A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The Lord said, if one of you had a servant plowing or herding sheep and the servant came in from the fields, would you say to him, come. Sit down at my table? Would you not rather say, prepare my supper, put on your apron and wait on me while I eat and drink? You can eat and drink afterwards.
Would he, the master, be grateful to the servant who was only carrying out his orders? It is quite the same with you who hear me. This is Christ speaking, remember. When you have done everything that you have been commanded to do, say to yourself, we are useless servants. We have done no more than our duty.
And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Once again, I remind you this was Christ speaking. This is not a parable.
This is a direct quotation of our lord's own words, and it's kind of brutal. Here, our Lord, and I ask you to notice, our Lord is using this. Here we have a man who's been out in the fields from sunrise to sunset, herding sheep or doing other work out in the fields, plowing. And here he comes in after that long, long day in the hot sun and laborious activity. And his master, who probably has been sitting around all day watching TV, tells him, Look, get off your duff and get my food out there.
Been waiting, I'm hungry. And after I eat, then you can have something to eat too if you can still stand up. No. I'm not exaggerating this. This is this is the impact.
You see, I come back to keep this here's another instance. Does Christ try to change the social milieu of his people? Here was an opportunity. And notice, not only doesn't he try to change it, not only does he try to say, look, let's have a little bit of equity here, let's try to treat the servant and the man with a little bit of consideration, he uses this as an example to teach. He gives tacit approval to it, and the man was very likely a slave.
What do you make of that? See, this is forgotten. All this talk about Christ being the revolutionary and the great liberator from what? Oh, yes. Christ was a liberator.
He was a revolutionary. What was he a liberator from? There's the point. Sin, worldliness. He came to preach salvation, and the slave can be saved as well as his master by being a good slave and the master by being a good master.
What counts is serving God. What did Saint Paul said? Well, you know what he said. Now, there is nothing here against people trying to improve their way of life, nothing at all. But it's a big mistake to mistake the emphasis.
We're not born into this world to make this a better world. Tell me where you can justify that in the bible. Oh, you can justify it in this liberation of theology if you want, but I don't find that in the bible at all. I just finished reading this morning, literally this morning, thanks to the generosity of one of our parishioners, a summary which came out of the Bishop's Synod in Rome in The Vatican. They met over there for four weeks.
And what is the emphasis of this? You've got to go through it almost with a fine tooth comb to find the word God. I'm not exaggerating it. This is the official translation of the Vatican. Now this is the Synod of Bishops.
And when I came back from Rome a couple weeks ago, there was a young priest from New York who was very conversant with Italian, and he just finished it and finished reading Les Oversarri Romano, in which he had just finished reading a number of statements from the bishops from all over the world. And he said, you would be absolutely astounded to read some of this stuff. It's all about making this world a better world, a redistribution of wealth, getting rid of nuclear weapons. That's all you don't have to be a Christian to be in favor of all this stuff. And supposing you get rid of it all, supposing we do have absolutely everybody with equal amount of wealth, we have no nuclear weapons, every there's no war going on, are you any closer to salvation?
Are you? You may be, but you may not be. Merely having the absence of war doesn't make you a better Christian, it can make you a worse Christian. Joan of Arc is a saint. And so, our notice, our Blessed Lord is telling us here, look, don't pat yourselves on the back.
When when you've done everything that you're supposed to do and keeping commandments, all you've done is what you're supposed to do. Don't don't think you're so great, this is Christ speaking. You'd say this is a hard doctrine. This is this isn't the way you influence people and win them and persuade them. Christ spoke with authority.
Christ spoke as the son of God. He wasn't interested in winning us. He told us. He doesn't persuade, he tells you. You do it or you don't do it, that's our decision.
Yet, you know, we've got to come back to a very This funeral we had yesterday of Monsignor Lewis, You know death is a reality in the sense that it happens. Death is an event, an actuality. Doesn't it it doesn't it make us ask what in the world is life all about? Is it to make this a better world? Well, you're going to leave it.
Supposing right now, as you sit in those pews, you I'd say, give yourself two or three wishes of all the things you could have in this world. And suppose you got them, would that bring you closer to salvation? And if it doesn't, qui bono, what does it matter? Let's come back to the second question of the penny catechism. It used to be sold for 1p.
I don't know what in the world you can buy today for 1p, but that little Baltimore catechism you could buy for a penny. And I tell you, as someone not totally ignorant with philosophy, that that penny catechism had the wisdom of ages in it because it had the wisdom of God speaking through his church at Trent. And what's that second question? Why did God make you? And that answer came out just like this.
He made me to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in the next. Can you improve on that? Making this a better world does not necessarily and the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.