A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. On one occasion, in a certain town, a man full of leprosy came to Jesus. Seeing Jesus, the man bowed down to the ground and said to Jesus, Lord, if you will to do so, can cure me. Jesus stretched out his hand to touch the man and said to him, I do will it be cured. Immediately, the leprosy left him.
And Jesus then instructed the man, tell no one, but go, show yourself to the priest. Offer for your healing what Moses prescribed. That should be approved for them. Jesus' reputation spread and more, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be cured of their maladies. He often retired to deserted places and prayed, And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. The last sentence I want you to carefully note because it is often overlooked. This is Saint Luke speaking, and after this statement now notice that statement has to do with first of all one miracle, the cure of the the cure of the leper, the man with leprosy. But then it says that great crowds followed Jesus to hear him and to be cured of their maladies. So here you have a picture of Jesus with a with great crowds around him, busy being thronged by them, scarcely finding time for anything private.
Now here's the sentence. He often retired to deserted places and prayed. The first thing I want you to notice is this, that our blessed lord, when the man asked him to cure him, said, if you will, you can cure me. And Jesus says, I do will it. And then he reached out and touched the man.
Why? Por quoi, Varun. Why did he do it? All he had to do was to will it. The man said that, if you will it, it'll be done.
Christ said, I will it. So then he stretches out his hand and touches the leper. Why? Why did he have to touch him? The answer is he didn't have to.
Now if you'll notice, if you'll just read the four gospels with this thing in mind, just keeping a it's a good way to read the gospels or any one of the gospel. Just take one idea and follow it through. You'll be amazed how you pick up things. But the point is this, if you'll watch our blessed lord and his miracles, there is always an external action to them. He cures the man of deafness.
All he had to do was to cure him. He didn't have to go through any foolishness like making mud over the spittle and putting it in the guy's ear. What do you have to do that for? The the young man being brought out of the the village dead. The only son of the widow of Nayib.
Our blessed Lord touched the beer, we're told. Why? Well, I don't know why for sure, but I only know that this is the way it is. That as far as I can recall, every single miracle that Jesus did for the public, he accompanied it with some kind of an external action. Well, now you're beginning to see where I'm going.
Because that's you see, this is the great problem of religion. Remember, religion the definition well, there are all kinds of definition. The word itself means to bind together. That's all. Like you bind a sheep of wheat together.
But religion means the the worship of God Almighty. Now what does worship mean? It means to know God, to love God, to do his will. Notice all of this, there'll be external actions as consequences. But true worship of God is the recognition of God by my intellect, and an act of love by an act of my will.
Now, I'm not putting this on the basis of some psychology. I don't care what you can believe in the will or not, or believe in the intellect or not. I'm only saying that true worship of God has to be the act of a human being. It has to be a human act. The the most magnificent beast of the fields, the forest, the plain, the prairie, can only worship God as a dumb beast, d u m b.
And that's a lot. It's only it's only where you get into the to the higher echelon of human knowledge, human love, that you have the obligation of worship on a human level. And that means an act of the intellect and an act of the will. We say the definition of prayer is the is the raising of the mind and the heart to God, to to acknowledge his existence, to praise him, to glorify him, to and to bake his forgiveness for sin. Notice, these are all acts of man of of man's as a rational being.
There's nothing in here about feeling or or getting down on your knees or putting on special clothing or going to a special place or or having special music or having incense or an altar or candles or all this rigmarole that we have surrounding religion. There's nothing there about building a temple or having a tabernacle. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The true worship of God is the worship of a human being as a human being. And notice this, today it says Luke Luke says that Christ often went off into a deserted place, not a desert place, a deserted place to be by himself alone with God Almighty. And our blessed Lord himself said that when you prayed, go up into your chamber, go up into your bedroom, close the door, throw the bolt lock, double lock it if you want to be secure, and then be alone with God. Well, having said all of this, you say, Well, what are we doing at the church? What am I doing up here with these things on?
Well, see, this is my point. Because just as surely as our blessed Lord often, often went off by himself to pray, to be alone with god. Just as often we're told he went into the temple to pray. He went into the synagogue to pray. He went down with his fellow human beings, took his place at the Sabbath worship.
He took his turn reading. He took his turn commenting upon the law. He went down into the he went to Jerusalem at the proper times to offer proper gifts. He was extremely careful in being faithful and obedient to all the feasts where you have the whole rabble coming into Jerusalem. It must have been a bloody stinking mess.
Everybody bringing in sacrifices and slaughtering cows and sheep and goats and doves and stuff. Must have been really repulsive. But he did it, he went along with all of it. And when he performed a miracle he stretched out his hand and touched the leper. Why?
You know today we're in a very we're in a very kind of a self contradictory position. I just got a letter from the liturgical commission. That's the group of people who try to tell us how to run the liturgy. And they tell us that we're having problems in planning liturgies. Notice, planning liturgies.
See, we used to go to mass. We used to go to offer the holy sacrifice of the mass, but now we are planning liturgies. What does this mean? It means that people today are extremely occupied and preoccupied with surrounding the mass, the holy sacrifice of the mass, with a proper atmosphere. That we go to worship God not with just a separated intellect and not just a disembodied will, But we we are bound to worship God in the totality of our being as human beings.
And so today you have this attitude and you get you almost get the impression that the efficacy of the mass depends upon our having proper singing and proper processions and proper vestments and proper readings and all these other things that we're concocting. As if the mass itself for its efficacy, the that's the keyword. Dependent on these things. When we know that the sacraments, by the definition of the church, work ex opere operato, which means the grace of God comes not from our contribution to the sacrament, but from the sacrament itself. I don't add anything to the mass by surrounding it with all the pomp and circumstances that money and wealth and talent can give it.
Not one iota bid. Then you say, then why do we do these things? Why did Jesus stretch out his hand and touch the leper? Why did he reach out and touch the beard of the dead boy? Why was our blessed lord most faith in all the religious observances of the Jews?
And they had a lot of them. Why did Jesus go up to Jerusalem on the feast days to celebrate? Why did Jesus often, often go out by himself alone into deserted places? Because he was a human being. He was truly human.
And the worship of God means that we we join all of this together. See, this is a big subject, folks. But remember, we've got to keep you've got to get it straight in your mind, otherwise you're going to be pulled all in all directions by what's going on today. But the main thing is we've got to hold it all together. It isn't an either or, it's a both and.
But you see, in thinking of all these appurtences of worship, there's a danger of overlooking worship. We can turn the church into a concert hall. We can turn the church into a theater. We can turn the church into a country club. This has all been done.
Well none of those things are all very good, but they're not necessarily worship of God Almighty. And so the the way the the the answer is this, we have to know what true worship is, and we have to use the means to worship God. And the best example we have in this, as in so many other things, is Jesus Christ. The name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.