A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to his disciples, I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. You must be clever as snakes, as innocent as doves. Be on your guard with respect to others. They will hail you into court, they will flog you in their synagogues.
You will be brought to trial before rulers and and before kings to give witness before them and before the gentiles on my account. When they hand you over, don't don't worry about what you will say or how you will say it. When the hour comes, you will be given what you are to say. You yourselves will not be the speakers. The spirit of your father will be speaking through you.
Brother will hand over brother to death and the father his own child. Children will turn against their parents and have their parents put to death. You will be hated by all on account of me. But whoever holds fast till the end will escape death. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next.
I solemnly assure you, you will not have covered the towns of Israel before the son of man comes. 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 I have on other occasions pointed out, you do not find quotations from Christ of this sort on Christmas cards or on Easter cards. It is not something which is heralded from pulpits.
But this is our Lord speaking. Keep this in mind. It's Christ speaking here. And if you say what what have I a right to expect that? If I follow Christ, what have I a right to expect?
Dare do you dare ask yourself that question? Because it's a frightening question. If you look for an answer and you have an answer, our blessed lord has answered your question more than once. More than once. Today is just one instance of his answer to your question, what does it mean to be a follower of Jesus Christ?
And that answer is enough to scare the pants off of you. If you rely on yourself. If you rely on yourself. I hope you heard what I just read. It is extremely serious.
It is downright frightening that a father is going to sell his son, the son the children are gonna sell their parents, that you're going to be handed over and you're gonna be persecuted. Remember, when the world loves you, beware. When you feel comfortable as a Christian, beware. Christ never said you would enjoy comfort as a Christian. Never did he say it.
What he said is is some is incompletely stated today, incompletely. That's what our lord has promised us. Of course, try to prove him wrong. We try to prove him wrong. We try to sweep it under the carpet.
We try to gloss it over with a with a with a thick veneer that you can't see through, but it'll be there all the same. It's there all the same. Our lord promised us nothing but his cross. But remember when he promised us that, he promised us that if we took it we would find it sweet and that burden light. See, you've got to keep this all together.
Just last evening I read an article by a priest and the title of it is Now I Walk With the Saints. Now I Walk With the Saints. And it's a very illuminating article. By just by chance, because a convent was breaking up and they had a pretty good library, he was invited to come over and pick take his pick of the books, and they had a pretty good number of books there, Lives of the Saints. So he picked them up because he was interested in history, And he started to read them.
I'm talking about a priest who had been ordained for a number of years. The result was that he had a new light on what it is to be a Christian. He says this himself. He says, now I walk with the saints. Now when you say that, you know, you mustn't think of something sugarcoated.
To walk with the saints is to be a Christian, and to be a Christian is what Jesus Christ said this morning. Because if it is, if we look at it in one way as frightening, at another way it's illuminating, it's encouraging, it's sustaining, it's reassuring. And if there's anything we need in this world today is reassurance, and our blessed Lord has given it to us. I have come, he said. I have come that you might have life and that you might have life more abundantly.
And he's not talking about the hereafter, it's included, but he's not talking exclusively of the next world. Our blessed Lord has come to be your savior today, right today, Friday, 07/08/1983. Not 1984, not 1982, but today. He is to be your life and that you might have life more abundantly. The message of Jesus is not a message of pessimism, it is a message of joy.
But it's his brand of joy. It is it is his kind of peace. And and whenever you use the word peace, think of the word salvation. You'll be close to the real meaning. And so from time to time I try to bring in in the concrete reality of their lives men and women today that we call saints.
The church has put its stamp of approval on. That doesn't mean that they they are the only ones. Walk into any cemetery and there at that cemetery, I am absolutely sure will have many a body in it of an anonymous saint. I am absolutely sure of it. I know people, you know people who are truly saintly.
They are close to God and they are living with God. And I say this without any hesitation. You will find them joyful, joyful, confident, reassured. They walk with a steady pace. Steady pace because they know who they are.
They know where they're going. They know how to get there. They they have no doubts about these basic questions. They know the second question of the Baltimore catechism. Why did God make you?
Now I walk with the saints. The other morning I talked about the curio of ours. Remember, you when you talk about saints, every one of them took something and exaggerated it to the extreme. Almost every one of them. Almost every one.
Nobody, the curio of ours, nobody should try to simply imitate his life the way he lived. And even he himself admitted he had made mistakes. Of course he did. Saints aren't perfect. What what sainthood means is you're close to God.
Not that you're perfect, but that you're close to God and that you wind up being closer to God. That's what sainthood means. And so when we you find yourself comfortable with these people. I mean, if you if you get to the reality of their lives and today we can do that. Today the the lives of the saints are being written in very proper historical ways.
Not a lot of guff, but the reality of their lives because it's the reality of their lives that speaks to us. And it speaks to us in terms that we can understand. That we can understand. When Saint Theresa of Avila for example says, and whenever she got finished praying her chief remark was, well thank God that's over. Isn't that a good human remark?
Good human remark. You come to mass on Sunday and you're worrying about what's going to happen. That sermon seems interminable. No whole ceremony seems interminable. Say, when you're finished you say, well, I'm glad we got over that.
Now I gotta go rush out and do something important. That's human. That's the way we are. God understands that. He understood Martha.
He didn't condemn Martha. He only said Mary has chosen the better part. Better in better implies the good, as Chesterton has pointed out in his marvelous book Orthodoxy. You can't have an ideal without a standard. And so now we walk with the saints.
We belong to the mystical body of Christ. That that's such an out you know, what does that mean mystical body of You we use the word mystical when we don't know what we're talking about many instances. Really? But the point is we know the saints. They lived.
They had their being. They had their ups and they had their downs. There's no saint I know that didn't have plenty of downs. And we are one with them. Now I walk with the saints.
Keep it in mind. Take your pick. They are they are a thousand varieties. Every saint is an individual. Every saint had his has his or her own brand of approaching God and of living the life.
But they were all united in one thing. They were united with God and his son, Jesus Christ, in the union of his church. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit, amen.