A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, in your this continues our lord's exhortation on prayer, which we started yesterday. Where yesterday our lord said, when you pray, don't be like these hypocrites. Don't go around putting on a big show. Retire by yourself into your own closet and lock the door and pray to your father who is in heaven.
So he continues that theme now. Our lord says to his disciples, in your prayer, do not rattle on like pagans. They think they will win a hearing by the sheer multiplication of words. Do not imitate them. Your father knows what you need before you ask him.
Now this is how you are to pray. Now here we have the new translate well, it's not so new now. But here is the translation of the revised text of the New Testament by the Confraternity of Christian doctrine. You will notice that no attempt was made to incorporate this in the Canon of the Mass, and you'll see why. Now this supposed to be an improvement over our ordinary and usual translation.
So this is the new translation. Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us the wrong we have done as we forgive those who wrong us. Here of course is a hard sentence. This is the way it's translated in this new edition.
Subject us not to the trial. The translation we're used to is lead us not into temptation. So they render it subject us not to the trial, but deliver us from the evil one. That's the lord's prayer in this in the the confraternity's translation. Our lord continues.
If you forgive the faults of others, your heavenly father will forgive you yours. If you do not forgive others, neither will your father forgive you. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. And this translation, this newest translation of the lord's prayer brings out it brings up, of course, the enormous problem of translation.
Now, you you see, it's it's amazing to me in this day in the age of our lord 1,983, speaking generally of people, people, they don't seem to have any realization of what a translation is. Now remember, a translation is always an interpretation. It's not the authentic article. When you wave the bible and say this is the word of god, it's no such thing unless you're waving the Greek or the Hebrew. There no one claims that there's inspiration in any translation.
The word of God, the inspired word of God is in the original languages. And that's the reason Calvin, more than Luther, Calvin insisted on going back to the original languages, and using the Greek, and using the Hebrew. Because that is the way God spoke to to us. Not in English or Arabic, or French or English, or German or Spanish. So that's the first point.
If you want to know what a man said, you've got to go to what he said, not to a translation. Now I don't Well, I never read the comic strips. But a comic strip was brought to my attention that appeared in the Washington Post for this past Sunday, and which I wish I had in my hand now because I would dare to read it to you. It's a contemporary translation of Psalm 23. Now some of you may have seen this in the comic strip for Sunday.
What's comical about it? I'm not too sure. But that's where it appeared this last Sunday. And it's a contemporary translation of the twenty third Psalm. The lord is my shepherd, he leads me by quiet waters, you know, and all that.
Read it. It's an it's it's an When you try to take a text and make it contemporary, that is to try to express it in the language of the day. Read it if you if if you have to or if you can recover it. It's I all I can identify with it's in the comics section of the Washington Post for this past Sunday. Now, I'm not downgrading translations.
If we don't know the original language and if we can't get a hold of the original language and if we don't want to take the time, and we in many instances we can't take the time. It's impossible to ask people today to go back and learn Hebrew or to learn Greek, and I mean learn it. Isn't enough to be able to handle it with a dictionary in one hand and a grammar in the other. Remember the when Saint Paul wrote his letter today, the second letter to the which is one of the most impassioned of Paul's letters. It's full of human humanity.
It's full of a man who is is chagrined and frustrated. Now he wrote to the Corinthians in the vernacular of the day. And this is believe me, who can grasp it? I mean, to work at that, to get it so that when you say I'm I am giving you into into in in English of 1983, the the the flavor, the odor, the atmosphere, the climate of what Paul wrote in about sixty AD in Greek to the Corinthians. Who can do that?
Who can do it? Who how can we ask people to do that? That's impossible. It's ridiculous. And so what do we do?
We work with translations and do the best we can. But we should never forget for one minute that you're dealing with a translation. This is one man's or this is one woman's idea of what the original text said. And today, without any trouble, you can you can pick up five or six separate translations of the very same Greek, and you will see how they differ. Look how this translation today of the lord's prayer differs from the one we're familiar with.
Go back to the king James. Go back to the Daoi and you'll see how they differ from that. And yet they're all they're all English versions of the same Greek, the very same Greek. Now another problem about this matter of using the vernacular. You see what I'm driving at?
How do you preserve truth when you're dealing with this kind of a fragile container? If you translate the Lord's Prayer into what I would to contemporary English, what is contemporary English? Whose English are you going to choose? That's the first point. Now the second point I make is this, no matter whose English of 1983 you choose, whether it be English English, or American English, or Waterfront English, or Chesapeake Bay English, or Louisiana English, or San Francisco English, and notice they these differ.
And certainly English English differs from American English. No matter which one of them you use, how contemporary will it be fifty years from now? Just go back and read Saint Thomas More's letters in English. He wrote them in English. Well, leaving aside the difficulty of the script, you need some footnotes to understand what the man was saying, and yet he was writing in the vernacular of his day.
So if you take God's truth and put it in this fragile container of contemporary language, where is it going to lead you? How can you how can you keep it? The answer is you cannot. You cannot. Look how they all look look how they argue over the the meaning of the constitution of The United States, and that's just a little over 200 years old.
Written in English I presume. At least Jefferson and Company thought they were writing English, and that's that's only 200 years old. So we come back, we come back. Saint Paul's letter today to the Corinthians is extremely important. Notice what he's telling those Corinthians.
He's saying, look, I brought you the truth and you have been gullible. You have been gullible. You have been listening to people who are coming around and telling you I am giving you message of Jesus Christ, and he says, are willing to believe them. And then Paul says, look, I brought you the truth. And note well, Paul says, I am not one of the super apostles.
That was John and Peter and James and back in Jerusalem. Notice, Paul didn't get the truth of Jesus Christ from anybody except Jesus. Keep that in mind. Nobody gave him a book. He got it straight from our Lord and he tells us this and he says it today.
But he says it even more explicitly in other places. He got our he he was the subject or the object of of a direct revelation from God. Direct. And it wasn't written down. Keep that in mind.
The apostles didn't go around with a bible in their hands of the New Testament. It was the word of God. It was the teaching of Jesus Christ which they had received. And so today we can put this together. What I'm trying to say about language.
It's extremely fragile, extremely fragile. But we have to treat it with respect. And in since it's in some instances the only way we can handle what we have to handle, that is truth as it is being handed down, we have to treat it with a a mature attitude. We can't be little we can't be a bunch of Alice's in Wonderland or looking through the looking glass. We have to be seeking after all, to be a Christian is to follow Christ, isn't it?
And to follow Christ means you want his truth and none other. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of holy spirit. Amen.