A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus dismissed the crowds and went home. His disciples came to Jesus with this request, explain for us the parable of the weeds in the field. Jesus said in answer, and this doesn't clarify the situation very much, Jesus answered, the farmer sowing good seed is the son of man. The field is the world.
The good seed, the citizens of the kingdom. The weeds are the followers of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the world, while the harvesters are the angels. Just as weeds are collected and burned, so it will be at the end of the world. The son of man will dispatch his angels to collect from his kingdom all who draw others to apostasy and all other evildoers.
The angels will hurl them into the fiery furnace where they will wail and grind their teeth. Then the saints will shine like the sun in their father's kingdom. Let everyone heed what he hears. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. If you should take the time to go back and read this text in in its continuity, this parable of the sower and going out to sow seed has has several shifting perspectives. What's the seed and who's the sower? And it's a it's a very complicated parable, and I'll just leave it as it is. Our lord spoke it, and what's good enough for him is good enough for me.
There's one thing that comes through very clearly, that first of all, there's such a thing as salvation, and there's such a thing as losing it. That's perfectly clear. That's the first that's obvious. And our blessed lord stresses it. And, of course, this isn't the only passage.
This truth of of Jesus Christ that there is such a thing as salvation and that there is also the possibility of losing it, of missing it, of not achieving it, that also is a very Christian truth and most unpalatable to many people. Because I'll tell you what, that's that's fear. That's simply foxhole religion. To love God, to love neighbor because you're afraid of going to hell. What kind of what kind of courage?
What kind of humanity? How does that fit in with the dignity of man and his nobility? Well, sometimes we have little dignity and less nobility. I see the good and approve it and do the opposite, said Terence. And he was a good first, honest to God, Roman pagan poet.
And Saint Paul comes along and says, the good that I would, I do not, and the evil that I would not, that I do. Where is our dignity and our nobility? And we say when it's over, how in the name of God could I have ever done that? You see, since our dear friend late lamented Jean Jacques Rousseau, we have this great idea of man's pristine goodness, and he was right. Man did have a pristine goodness.
Somewhere along the line, he lost it. There is some reality called the fall. It certainly corresponds to something, The fall. We are not in the same situation as we were before it. There man was.
Man did have a pristine and early, a primitive, an elementary goodness, But something happened, and it's continuous. And we're the evidence of it is all around. Now to explain this this contrariety in human nature, to explain this conflict that we're in, And don't forget there is a conflict. Life is not just fun and games. It is not just simply, singing the praises of the lord in complete security that all is well because god's in his heaven.
It is not that way. We are, in many ways, walking on thin ice, or you we are walking on a tight rope with a chasm beneath us. And these figures of speech are mild compared to what Jesus Christ used. We can make it or we can lose it, and it's in the palm of our hand. And yet it isn't there because we keep saying without without you, God, I can do nothing.
Nothing at all. You know, in a rare real sense, I cannot even sin without God. Think of that. And so this this thing we call life, it can be simplified. Of course it can, but it can be oversimplified.
The great Erasmus, at least some people thought he was great, of the of the Reformation, you know, the man who is supposed to have laid the egg which Luther hatched of the Reformation, Erasmus had this view. He said, the religion of Jesus Christ should be so simple that every Turk could understand it. Well, of course, that you see, that's just wishful thinking. It isn't simple. It is not simple.
You just take this parable of our lord. I don't care how you interpret it. And as I say, it's not a clear cut issue. It has it's it can be interpreted in several ways. Just what the main thrust of it is, I don't know.
But it certainly brings out the complexity of life. It's not enough to have good seed. It's not enough to have good soil. It's not enough to have a good crop, because if you have a good crop, your enemy comes and sows weeds in it. Did you catch that?
So life isn't as simple as some people would like it. It's not just getting in your hammock on a hot day such as this and getting your mint julep within an arm's length. It's a little more complicated than that. And the peace of Christ isn't that kind of a thing mildly swinging in a hammock on a hot summer day beside a pearling brook and all other such nonsense. It was this same Erasmus, you know, this same guy who wrote what he called the handbook of the Christian soldier.
And the title was Enchiridion. That means in the hand, and it can be very, very actually translated as dagger. As dagger. And this book, therefore, that he wrote as an elementary introduction to the Christian life, to being a soldier of Jesus Christ, can very well be in English called the dagger of the Christian soldier. How about that?
And that's the same man who said that the religion of Jesus Christ should be simple enough for any Turk to understand it. I was just reading that letter this morning, so I'm not pulling on my fertile imagination. So let's let's let's as I say, being a Christian is a very complex thing. If only it were one thing. If only it were one thing.
But it is many things. I have to love God. I have to love myself. I have to love my neighbor. I have to put it all together.
I have to love the right things, which means I hate the wrong thing. Notice, hate. Because if there's love in the world, it's got to be hate for its contradictories and for its contraries. Which, of course, that's a matter of Aristotelian logic. You know, it's a very interesting thing about this, that practically every single one of the great reformers of the sixteenth century, one of the first things they did in kicking out the Pope was to kick out Aristotle's logic.
That's a very interesting phenomenon, and it happens today. It happens today. Within just a few moons, I was having a rather heated argument with a professor from a university not of this area, and I quoted a little bit about the principle of contradiction of Aristotle. I cannot quote from the pulpit the reaction I got to that. You see, Aristotle is very much hated.
He is despised, spurned, kicked out. But you can't avoid this if you love one if you love something, then you cannot have a a love for what contradicts it and what and what is contrary to it. It's utterly impossible. Well, it's impossible to any reasonable creature. It's not impossible to people who have no consistency.
And so when we come to this matter of the Christian life, it's very easy to to exaggerate its difficulty. It's very easy to exaggerate its difficulty. Because you see, while it is difficult, while it is complex, while it's made up of many portions, many segments, while we have many obligations, while we have many responsibilities. It comes back to the bicycle wheel, as Clive Staple Lewis put it. He had a facility of doing this sort of thing.
It comes back to the bicycle wheel. Now if any of you, of course I know you've all done it, try to line up a bicycle wheel, that means you know that you have to tighten each single spoke just enough so that that rim will spin in a beautiful, even circle. If you haven't tried it, you won't know how difficult it is to do. It's possible to do it, but you've got to tune each spoke. And so here's the way Lewis put this whole business.
He says, it's like a bicycle wheel. When all the spokes are lined up with the hub, They're lined up with god. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit. Amen. The lord