A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. We shall change that because we are reading from Saint John. When Jesus had appeared to his disciples and had eaten with them, notice that. It was not not just some kind of a weird ghost or an illusion. But after Jesus had appeared to his disciples and taken food with them, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?
Yes, lord, Peter said, you know that I love you. At which Jesus said, feed my lambs. A second time, Jesus put his question, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Yes, Lord, Peter said. You know that I love you.
Jesus replied, tend my sheep. A third time, Jesus asked him, Simon, son of John, do you love me? Peter was hurt because Jesus had asked him a third time, do you love me? So Peter said to him, Lord, you know everything. You know well that I love you.
Jesus said, feed my sheep. I tell you solemnly, as a young man, you fastened your belt and went about as you pleased. But when you are older, you will stretch out your hands and another will tie you fast and carry you off against your will. What Jesus said indicated the sort of death by which Peter was to glorify god. When Jesus had finished speaking, he said to Peter, follow me.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. It's one thing and not always an easy or a simple task to deal with one of the saints of the church. But when you put together saints Peter and Paul, well, let us say you have a problem, a real problem.
What do you say? What do you gather from these three readings that we had this morning? Well, you can take a great deal from them. The first thing that strikes me is this, god's ways are not man's. Now I know you've never heard that.
That's a very freshly discovered truth. But, you know, we can't hear that often enough that God's ways are not our ways. Being human beings, we can't escape being human. You all we've had thinkers like Plato and Descartes and others who have we say raised man and elevated him to be angels, but you know we know we're not. We know we're not.
A good spell of seasickness cures you a bad idea. We know we're human beings, and that's a good place to begin with, that we are human beings. And therefore, all our conceptions are conceptions as human beings have conceptions. Now to put this in another way, in other words, all our thinking is anthropomorphic. All that means is all our thinking is man like, human like.
How can it possibly be otherwise? And it's difficult, you see, to think of someone, even our own fellow human being, acting in a way that we do not seem to approve. And of course, here's where we have all the all the fodder for the indoor sports, you know, criticizing each one another. What would we do without that? And yet, prices don't judge people.
So that we have to understand that we do not have a halter upon god. We do not dictate to god. We have a right to expect the unexpected from god almighty. Now you just take and I want you to apply this to your own lives and to my life. I'm not preaching to you any more than I'm preaching to myself.
This is what we have got to understand that God's ways are not our ways. Look. You just take the two apostles, Peter and Paul. Without a doubt, they are at the top of the heap. They're the great apostles of the church.
Here, one was a fisherman, an ignorant, no account, anonymous fisherman from some nondescript little old town up there upon a little old lake in the north of a little old country that even the Romans were sort of embarrassed to have. He was a nothing. And look how he acted. Look at look at the backbone that hat man had. Look how quick he was with words and how irresolute and contradictory an action.
And yet Christ called him, and he said, come follow me. And we're told that he left everything, his father and his nets and his boat, and he followed Jesus Christ, a most imprudent thing to do. An unthinkable thing for a Jew to do to abandon his old father, yet he did it. He did it at the he, a a a waterman, took the word of a carpenter from Nazareth. Now we don't know all the background went into this, but the facts that we know are the ones I've given you.
Just that simple, and there's nothing more. So we say, Christ said, come follow me, and Peter follows him. And you know the kind of a man Peter was. And yet it was our lord who said, call this man Peter who was the most irresolute of the disciples. He called him a rock.
And he said, upon this rock, I will build my church. And look today in that reading how Peter was signaled out to feed the sheep, also the lambs. So there you have Peter, and there's how God acted through his son Jesus Christ with Peter. Now you come to Paul. What a contrast.
Here you have a Jew of Tarsus, a Roman citizen and yet a Jew, an educated Jew, a Pharisee, a man of culture, a man of education, a man of prestige, and a man overwhelmed with love of God and jealous of God and jealous of God's worship. And by being jealous, I mean he wanted it to be right. And because he loved that, he had to hate what was contrary and contradictory of it. So he was an absolute raging enemy of these upstarts, these so called followers of the new way who were out to destroy God's religion and God's proper worship. And so Paul is on fire, and he's giving his he's giving his all to putting them down.
I'm not exaggerating this. Much of what I've said is right there, and he himself says in this passage from the Galatians. Now from time to time, I have alluded, you might say, in a very sensitive way, you might not say, to this matter of personal revelations, to this matter of charisma, to this matter of being reborn with all the emotional and content that goes with this feeling of, whatever it means, of a great religious experience. And at all times I have expressed great distrust of it, in case you didn't get that point. But notice today, here we have one of the most dramatic religious experiences on record.
Here we have an instance of where God does speak directly to one of his creatures. In this case, it was Paul. And now notice how Paul explicitly says, what I have, I got from God directly. And he then he says, and I got it from no man, which includes women. Notice.
See, Paul was a brain. Paul Paul was a thinker. He was he he he very likely had studied some Greek philosophy. So notice he says, I not only not only did I get it from God, but I got it from no man. In other words, it's not a matter of faith which which I bring out of human beings, no matter how much credibility they may have.
It says, I got this straight from God through his son, Jesus Christ. Now please notice that as regards this this very dramatic revelation of Paul, please notice all the things that went with it. It was not in it was not in a certain sense confined to Paul. Because first of all, he got a message. And you will recall the message that Paul got in that revelation, that he was to go into a city and he'd go to a certain man, and this certain man would take care of him.
And when Paul did that, by golly, he found it exactly as he had been told in this revelation. Notice. Notice that here, just as it is with our blessed lady at the Annunciation, without the person, without Mary or without Paul saying, God, I want motives of credibility. How do I know this isn't a dream? How do I know this isn't a beg indigestion?
How do you how do I know I'm not losing my mind? How do I know that this is not an illusion? All of these things happen. We have it right over at Saint Elizabeth right now. So Paul and the Blessed Mother, they didn't say, How do I know these things aren't true?
But without their asking, notice, proof was given them. To Mary it was said, Go and look at your cousin Elizabeth, this woman who was sterile, never had a child, she's even in her old age, and she's pregnant. By golly, that's pretty good proof. And notice, we are told Mary left immediately. Maybe she just wanted to see whether that was true.
In the same way with Paul. We can't emphasize too much that we do not have reins upon God. We don't tell God how to run the show. He runs the world. He is running our lives.
He is calling each one of us as certainly as he called Saint Paul. May not have all the thunder and lightning around it. We may may not be thrown off of horses and all that kind of thing. We have more than that in a certain sense. Because if that's all we had, we would be worse off than we are in the state of confusion.
And so of all the things one might say or all the consequences one might draw from these three readings, I think this is certainly one thought we can apply to ourselves. God's ways are not my way, And my one great prayer must be, not my will, but thine be done. After all, that's the way Jesus prayed. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit. Amen.