Yesterday, we had the feast of Saint Anthony, and the gospel reading was from the twenty second chapter of Saint Matthew. Now you will recall, I'm sure, how this young man came to Christ and said, what do I have to do to be saved? And Christ said, well, keep the commandments. And the and the young man says, well, which ones? And our blessed lord then proceeded to tell him which commandments he should keep in order to be saved.
And he told them, thou shalt not commit adultery, honor your father and your mother, don't steal, and so forth. But not once did our blessed lord mention the first commandment, that there's a god that's supposed to be worshiped and adored. Now that is in the twenty second chapter of Saint Matthew. For this morning's gospel reading, I want to read from Saint Matthew chapter the nineteenth on this very same subject. The lord be with you.
A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, and there was no love lost between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, they assembled in a body, and one of them, a lawyer, asked Jesus, teacher, which commandment of the law is the greatest? Jesus said to him, you shall love the lord your god with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second, our lord continued, is like it.
You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself. On these two commandments, the whole law is based and the prophets as well. 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.
Now notice, the this is some chapters nineteen and twenty two of the same author, Saint Matthew. So the point I'm making well, you can make a lot of points out of it. But the first thing I want to stress is is what you can do with a text. You can quote Saint Matthew and said, Christ said keep the commandments, but they those commandments have to that he quotes to the young man, have to do entirely with my neighbor, and you don't have to believe in God to keep them. God doesn't figure in them at all.
Our blessed Lord doesn't even mention God. And you say, well, then now we know. Now we know what we have to do because Saint Matthew says it and Christ is quoted. Is that so? Well, then how about this chapter 22 where we have the sadducees and the pharisees and where Christ said, look.
There are two commandments, and the first one has to do with God, and the second one has to do with loving your neighbor as you love yourself. Notice that's not included in the in chapter 19. Which one do you take? Well, see, here's the problem of a book. And if if you're left with only a book, how do you solve that kind of a problem?
And it's our blessed Lord speaking in both instances. It's the same writer recording it. Incidentally, this Saint Anthony we had yesterday is Saint Anthony of Egypt. I presume we all knew that. He died, you know, about the same year, roughly, that Saint Augustine was born, March, 03/1954.
Saint Anthony lived to be a ripe old ace. They he could easily they think he was over 100 years old when he died, which shows you that if you want to live long, become a hermit. Of course, it'll have to be in Egypt. Now then just this is all gonna come together, you know, just yesterday, again, by coincidence, into my hands came a pamphlet bulletin or something of that sort, in which we had a lot about Saint Louis of France. Now notice, I repeat, Saint Anthony dies the year Augustans are born roughly, about two years different.
Now we're jumping to the thirteenth century with Saint Louis of France, one of the great magnificent rulers of France. He was no pygmy when it comes to being a king. He knew how to be a king, and he was a king. He was also a saint. And now I bring try to bring these things three points together.
The opening sentence of one of the articles about Saint Louis was this, that say that the the Saint Louis, the king of France, tried to live in the present in in the sight of god. In the sight of god. He tried that's the opening sentence. And to me, that's the there there's the secret. You we are not born to live in the sight of my neighbor.
Well, I'm not born just to be a in to to be to to practice a narcissism of loving myself. I am born to live in the sight of God. And that can't be left out. Now yesterday, I referred to this, this attitude towards Christianity, which we which today is commonly, referred to as vertical and horizontal. But you see, if you're a Christian, it can't be separated it like that because your goal is God.
Whether you're going on the horizontal in, let us say, seeing God in your neighbor and giving your life in in a martyrdom to your neighbor, or you see God directly and you give yourself in martyrdom to daily service to him exclusively, it's the same person, God, that you're serving. It's not a 90 degree difference. It's gotta be no difference. No difference. It's not that one's going in that direction and the other's going in that direction.
See, this horizontal vertical is a lot of nonsense if you're talking about being a Christian. As C. S. Lewis put out, and this is a very good example, he said, And if any of you have ever tried to line up a a bicycle wheel, getting all those spokes lined up, you'll know how apt a metaphor it is. Because it no.
Nobody denies we have a problem here. But the point is, how do we resolve the problem and keep this unit unity, this integrity of life? How do we live in the sight of God and love neighbor and self? Well, Lewis said, look. If if all the spokes of a bicycle wheel are lined up with a hub, they'll be lined up with one another.
Because you see the spokes of a wheel aren't going at 90 degrees difference, a vertical and a horizontal, they're all going into that hub. And if if the spokes of the wheel are lined up with the hub, they are bound to be lined up one with another, all around the hub, 360 degrees. You see, it's so easy to forget God. It it is because we're living in this world. We're bound by our duties, by our Christian responsibilities to use the things of this world.
This is absolutely necessary, and King Lewis did it. And there's a there's a a little item that we that comes, I think, for you see here, this Saint Anthony is a pretty interesting saint. For one of the reasons is this, that within one year of his death, March, in one year of his death, Saint Athanasius wrote his life. Now that's pretty in other words, it's well documented how how you interpret this document something else. But the point is, we have a biography of Saint Anthony written one year after his death.
Now Anthony wanted to be a martyr. He lived during the persecution of Diocletian. He wanted to be a martyr because a lot of his friends were being martyred. Remember, he's from Egypt. And this ties well, that's another point.
But the thing is he he aimed to be a martyr until one day he woke up, and he found his martyrdom in living daily for Jesus Christ. Living daily for Jesus Christ. Now here's my point. Here you where I'm talking about I know he may have been a cop I don't know. Was in Egypt.
He was he was raised, lived born, raised, lived, died in Egypt. He probably didn't know Greek. But here's a man who dies in '3 about March, who is a Christian whose life we have, who finds the secret of living not in one great generous gesture of laying down his life for Christ in martyrdom, but finds that in his daily living. Then we jump to the thirteenth century, and we have here a great French saint who was just as much a saint as this hermit in the Nile Valley, who found the same thing, to live daily in the sight of God. And then you jump to the sixteenth century to a man like Thomas More, and you have the same thing.
Here we have a layman, said, of course, Louis King Louis was a layman. Now we come to man like Moore, who finds the same secret of being a saint, because that's what we're called to in daily living, in daily living. And now we're talking about this whole assemblage in Garrett Park in 1983. That's the Catholic church. The name of the father and the son, holy spirit.
Amen.