A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus went along the Sea Of Galilee. He went up onto the mountainside and sat down. Large crowds of people came to Jesus, bringing with them cripples, the deformed, the blind, the mute, and many others. And that is not the gospel for today.
That's what we read yesterday. I thought I recognized it. We have though a continuation of the same from Saint Matthew. It's a continuation from what we heard yesterday, where which was the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes. So on that occasion, Jesus continued and said to his disciples, none of those who cry out, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of God, but only the one who does the will of my father in heaven.
Anyone who hears my words and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on solid rock. When the rainy season set in, the torrents came and the winds blew and buffeted his house. It did not collapse. It had been solidly set on rock. Anyone who hears my words but does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand.
The rains fell, torrents came, the winds blew, lashed against his house. It collapsed under all of the strain and was completely ruined. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Yesterday I spoke on this matter of penance.
That is doing penance, doing something which runs counter to what we would like to do, that causes us discomfort, maybe some pain, but at least it makes us aware of one thing, we have a choice. And we might make the choice in favor of God, the omnipotent God. Because as I dare remind you, the first commandment is about God, not about me or about my neighbor. It's about God. And I told you also that in a recent article in the Notre Dame Alumni Magazine, Michael Novak said that the greatest sin of the twentieth century is blasphemy.
You say, I don't hear many people going around blaspheming God. Oh, yes, you do. You may not hear it, but you see it. We have put up other gods, idolatry, and that's a big blasphemy. That is a whopping big blasphemy.
We have put everything under God in place of God. And you see, this don't be amazed at this. This read the Hound of Heaven. It's it's the history of our lives. Read Exodus.
We constantly run after false gods made to our image and likeness. And if and one thing that penitential practices do is to spur us back, to wake us up to the great fact that what matters most is God. And what matters secondly is my relationship with him. And everything else comes after that, everything. That is the due order.
Now the church puts on purple garments during Advent. It asks us not to use the organ. It asks us not to use flowers on the altar. It tries to bring home the penitential spirit, which of course we try to avoid. We still have flowers here and we still use our organ.
We talk about a celebration of the mass, not about the sacrifice. You can read whole treatises on the Eucharist and not see the word holy sacrifice used once. We talk about the Eucharistic celebration. Oh, yes. Everything is joy.
You see, it's just going back to what old man Erasmus in the sixteenth century proposed. This is not what he said, but it's what we call Christianity without tears. And there is no such thing. There is no such thing. How do I know that?
I know it by the only standard of truth that I have much regard for, and that's Jesus Christ, who said unless you take up your cross and follow me, you're not going to be my disciple. That's it. That's the one thing he said was absolutely necessary. And yet we don't like to do it. Now I remember in the seminary we had a very understanding and common sense, we called him a rector.
And at the beginning of Advent and the beginning of Lent, he would tell us young ascetics, who were also gung ho, you know, on doing penance, that if we chose he gave us very eloquent talks about doing penance in the need of it. But at the same time he said, Don't make your penances what other people have to do. He was specifically referring to some of the young men who were devoted to their pipe. We weren't allowed to smoke cigarettes. And some of these men would give up their pipes during Advent and Lent and be a real cross for all the rest of us, you know.
What's a man without his pipe or his cigar after dinner? He wasn't fit to live with, and we had to do his penance. Now I know that, you know, we say that a lot of the saints didn't have common sense. You read, oh, I could give you any number, a curiovars, practically any of them, not all, not all. But some of the great saints seem to be men of total lack of common sense.
Well, are two things I have to say about that. First is this, maybe their conception of common sense wasn't isn't exactly ours or wasn't exactly ours. And many a saint has told us, and the Courier of ours is one of them, that nobody should do what he did, that what he did was crazy sometimes. This is one thing I like about Thomas Aquinas, or like Saint Francis of De Sales. These men were not crackpots.
They didn't do anything extraordinary in the sense of what you'd say it wasn't sensible. But what they did do, you see, they had a fervent love of God, and they, no less than a Saint Bernard, who would get up in the morning and know, early in the morning and break the ice on some creek near the monastery and go down and take a swim. That's one way of handling your passions. I don't know, I never tried it, but it's I don't know, maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. But the point is we don't have to do that.
But the one thing we have to do is love God. The one thing we have to do is to love God more than ourselves. More than my neighbor, more than my job, more than my kids, more than my spouse, more than my health, more than my very life. Christ said, Unless you're willing to lay down your life, you're not even gonna find it. You see, he said that.
I'm not making that up. If anybody who would say that, you see, would be thought crazy. But Christ said it. And so we come back to this business. There's got to be a choice of God.
It isn't giving up things. This is you see, many critics both, mostly within the church who have gotten rid of the of not eating meat on Friday, who've gotten rid of of formal prayers, who've gotten rid of a lot of these things which we found inconvenient, undiscomforting, and all of that. They've gotten rid of all that. Christianity without tears. There's no such thing.
But you see, they did have an argument. And the basic philosophy of it is there's no merit in a negation. I repeat, there is no virtue in merely giving up something, doing without something, not being something. What matters is, is being something, choosing something, wanting something, aiming at something, striving for something. And what is that something?
It's got to be God. It's got to be. Now this this may not be always evident. Our blessed lord can come to you in very many guises. Tolstoy has a famous story on this.
But and the trouble is we don't recognize Jesus. And as I said yesterday, and I want to repeat today, whether I recognize him or not, I can find him pretty easily. And one of the easiest places to find him is in my daily duty, d u t y, duty. What am I supposed to be doing in virtue of who I am, my vocation, my station in life, my obligations? What am I supposed to be doing?
It's that simple. So don't start taking and jumping into ice cold water to lacerate your body, or start wearing hair shirts, or taking the whip, or whatever, until we begin with the with the basics. And you can't lose out on this. Nobody can accuse that of being negative. Nobody can say that that is useless.
You can't make a mistake, you can't possibly make a mistake. When in any given situation or situation, you choose God over yourself. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, of the Holy Spirit. Amen.