A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus went through cities and towns teaching, and all the while making his way toward Jerusalem. Someone asked Jesus, Lord, are they few in number who are saved? Jesus replied, try to come in through the narrow door. Many, I tell you, will try to enter and be unable.
When once the master of the house has risen to lock the door and you stand outside knocking and saying, sir, open to us, He will say in reply, I do not know where you come from. Then you will begin to say, why we ate and drank in your company. You taught in our very streets. But he will answer, I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Away from me, you evildoers.
There will be wailing and grinding of teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets safe in the kingdom of god and you yourselves reject it. People will come from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South, and will take their place at the feast in the kingdom of god. Some who are last will be first, and some who are first will be last. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. Again, this is the kind of text. This this is an expression of our own lord's thinking. These are his words. This isn't a parable.
He said this. At least it's reported by Saint Luke is saying it. And, this is not one of the texts that you see brewing abroad. Because this gives us the good news, but it's a good news that a lot of people don't want to hear. They don't want to hear it.
Now you have to get the picture of what of the the circumstances surrounding this statement of our blessed lord. He's talking to Jews. He's talking to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He is talking to the descendants of the prophets. He is talking to people who knew they were the chosen people.
He's talking to people who knew their history of the exodus, of god's providence over them, of how god, in his power, gave them the promised land, handed it to them on a silver platter. They knew all of this. They were the chosen ones. And what does Christ say? He says people will come from the North and the South.
They will come from the East and the West, and they will get in, and you will be left outside knocking. And the master of the house will say, I don't know where you came from. Then they tell him, well, look. We ate with you. You while you were on our streets, you went up and down teaching.
You must remember us. And the Lord says, I don't know where you come from. This is rather this is severe doctrine. And, of course, many people don't want to hear severe doctrine. Many people don't want to hear doctrine at all.
For example, we don't talk about Christian doctrine anymore. We talk about religious education. So you see, we're not a million miles away from the days of our blessed lord, to mix my metaphors. You see, we have to think in terms of reality. As I said yesterday, the you can't escape the obligation of worshiping god almighty.
Now there are many ways of doing this, but you can't escape the overall obligation. And no amount of circumstances, no amount of of building up some kind of religious edifices around ourselves can substitute for honest to God religion. It can't. All that these great externals and by you'll notice what the word external means. It means everything I see and taste and touch and hear, all of these things that surround me.
So much of what we call the religious life. Well, you can be deep into that religious life right up to your eyebrows and not have any religion at all. The church can be a concert hall. The mass can be a drama, a mystery play. The sacraments can be something which is socially accepted.
If you have a baby, you have it baptized, of course, because you need godparents. And godparents, it's a social thing, you see. As a young Yale student told me when we were traveling together and I made the statement that if all religions are equally true, then they're all equally false, and I don't want any parts of any of them, he looked at me and was absolutely scandalized. He said, you can't say that. I said, why not?
He said, because we need religion to keep us civilized. He was sincere. But be God never asked us to be civilized. Christ you you won't find anything like that in the New Testament. What Christ said was, come follow me.
You cannot use God as a means to an end. Immanuel Kant was absolutely right. You can't even use another human being as a means to an end. That was one of his definitions of the categorical imperative. You can't use God.
He's not just an instrumentality to keep us civilized, to keep us human, to keep life pleasant, to have us grow in fulfillment in this world. Christ never, never said anything like that. And yet some people are trying to tell us they did, that he was a great revolutionary. Where was he a great revolutionary? Here's the revolutionary Christ was.
He's telling those Jews, the descendants of the prophets, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the descendants of the chosen people, the elite, the descendants of those multitudes of people that God took through the Sinai Peninsula and brought them up safe into the promised land, these were their descendants. Of course, they were. But they cannot rest on their oars. They cannot say, god, you knew us. You ate with us.
You taught us. Oh, no. You can't get away with that. Not at all. Not at all.
You can't use god almighty. As I've said it, religion can be one of the worst enemies of honest to god religion. People can lose themselves in these all these trappings of religion. Not that they are not import of course, they're important. But we've got to go to God as his creatures, admitting his absolute transcendence, absolute transcendence.
There's not a single proposition you can make about God in a univocal sense. In other words, you can't use words applying them to God as you apply them to anything in this world univocally. That is in exactly the same sense. You can't do it. Not even the little verb to be.
But when you say God is, that word is has a tremendously different meaning as applied to God and applied to anything that I know in this world. And one of the thing differences is God is absolutely transcendent. He's an uncaused cause. He's absolutely sufficient in himself with no beginning and no end, completely separated from time and space. We don't know anything in this world that corresponds to any of those statements, not a single thing.
Because the word is and as we use it for anything we see implies all of that, All of it. And so these are hard words. Our blessed lord had hard words at times. At times. He has more than once indicated that we are destined for eternal happiness, but that we can lose it.
And it's not enough to say, Lord, you taught in our streets. You ate with me. You must know me. No. The question is, have I known you?
In the name of the father, of the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.