniac, crazy, and ought to be locked up, or that he was one of the world's greatest liars. Your third choice is that he was what he said he was, the son of God, and we know the son of Mary. In the name of the father, and of the son, of holy spirit. Amen.