A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus said to his disciples, you know as well as I do that if the head of the house knew when the thief was coming, he would not let him break into his house. Be on your guard, therefore. The son of man will come when you least expect him. Peter, good old Peter speaks right up.
Peter said, do you intend this parable for us, Lord, or do you mean it for the whole world, for everybody? Our lord replied, who, in your opinion, is that faithful, farsighted steward whom the master will set over his servants to dispense their ration of grain in due season? That servant is fortunate whom his master finds busy when he returns. His master will put him in charge of all his property. He's proved himself faithful.
On the other hand, if the servant says to himself, my master is taking his own good time about coming, and then he begins to abuse the housemen, the servants, and the servant girls to eat and drink and to get drunk, that servant's master will come back on a day when he least expects him. He will punish the servant severely and rank him among those undeserving of trust. The slave who knew his master's wishes but did not prepare to fulfill them will get a severe beating. Whereas the one, the servant, the slave, who did not know them but who nonetheless deserved to be flogged will get off with fewer stripes. When much has been given a man, much will be required of him.
More will be asked of a man to whom more has been entrusted. 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 said, we today are celebrating the feast of the eight Jesuit martyrs.
Now they weren't all Jesuits and they weren't all priests. They weren't all religious. And we generally refer to them under one or two names. But the least we can do in remembering them, in celebrating their martyrdoms, is at least to call out their names. And the six Jesuit priests were as follows.
Isaac Job, you know that name very well, Antoine Daniil, Jean de Rebeth, Gabriel Lamont, Charles Gurnier, and Noel Chabanel. They were all priests, all Jesuits. And then there were two laymen, companions, associates, but not religious in any sense of the word of a formal brotherhood or anything of that sort. And these two men were Rene Gupeel and Jean de Lalonde. And these eight men died a martyr's death between the year 1642 and 1649 at two separate places.
Three of them were martyred in Orreesville, New York, Upper New York State, and five of them in Canada, Midland, Ontario. Now notice the century. It's it's the first half of the seventeenth century. These all these Jesuits came from a very cultured background, all of them, including their companions. They came out of seminaries.
They came out of an academic world, and they came out freely as volunteers. And they as far as we know, we they fully understood the frustration of the job they were going to try to do. They had no reason under the sun to expect anything like startling results. And several of them had the opportunity of going back to France, and they did go back. But they came out again knowing full well the hazards that they were facing and the slightest possible expectation of results.
There was no reason for them to expect that their lives, even if they hadn't suffered martyrdom, would be very fruitful. There was no reason to expect it. They did only what they could. The church of Jesus Christ is extremely extraordinary in the fact of its missionary activity. Never forget that.
We we take so much for granted. The Romans didn't try to make the Jews believe in their gods and goddesses. The Greeks, when they were when they were dominating the Eastern portion of the Mediterranean, they didn't try to convert the Egyptians to their gods and goddesses. Not at all. It was rather the practice of the conquerors to adopt the gods and goddesses of the people they were conquering.
That's the reason you have such a conglomeration, let us say in Rome. They took over the whole Greek gods and goddess. They didn't know when to stop. Christianity from its very beginning was missionary. This is extraordinary.
From the very beginning. From the very beginning, our lord said, go, teach ye all nations, baptizing them, and teaching them everything that I have taught you. And behold, I am with you all days even unto the consummation of the world. These words don't ever forget them. Them.
They are the foundation of our faith today when there is, in fact, so much confusion. We have no reason to be confused as as long as we see Jesus Christ and hear his living voice in his church. I repeat, he did not give them a book. He sent them out to teach right from the beginning. Now some of you may say, well, of course, but look at Mohammed.
Here he dies in June. '6 I think that's about right. June, about then, anyway. And in a short space of time, this unknown religion from the Far East, from places that nobody had ever heard about, sweeps all across Africa, jumps the Straits Of Gibraltar, and moves up into Europe all the way north until it was stopped. But it took over all of Spain until the time of Isabella and Ferdinand.
Isn't that a missionary activity? No. It was not. It was no more a missionary activity than communism taking over the world or Hitler or Mussolini trying to take Ethiopia. It was a matter of politics, of domination, of occupation, of aggrandizement, but it was not religious.
The Mohammedans didn't force people or even try to get them to be Mohammed Muslims, I should say. They didn't they did they were not a missionary people in that sense of the word at all. Christianity is unique in this regard, and it's unique in its disregard of results, of productivity. A missionary, I should say, used to have the idea that God would give the increase. All he could do was to sow the seed.
The essence of being a missionary is to continue the work of Jesus Christ, not to be social uplifters, not to change cultures, not to give people new political systems, not to interfere with their national goals and objectives. Notice this gospel we had today where our blessed lord refers to slavery. There's not a single word there. There's not the suggestion of a suggestion that our blessed lord in the slightest condemned slavery. Not not the slightest suggestion.
He accepted it. What does Saint Paul say? Slaves, be faithful to your masters even when they mistreat you. You see, we are interested in what? What are we interested in?
What is a missionary supposed to do? What is his activity? Social uplift to reconstruct the economic system, or is it to do what Jesus said? Going, therefore, teach ye all nations. Teach them what I have taught you, what I have taught you.
And Christ was no social uplifter. He was not a political revolutionary. Although we have great and honorable people today telling us that Christ was a great revolutionary. And the best I can do is to get my own little machine gun and go out and imitate him. How absurd can you get?
This is absurd. And they don't even try to base these, and this is operating right within our own missionary activities. If you get any of their magazines, you'll know that I'm not this is not a chaotic windmill I'm talking about. You think the first thing you have to do is to is to convert people to some kind of an anti capitalistic system before they can be saved for Jesus Christ. Today, these here we have these eight men.
As far as human vision can see, they accomplished nothing. What did Colby accomplish when he went down into that dungeon and and was starved to death? What did he accomplish? What did he accomplish? What was the product of his effort?
Anything? Far as you can see, nothing. A corpse. They went in and gave him some shot of some kind of a chemical and killed him because they needed the space. They wanted to put some more people in, so they had to get those guys out.
After all, we cannot fathom the ways of God. Let's let's be very modest and admit that. We are not equal to God in our omniscience. And there's plenty of things go on in the world that we cannot make sense of. Let's admit it.
But who are we to judge? Who are we to judge? Now these men, these judges have been criticized for throwing away their lives. Did they throw them away? Did Colby throw his life away?
Think, I repeat this, I've said it many times, think of the millions, I say millions because I think the number is absolutely untold, of men and women, honest to God Christians, who have slaved, who have done their duty in this life, who have had families or had been attached to families, who are completely anonymous. Completely anonymous. Ed Kerry was buried yesterday. In another year, most people in this parish won't even recognize the name. And in a generation or two, it will be as if he had not lived at all.
Just in a generation or two, thirty years. Life is short, but there are the world has been populated by multitudes, and I firmly believe this, of God fearing men and women whose names have been written in water as far as the world is concerned. As far as the world is concerned. But remember, our blessed lord never told us, never, never told us that in serving him, we're going to be very productive citizens in this world. He never said that.
All that our blessed lord said was, take up your cross and follow me, and then you will save your life. Because if you try to save your life in this world, you're going to lose it. That's the paradox of Jesus Christ. If you lose your life, lose it, as Colby did, as these eight men did, if you lose your life for Christ's sake, you have gained it. Can you believe that?
In the name of the father, and of the son, and of spirit. Amen.