A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Once on a Sabbath day, Jesus walked through the standing grain. His disciples felt hungry, so they began to pull off the heads of grain and to eat them. We'll be doing that right now practically. The wheat's coming into heading.
Now when the pharisees looked and saw this, they protested. Look here. Your disciples are doing what is not permitted on the Sabbath. Jesus replied, have you not read what David did when he and his men were hungry? How He entered god's house and ate the holy bread, a thing forbidden to him and to his men or to anybody except priests.
Have you not read in the law how the priests on temple duty can break the Sabbath rest without incurring guilt? I assure you, there is something greater than the temple here. If you understood the meaning of this text, it is mercy I desire, not sacrifice. You would not have condemned these innocent men. The son of man is indeed the lord of the Sabbath, and this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. I do not know how much or how little of what the first reading laid before you hit home. But here's Hezekiah, mortally ill, and he's told that he's going to die. And he crumbles. He can't stand the thought.
He cries out with tears and a certain amount of bitterness, telling God how good a man he had been, And why should he be treated this way, and then he gets a reprieve. Isaiah comes and with the word of God said, well, we'll give you fifteen more years. So now Hezekiah is all all smiles. Everything's just fine. It's like a person going to the hospital and walking out instead of being carried out on a stretcher.
Then, of course, the Responsorial Psalm took up this idea of death and how Christ has saved us from dying. He hasn't saved us from dying at all. We all die. But one thing he saved us from is the fear of dying. The The fear of death.
First of all, for any human being with half of a brain cell working, let's say a quarter of a half of a brain cell working, who thinks he's got in this life a lasting habitation, that is going to go on in this life indefinitely, is crazy. He's absolutely crazy. He's not with it or any words you want to use, because all he has to do is just to get up some morning and look around. He can pick up his morning paper and look at the obituaries. Does it occur to him that in a day that he doesn't know his name will occur there?
For absolutely he can be. That's one thing we can be sure of. Conception and birth are pretty pragmatic, especially today. But there's nothing pragmatic or problematic about dying. It's a certainty.
And anybody who lives thinking it's not is absolutely out of it. He's not with it. He's unreal. And that goes for those who are on the other side of the sexual barrier. We all ought to realize this, but do we?
A long time ago, we had a poet in The United States who wrote a famous poem called Thanatopsis, A View of Death. Now we can shove this idea away. It's who in the world in his right mind will think it's a pleasant thought? Death is awful. In the physical order, death is the worst thing that can happen to us.
Absolutely the worst thing. And let us realize it, I said in the physical order, because that's the end of your physical life. Cutting down a tree may be very good for society, but it's not good for that tree. And so death is not a pleasant thing. Of course, saints have gone gone through it and embraced it, but they were saints.
And you see, they were saints because they had grasped God's truth. It isn't that they thought they weren't going to die. It isn't that they may not have and had an apparts of dying, but they had no fear of dying. They knew the realities of being alive. They knew that one of its realities was the reality of dying.
And that can be absolutely crushing, absolutely crushing. No question about it. Some time ago a book came out titled On Death and Dying, and this woman had made a very positivistic, that is, she just gathered the data from the hospital out in Chicago. And when patients learned that they had a terminal illness, the first reaction was to be crushed. Now that's perfectly normal.
I don't care how much faith we have. It's perfectly normal to recoil from the thought of death, but it isn't being rational to think we will never die. It isn't being sane. It isn't being scientific. It isn't being having any common sense.
You name it. To think that we are going to go on in this world indefinitely. Because it just is not so, and we know it's not so. But we don't think it will happen to me. Now this text this morning is very it's extremely human.
It's extremely human. And I think the thing we should bring home to ourselves are some of the truths here. First, the inescapability about dying, but the fact that Jesus Christ took away that fear. Now when I talk like this, I'm not talking in the terms of the world. It that's ridiculous.
Be because Christ is not of this world, and his kingdom is not of this world, and we are in his kingdom. Therefore, we are not of this world. Perfectly valid syllogism. And therefore, from a Christian point of view, death does not have that fear, or it shouldn't. I say it shouldn't.
We may recoil, of course. Everything in our physical makeup rejects the idea of dying. Let's face it. But there may be something else. There may be something that overrides that, overrides it.
It doesn't negate it, but it overrides it. And that's what Jesus Christ came to do. Look how Hezekiah this morning, he rejoices that he has fifteen more years. What happens at the end of the fifteen more years? The patient walking out of the hospital, cured as we say, for how long?
For how long? I referred to Monte Cassino several times in the past seven days, but here when you live in an institution, it goes back to the fifth century, you get a perspective of time that gives you some idea of how long a single human life is, whether you add ten years to it or take it away. What is it? And so this, I say the thought of dying, it's not the thought, it's the prospect of dying. It's something we're going to get.
It's going to happen to each one of us. That is one thing we can be absolutely sure of. No one in this world will take a bet against your dying. It's just a question of when. Just a question of when.
And as our blessed lord did not change that, we are inescapably tied to dying, but we are not inescapably tied to the fear of dying. That is what Jesus Christ freed us from. We are freed of that horror. We know who we are. We are the kingdom of Jesus Christ put there by baptism.
We are carrying the light. We are carrying the light. And the years may be many or they may be few. They come to an end as we count years, but the end of counting years is just the beginning of counting eternity. In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.