In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Legalism is a naughty word, and yet it is so easy to get lost in legalisms. Obviously, there's a close connection between this reading we have from Saint Paul this morning about the law and keeping the law and how it will not avail you in in any way. And, this, statement of our blessed lord about clean and unclean.
There's a very close relationship here. We're living in a world which judge judges by phenomena. There's a whole system of philosophy called phenomenology, and it's extremely popular. And I'm not criticizing it. But I'm only saying that we that's the kind of a world we live in.
We live in what we call a world which is supposed to be guided by evidence, by by what can be seen and touched, heard, felt, taste, smell. That in other word, phenomena. And when you talk about evil today or immorality or breaking God's law, the first people the first question will ask, what harm did he do? What injury did she inflict? How did it hurt anybody?
Well, you say, what do you mean by hurt? Well, how did it hurt them? That's the isn't it isn't this the way it is today? And yet that's not the way it is with Jesus Christ. That's not the way it is with anybody.
And I say this universally, because morality by definition doesn't morality as such notice, morality as such, goodness, moral goodness as such, moral evil as such, not in the physical. It is not in the material. It is not in clean and unclean dishes, in circumcision or non circumcision. These are material physical things, and as such they may have they have goodness, but we're talking now about moral goodness. See, that's the reason people don't use the word moral, we use the word ethical, as if you could get away from this problem.
But you cannot escape it. Even Immanuel Kant, as I say, who wasn't the most fervent Christian known in modern times, he went so far as to say that the only real evil in the world is moral evil, not physical evil at all. Because when you talk about physical evil, I suppose most people would agree that death certainly is one of the worst kinds of physical evil. Yet it's in itself it's neither moral nor immoral. Whether a person dies a natural death or is shot with a 32 revolver, they are equally a corpse.
They are equally dead. You can't argue anything to morality from that whatsoever. This you see, I've come back time and again to this matter of the sixteenth century, and this is where we must pay tribute to the great reformers. They weren't the only ones by no means, but they became prominent. Prominent.
They became the champions of this view that true honest to god religion comes from within a man. It's of the heart, the mind, the soul, the spirit. You see, their great mistake was in forgetting that we are not pure souls. We are not pure minds. We are not pure spirits.
We are human beings. And the body is just as important to me as a human being as my so called soul or mind or spirit, unless I'm a neo Platonist. And they were neo Platonists, remember. But they were right. They were perfectly correct in their emphasis upon man's inner dispositions that salvation is by faith, not by giving money to the poor, not by giving my body to be burned.
And that's Saint Paul's theme. And, of course, Saint Paul became their great apostle, and naturally, and he's our great apostle too. And so I can't stress too that there's an enormous truth here that what counts is how we appear before almighty god. I appear before him as an individual human being. I'm not a community.
I'm not a society. I'm not a collectivity. I am little old me. And that's how I stand before god. And it's what I do that matters in the sense of its being my own.
Now what is most truly my own? It's what comes from my intellect, from my will, from the self. In in no way can that be divorced from the physical. But it's not the physical that gives it a spiritual character. It's not the physical and the material which gives it a moral character.
Nothing at all. It's that imprint of mind and will, and if it's in the Christian order of faith. And so let us take this to heart in our own lives and realize this, that we come to god as a total human being. And I give him my mind, my heart, my will, my soul, but all that I am. And the all is my entirety of a social individual self.
And that's what comes to God. And that's why why there's such a chasm between legalism and any other view which looks upon the individual human being as a as worshiping God as a human being, not merely as his creature. And so this message of our blessed Lord today is so tremendously important in our what how do we appear before god? How does he see me? Not does that not as the world sees the phenomena, but how does god see me who sees the noumena, the reality of the self that I call me.
The name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.