A reading of the holy gospel according to the evangelist Saint Luke. The lord appointed a further 72 and then sent them in pairs before him to every town and to every place that Jesus intended to visit. And he said to the 72, the harvest is rich, but the workers are few. Therefore, ask the harvest master to send workers to his harvest. Now be on your way, and remember, I am sending you as lambs into the midst of wolves.
Do not carry a walking staff or even a traveling bag. Wear no sandals and greet no one along the way. On entering a house, say first, peace to this house. If there is a peaceable man there, your peace will rest upon him. If not, it will come back to you.
Stay in the one house eating and drinking whatever they have for the laborer is worthy of his hire. Do not move from house to house. Into whatever city you go after they welcome you, eat of what they set before you and cure the sick there. And then say to them, the reign of god is at hand. And this is the good news of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Saint Luke, we know a little about him. Not much, but a little. And, of course, there are those today who think they know an awful lot about him.
He came from paganism. He didn't come out of the Jewish world, apparently. And he was the close and dear friend and traveling companion of Saint Paul. Now remember, Saint Paul explicitly tells us that the information he has about Jesus Christ and his message, his of good news, of salvation. Paul says, I did not get this from the other apostles.
I got it straight from God himself. Paul tells us this with an absolutely unequivocal language. Paul claims to have had private revelation, and Luke became his faithful companion. Luke apparently was a physician, doctor, an educated man for the time. And it is Luke that we have chiefly to thank for what are called the infancy narratives.
That is, as you recall, the story of the annunciation, the visitation, the birth of our lord. And it it's these texts, as you know, that are of under have been under such heavy bombardment by the so called contemporary and modern critics with their historical critical method. Saint Luke is the author of that third gospel beyond the shadow of a doubt. That is the gospel that we have. He is also, without the shadow of a doubt, the author of the first history we have of Christ's church, the acts of apostles, or as we generally say, the acts of the apostles, which is a mistranslation.
Because the title is not the apostles but the the acts of apostles because there's no for example, in Latin, there is no definite article, so it can't be in Latin. Now that's about what we know of Saint Luke, that he was a very faithful companion of, Saint Paul. And then as you heard this first reading this morning, Paul was having his troubles. Please notice that, that in the earliest days of Christ's church, the enemies of the church were mostly from within, not from without. And this is today's first reading tells you about that.
Paul is is writing to Timothy and he's telling him what's going on, that there are preachers of false doctrine and that he that some of his loyal companions are proving disloyal. He's having a hard time of it, and that is the name of the game for Christchurch. It's always had a hard time. And remember, Judas was one of the 12. Now today, there is so much criticism of Luke's texts.
And much of the criticism and you as you know, the re the consequences of the criticism are to practically negate any truth value, historical value of what Saint Luke narrates in the beginning of his gospel. That's the fact. And this is from our own critics like father Raymond Brown whom I knew well. And he's held up as the as the outstanding biblical scholar. And of course you will find his address up in the Union Theological Seminary in New York.
Although he's a sufficient belonging to a congregation of men who are supposed to be dedicated to educating men for the priesthood of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. These are just some of the little anomalies of the day. The you see, the question they raise is this, how did Luke know what he wrote about? He wasn't there. He only comes into the picture with Saint Paul.
So how could he have known all remember his writing around eighty AD or '90, some place in there. How did how could he know about it? Well, you see, with this historical critical method, unless you can come out with a document, you have nothing to rely on. And yet these very same critics talk about what they call the document queue, which is supposed to be a gospel or a narrative on which Saint Luke rested. Of course, no one has seen document queue.
This is a deduction which these critics, these scholars make based upon internal evidence and a lot of other things, but they have never seen any document cue. No one has ever seen it. On page one, they'll talk about it as a as as a necessary inference. You get about page 50 and you think that you could go down in the Corcoran and see a copy of it. Now I just want to reassure you that this contemporary criticism of Saint Luke's, infancy narratives as they're called, that is the annunciation, the visitation, and the birth of our lord, That while these critics get a lot of notoriety, there are equally good critics who reject what they have to to say as their deductions, as their conclusions, their assinotiations.
So don't be too worried about it. Don't be too worried. Simply to say that Luke could not know what he's writing about because he wasn't there at the Annunciation, it's in on the surface, it's almost absurd. Most of you sitting in those pews think that we had a a man named George Washington and that at a certain time he got in a boat and crossed the Delaware River. Now as I look at this congregation, I don't see many of you who appear to be that ancient.
That you were up there and said, Goodbye George. I hope you make it to the other side. And yet, we we accept that as a fact, don't we? My friends, we have a living church. This is something that we can should never forget.
Christ did not leave a book, whether it's Luke or Matthew or John. He left us a living voice, a church. And it's the church that gives us the bible. The bible doesn't give us the church. Never forget that.
Luther comes along in the sixteenth century and tells us that the bible is the sole rule of faith. Where where was the bible for sixteen hundred years? It is the living voice of Christ's living voice of Christ's church centered in Rome in the person of the holy father, the successor of Peter. And it was to him that Christ said, thou art the rock, and on this rock I will build my church. He didn't say on this rock I'm going to give you a book.
And so our faith doesn't rest upon Matthew, Mark, Luke, John or the acts of the apostles. And it's what the church gives us that we can accept. And the church stands firmly behind the historicity of Luke's good news. Absolutely, firmly, and solidly. I can tell you that without any ambiguity.
The Catholic church stands firmly behind the authenticity, the historicity of the infancy narratives. And a loyal Catholic will accept that. And for them, that will be enough. It is not that Luke gives us the Catholic church. It's the Catholic church that gives us Saint Luke.
In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.