A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus was addressing the crowds when his mother and his brothers appeared outside to speak with him. They wanted to talk to him. Someone said to Jesus, your mother and your brothers are standing outside and they want to speak to you. Jesus said to the one who had told him, who is my mother?
Who are my brothers? Then extending his hands to his disciples, he said, there are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of my heavenly father is my brother and my sister and my mother. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father, of the son, and of the holy spirit.
Amen. This excerpt from our lord's life has been a scandal to many. Well, so are the lives of the saints scandalous to many. Let me give you an instance. Saint Peter Claver, identified with Cartagena, Colombia, and the way he gave his life totally to the slaves that came into Cartagena.
Cartagena, as you know, was one of the three, and probably the most important port, or the three, of entry for slaves coming into the New World. He was about the second generation Jesuit. He came from Barcelona, from Catalonia. And from the day he left Barcelona on the ship sailing for Cartagena, he never wrote a single note to his family. Cut himself off entirely from his family.
There's a saint Saint Labry who wanted to be a religious. He tried to be religious. He he tried as earnestly as he could to be a religious, and nobody would keep him. They kicked him out. And finally, he became simply a wandering bum from Lyon, France, down through Italy, and especially in Rome where he died, and was practically acclaimed a saint by the crowds, the multitude of the city.
He cut himself off entirely from his family. Take the curie of ours, he did the same thing. Just recently I had lunch with a religious woman superior. She was going north. And I knew her mother was up in years because she was no spring chicken herself.
And I knew her mother was ill, so I said something about her mother. And she says, well you know re religious have cut ourselves off from our family. This is a problem. And let me give you another thing. When I was in Jerusalem, there's a there's a there's a vigorous Catholic congregation in Jerusalem of Arabs.
Arabs. I attended mass said in Arabic. I did not con celebrate that mass. My Arabic isn't as good as it used to be. I asked one of the Franciscan priests, I said, are you getting any vocations from the Arabs?
He said, no. So, naturally I said, why not? He said, very for a very simple reason. He said, they know that a they know that a Franciscan priest takes vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. That means they're supposedly to be poor.
And therefore if they're poor they can't support their parents in their old age. I mean the parents in their old age. Ergo, they don't want any son of theirs to be a poverty stricken adult who can't take care of them in their old age. Just a little aside. This is a problem.
It's a scandal for many people. I've heard it time and again that people give their lives to God and forget their responsibilities to their family. Well it looks like that many times. No. Let's admit that.
It looks like that. But let's go back to some fundamentals. What did our blessed Lord say? He says, unless you hate your parents, you can't follow me. Unless you're prepared to give up mother, father, sister, brother, child, you're not worthy of being my disciple.
Jesus said that. Now, does what follows? Here we're dealing with a book. Here we're dealing with something somebody said. What in the world does it mean?
We're back to the old question. Back to the old question. Remember, a book doesn't speak for itself. A text doesn't speak for itself. We have Even if you read the Greek, which is the only inspired word of God.
Remember translations are not. Even if you read the original, you still have to ask yourself, what does it mean to give up your parents? Are are you supposed to release yourself of responsibility for them? Or what? What does it mean?
Did Christ reject his mother there? You know as much about it as I do. Books have been written on this, of course. Since we don't know much about it, you can write voluminously. And yet we have one of the one of the 10 commandments is to to honor your father and your mother.
And our blessed Lord said, I have come not to change the law to fulfill it. He says, not one tiniest jot or tittle of that law will I change. How do you put how do you put all of this together? Now people, men and women, have exaggerated. We do we have to is is Peter Klabber can we hold him up as a perfect example of how we should treat our families?
Of course not. Because he was excessive in a lot of other things. Here's the man you know who for who for some very slight infraction of something or other, took up his his It was a stinking old blanket that he slept on. I'm not exaggerating this. And went into the to the refectory when when his brothers, brother Jesuits were trying to eat a decent meal, he walks in dragging in his stinking old mattress to beg their forgiveness.
Are we supposed to do that? Are we supposed to imitate a courier of ours in in living on moldy potatoes? Of course not. And what keeps us sane? The living voice of God's church.
Don't you ever forget it. Because somehow or other human nature is prone to excess. As I've said many times, if only we could say to God, I have to do only this, this. Whether whatever it be. If I only have to do this one thing, oh I can I'll I'll do it.
And I would. But you see, to be an honest to God Christian, you can't do that. You can't do that. In many, in many ways you are serving many masters. In many way, and you can't escape it.
A father and a mother have responsibility to their children and to each other, believe me. Can they run away from those responsibilities? Can a mother say, I'm tired of being married, as has happened in my own experience, not a million years ago. I'm tired of being married. I want to seek my fulfillment.
So she capes these off and leaves her family to be taken care of by her husband. Can we do that? Even if we say I'm doing it for God's sake. Who's going to keep us straight? What was the voice in the time of Saint Jerome when you had thousands of people flocking into the Nile Valley to become hermits?
Because they they said this is the only way to be follower of Jesus Christ. Notice that little word only. And what voice stood up and said this is wrong? The voice of Rome. The voice of Rome stepped even on Saint Jerome and his excesses.
And when you Here we are living in 1983. We have had religious orders all down the ages. We had religious orders in quotation marks before Christ. What rule has been the dominant basis, the foundation for most of your religious in the Western world, and it's the rule of Saint Benedict? And why?
Because it's so sensible. It's decent. It's been tried. It keeps us balanced. Because remember, a a Christian is following Christ.
And that is not an easy thing. We have to be single-minded in seeking Christ. Christ has told us this, let's not mince words. He said, unless you're prepared to hate the people you most should love, you cannot be my disciple. He said that.
And he said, I have come not to bring peace but war. He said that. So let's not try to unsay it. But remember, he said a lot of other things. Whereas Christianity stands for warfare, the Christian stands for the peace of Christ in his soul.
And to follow Christ means, for most of us, that we do not go into what I call religious heroics. We live the humdrum, monotonous, tiresome daily life. It has its peaks, but it has its troughs. And what keeps us sane? What keeps us balanced?
What keeps us, as I would say, in the middle of the road? It was a Greek who said in Medio Stadt Virtis that in the that the virtue is a medium, which is of course not true universally. But there's a lot of truth in it. What keeps us balanced? What keeps us on course with all these responsibilities we have when Christ says you've gotta follow me and you I do I will not have any any competitors.
What keeps us on course? The living voice of Christ, his church. In the name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.