A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Jesus said to the crowds, what comparison can I use to describe this breed? They are like children, squatting in the town squares, calling to their playmates, we piped you a tune, but you didn't dance. We sang you a dirge, but you did not wail. In other words, our lord is speaking.
In other words, John, that is John the Baptist, appeared neither eating nor drinking. And people said, he is mad. The son of man appeared eating and drinking, and now they say about him, this one is a glutton and a drunkard, a lover of tax collectors, and those outside the law, which, of course, is a synonym for being sinners. Yet time will prove, our lord concludes, time will prove where wisdom lies. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. This statement of our blessed lord is so extremely true. You can't win. You can't win.
As he says, John the Baptist came. He as you know, don't know an awful lot about him, but the point is John the Baptist must have exercised a tremendous influence in his day, tremendous. He came out of the desert places down around the Dead Sea around Jericho, and probably was associated with the Essenes. He wasn't one of them, but he might have been associated with them. Now the Essenes, you know, we heard a lot about them when about the Qumran manuscripts, the Dead Sea Scrolls as they're called.
Well, when you're down around the Dead Sea, you can look up. You're you're you're looking west, and it's a very barren. Well, they call it a desert. And it's a gruesome looking hillside, repulsive. It looks like a burned out hill, burned out hills.
And this whole area is lined with caves, that's where they found these scrolls. Now apparently that's where John, at some time of his life, went there and lived the life of a hermit. And we're giving we're given this picture of him in the new in the in the New Testament that he appeared clothed in camel's hair. Notice this is down in the Dead Sea where year in and year out, it's hot. It's hot.
I was in Jerusalem when we had snow. When we got down to the Dead Sea, you'd go swimming if you were silly enough to go into that water. So here he is clothed in a camel's hair with a leather and felt around his waist. You can and a flowing you can you can imagine he must have had a beard almost down to his knees. He must have looked like a wild man.
And some people said he is wild. He's nuts. He's crazy. Of course, they've said that a lot about a lot of people who followed Christ. But that's the way they looked at John.
Now he had influence. Oh, don't underrate it. But according to our blessed lord, he had his critics. Well, even if you didn't read a word of this, you would know he had critics. If you try to do anything in this life, you will have critics.
The only way you can escape criticism is to do nothing to be a fungus on a log. But once you move your hand to do something, there will be those who approve and those who will disapprove. This is absolutely commonplace. And our Blessed Lord focuses on this. He said, John came, he was a hermit, he lived on nothing but grasshoppers.
Don't underrate that, that wasn't too bad a diet in a way. We're eating them now, we're eating ants, you know, too, if you go to enough cocktail parties. So but he was he was outside the, you know, the civilized people. He didn't wasn't a Pharisee, he wasn't a Sadducee, he wasn't a scribe, he was just some kind of a desert hermit, a loner, an absolute loner, and probably looked like a wild man. And so in spite of the fact that he had multitudes of followers, don't underrate it.
We pick up his traces in the epistles. John had tremendous influence, but at the same time, he had his critics. They say he's a maniac. He's a lunatic. He's crazy.
He's a nut. So our lord said they condemned him. Then he says, I come. The son of man comes, and I eat and I drink. So they say you're a glutton and a drunkard.
Moreover, you even eat with publicans. Now the publican was pretty he was at the bottom of the heap because you see not only was he outside the law, but he collected taxes for Rome. And a tax collector in those days was no more popular than the IRS is today, much more so. And so he, our blessed lord, says, I come. I try to win sinners.
I eat and I drink, and you accuse me of being a drunkard and a glutton and outside the law. Because you see, when you dine with this with a person outside the law, that made you unclean too. There was a lot of uncleanliness around those in that in those days. You scarcely move without getting unclean. So how do you win?
Well, answer is in a sense you can't. It's a very immature person. It is a person of no experience, vicarious experience or personal experience, who thinks he can please everybody. So the question is, whom are you going to please? The question is, what is your standard of conduct?
You've got to have one or something. You've got to have it. And you have it either in theory or you have it in fact. What is it? How operational is it in your daily living?
Now I've been reading this very long novel by the Italian ECO, E C O, called The Name of the Rose. I don't know where it gets that title. It's about a fourteenth century, and it's it's a kind of a gothic romance with all kinds of background information, and in many ways extremely accurate. It's centered in a monastery, and a very good one, and a very magnificent, affluent, wealthy monastery, Benedictine monastery. They have a few murders there just to, you know, to break the monotony of life there.
And it brings in all kinds of movements. Now the one of the great movements, one of the great movements of the fourteenth century, notice I say fourteenth, Francis of Assisi was born, you know, in the twelfth. So this is about a 100 and some a 100 and year few years after Francis of Assisi founded his Order of Franciscans. Now, one of his great, and the same way with Saint Dominic, the Dominicans, but one of his great that is Francis, one of his, I guess you can say his chief avenue for coming close to Christ was poverty. Poverty.
And Francis of Assisi had the concept of absolute poverty. Absolute, that you owned absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. And even this adusum that is for the use of, that was very carefully guarded. But even if even he scarcely got started when there was dissension among the brethren.
Because as a practical thing, how do you live with absolute poverty? The point I wanna make though is this, that within a few years, this idea of poverty had become a divisive issue in the whole of Northern Italy, Southern France, and maybe some parts of Southern Germany. I'm not sure of that. But the point is that they seemed to be on the point of denying the right of private property. Now there's two very different things, Because you can go back to the Acts of the Apostles and you have plenty of communism, that is things were held in common, but that doesn't mean that you deny or reject the rights of private property.
But this is all peripheral. This story, and I think it's accurate as far as it goes, gives you a picture of the conflict that was going on over this matter of property. God has disappeared from it all. You have these people literally killing each other over this problem, burning people at the stake. And in all of this hubbub, all of this turmoil, where's God?
Where is God? I tell you, as I've said many times from this pulpit, religion can be the greatest obstacle to honest to God religion. It can be, and it has been, and it can be in our lives. It can be in our lives. We have got to come back to God.
Whether we come out of the desert as a Saint John the Baptist, whether as if you as some people do it, are plenty of good honest to God Catholics who take for vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. And the church says, fine. But don't tell everybody else they've got to do that. You can eat and you can drink and you can eat with sinners, with the charity of Christ. The church takes us all.
But the main thing is to keep God in our lives. I mean, operationally keep God in our lives in daily decision making. Do we are we separated from the world in the sense in which we are different? If if we're not, we're we're not living up to Christ. That's all there is to it.
Unless we are a scandal to the world, you can be sure that we're not very authentically Christian. And how do I know this? Christ said so. He said the the world will hate you. The world will hate you because it's an absolute dichotomy between the the world in that sense and Jesus Christ.
And so this today, our blessed lord is giving us the problem of our lives. We are in the world. We have to use the things of this world. Every person sitting in that pew this morning has responsibilities of all sorts. We can't turn our back on them.
We have to live with Jesus Christ. And I come back to that same thing, the opus dei, the work of the Lord. Whether you be a Saint John the Baptist eating grasshoppers and the honey of wild bees, or whether you are with our blessed Lord, the question is, are you doing his work? Are you choosing Christ? In the name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit.
Amen.