A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. That is not what I want. Yes, it is. Rather, it is according to Saint Luke. Wouldn't wanna mislead you, but you'd recognize the difference right away.
On one occasion in a certain town, a man full of leprosy came to Jesus. And seeing Jesus, the man bowed down to the ground and said to Jesus, Lord, if you will to do so, you can cure me. Jesus stretched out his hand to touch the man and said, I do will it be cured. The man at once lost his leprosy. Jesus then said to the man, tell no one, but go and show yourself to the priest.
Offer for your healing what Moses prescribed. That should be a proof to them. The reputation of Jesus spread more and more, and great crowds gathered to hear him and to be cured of all their maladies. Jesus often retired to to deserted places and prayed alone, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
Passages like this have so many angles that arouse curiosity and questions and present problems and also give consolation. I often mention, I just want to mention this in passing, that almost invariably, I I think I can say invariably, when our blessed Lord performed a miracle, we call it a miracle, he always accompanied it or the the cure was accompanied by some kind of physical action. Now if our lord could cure that man of his leprosy, whatever that was, why did he have to reach out his hand or touch him, or why did the man even have to come to Jesus? I don't know. I don't like but it's an interesting question, isn't it?
And as I say, you just have to think of the time that our Lord even man wanted to hear, so our Lord touched the man's ears with his hand. There was always some kind of a reaching out of our Lord to touch or and usually, some words went along with it. Just absolutely in passing, I had the privilege of meeting at Lourdes a man and his sister who had given years and years of their vacation time, which was a month each, to Lourd. So they had a wide experience with the so called cures or alleged cures of Lourd. And they told me that every single time there was a cure, there was some kind of a, let's say scar, in quotation marks.
There was always some kind of visible evidence left. Now that's what they said. But anyway, what I want to bring home or point out is that last sentence. Here we're told that our blessed Lord was becoming extremely popular. Crowds were gathering around him, to be cured.
Of course, everybody goes for a handout, and he's being overwhelmed. And that last sentence says that often now notice, often Jesus went to deserted places to pray alone. I think this has to be stressed today, that in the last analysis, religion is a personal thing, not a community thing. An article, well, it's not not so new now, it's several months old. But the author of this article, a well known writer at the present time, said there seems to be an attitude that the church exists for community.
And so much of our doctrine has been interpreted that way. For example, I can I've mentioned this to you many times. You can today, not the Vatican Council too, but writers, catechisms, books on devotion, books on spirituality, the great emphasis on the Eucharist is the supper, the Eucharistic supper, Eucharistic celebration. They carefully avoid the word eucharistic sacrifice because they say it's the great it's the it's the great sacrament of community. As if community was something in itself worth achieving, As if man was born for the exclusive purpose of being whatever it means, community.
We even that's how we talk about it. We don't even put an article in front of it. It's so objective, it's like an iceberg out there, I guess. But you see, community has no reality except individual people, unless you're some kind of a Platonist, a radical Platonist. The only reality which exists are individual human beings.
And it is my firmest conviction that in the last analysis, we stand alone before God. I have to go to him with acts of worship, petition, contrition, hope, love, faith. I'm the only one that could do it. And if a lot of people get together to do it, then we say we have a community. But there's no reality there except the individuals.
Now, I'm not at all denying denying that there's a great help and support and encouragement and all kinds of good things come from doing things together. No man ever won a football game all by himself. Only one man carried the ball though. And so we come back to the our blessed Lord, you see, if he said, follow me. And it's not that you see, following Jesus Christ is not that difficult.
I mean, to know what's right, to know what we should do, to know what our lord wants us to do. That, for the most part, is not terribly difficult. All we have to do is follow him. Now just a few mornings ago, we had a text which said how Jesus took his place regularly in the synagogue. He took his he took his turn in reading.
He even spoke. In other words, and then we're told how he went down to the Temple Of Jerusalem at the appointed times. He was often found in the Temple Of Jerusalem teaching and preaching, even performing miracles there. So that our blessed lord certainly cultivated what we call community or social worship. But at the same time, at the same time, we are as we are told this morning, he often with withdrew to deserted places to pray alone.
Now there's no substitute for personal prayer. If you have if this church is filled with people, the only reality here are the individuals, and the only prayer you're going to get is the prayer that comes from the individuals all in this church. There's no superego above us. And so I I urge you to think about this. You see, you can have exaggerated individualism, I know that, and you we all know it.
And there have been times when we have had too much individualism. But on the other hand, to swing the pendulum so far out on the other side that you think the only reality is the community or society and that that's some great goal worthy of our greatest efforts, that's ridiculous. It may be a perfectly good goal in some things, but it it can be completely separated from religion, completely separated from religion. And so this sentence today, and this is not the only instance of it, of course, where we're told that Jesus and it's usually he when it's stated like this, it's usually either before some very important event in his life, or it's when he's been surrounded with the crowds, or some such situation as that that the that the writer tells us that Jesus withdrew to some deserted place to be alone and to pray. To pray.
Prayer is an individual thing. We can have community prayer, but what's what the reality of community prayer is the reality of people, individuals praying together. If you have a 100 people and no one prays in the in among the 100, you don't have any community prayer. You see, we you can't get away from this, but it's so easy to get away from it. It's so easy to be such an extrovert doing good, going out towards others.
There was an article in this recently in the paper about the monastery down in Berryville, and there was a whoever wrote it had taken the time to get some understanding of what it is to be a Trappist monk in the year 1982. That they don't do any outside labors at all. They don't run schools, they don't take care of the poor, they don't do they don't build churches, they don't run they're not out to liberate the oppressed, they're not out to win revolutions, they're not out to build community. All they're doing is having their own self sustaining community by the they work with their hands in one way or another, and all they do is devote their life to praying, to praising God. And that's what we have to do in our individual lives.
There's not going to be a great absence of activity. The great problem is that from time to time, we have the common sense to realize that unless we're going to be lost, unless we're going to be submerged, unless we're going to be taken over by the things around us, we too, like Jesus Christ did, have to withdraw a bit, to go into a deserted place, to be alone with god, and to pray. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit. Amen.