A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee named Nazareth to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. Upon arriving, the messenger said to Mary, rejoice, oh highly favored daughter. The Lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women. Mary was deeply troubled by these words and wondered what the angel's greeting might mean. The messenger went on to say to Mary, do not fear. You have found favor with God. You shall conceive and bear a son and give him the name Jesus.
Great will be his dignity, and he will be called son of the most high. The Lord God will give him the throne of David, his father. He will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and his reign will be without end. Mary then said to the angel, how can this take place since I do not know man? The angel replied, the holy spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you.
Hence, the holy offspring to be born will be called son of God. Know that Elizabeth, your kinswoman, has conceived a son in her old age. She who was thought to be sterile is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible with God. Mary then said, I am the maidservant of the Lord. Let it be done to me as you say.
And with that, the angel left her. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. As you all know, and if you all know it, why should I be saying it? The reason is just that for that very reason, that today we have in the Catholic church and outside the Catholic church, some severe criticism of the text I have just read.
How literally should we take it? How unliterally should we take it? What does it mean? Well, when some of the exegetes, some of these men and some women who are so deeply and profoundly versed in the scriptures, when they're done with this text, you have no idea what it means. Now there are a few things about this whole problem, about the authenticity See, there's no question of authenticity here.
Authenticity simply means that the work comes from the author that it's imputed to. That doesn't mean it's true, it just means that it's authentic. Now the question is, what is this all about? Did it happen? Did this scene take place with Mary?
It's given in direct quotations. The questions are raised, how could Luke, who wrote this, how could he know about that? He didn't write for maybe, oh, sixty years or seventy years after this took place at the earliest. So how could he know it? How could he know what Mary said?
How could he know what an angel said? How could he know anything? Well, you know, it goes on and on. The point I want to make is this, as I've said many times, when you're dealing with a written word, you've got to realize what you're dealing with. It's just a piece of paper with some ink on it or some blood or some gravy or something, something which makes marks.
It takes a human mind or some mind to give to find some meaning in this scribbling. I look with great admiration when I see Arabic script. It looks beautiful. I it's used as an ornament, but it's absolutely meaningless to me. As a matter of fact, even with my well founded knowledge of Chinese, I'm not fluent in reading Chinese.
It's just a lot of just marks on a paper. It has no meaning whatsoever. Now a a person who can read Chinese comes along and he gets meaning from it. Where is he getting that meaning? Have you ever thought about it?
Where does it come from? Does it spring out of the pulp of the paper or the papyrus? Where does it come from? From the ink or whatever was or the juice of the berries or whatever was used to write? Where does meaning come from?
You see, you always get back if you ask these questions, you've got to get back to something more than a book. In every instance, no book speaks for itself. If you have three people who read the same sentence, you will get three versions of what the sentence means. As my dear and late lamented friend Thomas Aquinas said, whatever we know, we know according to the mode of the knower. So we come back to this.
Remember, Luke wrote this, these while it was written about sixty years or seventy years later, he wasn't writing and giving these documents to people who were ignorant. I mean, can't assume they were ignorant of what had happened. Now when you get down to the niceties, did our blessed mother use these exact words? Well, know she didn't speak English, folks. That's one thing I'm perfectly sure of.
She didn't speak Chinese either. She didn't speak Greek, we're pretty sure of that. We don't we're not too sure what language the Blessed Mother spoke. And as far as the angel, who knows? Who knows what an angel is?
How did she know it was an angel? I don't know. I don't think I'd recognize an angel if it came along. It had certain kinds of angels. Other angels we all recognize.
Now, the point I'm making is this, here is a text. Here is something which has been handed down in Greek. The original was written in Greek. And what I want to lay before you very clearly is this, we are not asked to take this completely or merely the text. Because what is absolutely to me completely convincing that you're dealing here with not with somebody writing from the top of their head, but that you're dealing with some kind of facts is this.
When Mary says, how can this happen to me, isn't that a perfectly sensible question? What could be more to the point? Here's something fantastic happening to her and she says, How do I know anything about this? She could have then gone on to say, Well now, dear Angel, would you please give me motives of credibility? Dear Angel, please explain yourself.
Let us now go with the logical positivists, and now we will analyze your propositions. We will take them up one by one. You say that I'm supposed to become a mother? I'm not even married. And you and whoever you are, you're telling me that that this child is gonna be something extraordinary?
Listen, don't expect me to take that kind of stuff. Give me some evidence. Tell me why I should believe you. Why should I believe you? And by golly, we get an answer there that hit you right between the eyes.
You know what that answer is? Go down and look at your cousin Elizabeth, an old woman who all her life was sterile. Her husband is advanced in age, and she is pregnant. Do you want a motive of credibility? Could you think of anything that would inspire reason to accept authority that can match that?
Remember, people in our Lord's day and in the day of our blessed mother were not ignorant of pregnancy. They knew about it. They knew how babies come. They knew about sterility. They knew about old age.
They know about what you how women cannot have babies beyond a certain age. They knew these things perfectly. And here, Mary is asked to look at the impossible that her cousin, an old woman, sterile all her life, is now pregnant. And what does Mary do? She gets on her little metro and rides right down towards Jerusalem to see for herself.
She goes down to take a look. She wants to see whether her cousin is pregnant or not. Now you talk about if this kind of evidence would hold up in any court of law, this is absolutely fantastic. And while I'm sort of giving it a slap happy attitude, it's absolutely on the beam. It's absolutely what the angel says.
Mary says, how can this happen to me? The angel says, go down look at your cousin. Now and while sixty years is a lifetime, remember that's especially when you're dealing with an oriental, that's point number one, even today. And secondly, when you're dealing with an oriental in one AD or whatever, you sixty years of transmission of tradition, tradition means standing down, that's not long at all. And do you think that the people, the Christians in the time of Luke, weren't in a position to know what had happened in those days by somebody telling them about it?
You see, we have gotten so tied up with this idea of documentary proof that we overlook some very factual things of life. So let them, you know, CS Lewis said the one thing to be aware of in reading the bible is scripture scholars. And boy I agree with him 100%. Because you see, you can't just take a book and think that that's going to be the peak of the pyramid upside down. There's lots more to it than that.
And so this great story of the birth of Jesus Christ from a virgin. I know that that text we just read from Isaiah that a virgin shall conceive. I know the difficulties of that word virgin, but so what? My guess at it is as good as anyone else's. So if you want to translate it as a virgin, it's very justifiable, very justifiable, and nobody can deny that.
And so as we edge in now to the Christmas season, this text is given to us. We are asked to believe, but not as unthinking persons, not as irrational people. Faith is blind, of course, but it is not irrationally blind. We have every reason to accept the testimony of Luke. We don't have to think that every single word it's crazy because we know they didn't speak English.
And so we want the what are the facts, madam? They're the things we want. What are the facts of the case? These facts speak for themselves. Indeed, they do speak for themselves, and we thank God for it.
That here as we edge now in the last week of preparation for Christmas, this is a tremendous act of faith that God became a human being in the womb of a virgin Jewish girl. The name of the father, son, the holy spirit. Amen.