A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. And this is the continuation of the narrative we've been reading for the last few days. Now when Elizabeth's time for delivery arrived, she gave birth to a son. Of course, this is the mother of John the Baptist. Her neighbors and relatives see, it wasn't a private affair.
Her neighbors and her relatives, upon hearing that the lord had extended his mercy to her, remember she was a a woman advanced in age and had been sterile all her life, and here she is having a baby now. So when all of them had assembled for the circumcision of the child on the eighth day, they intended to name the boy after his father, Zechariah. Remember, Zechariah had been struck mute. At this, his mother intervened saying, no. The boy is to be called John.
Her relatives pointed out to her, to Elizabeth, none of your relatives has that name. Then using signs, they asked the father what he wanted the boy named. Zechariah signaled for a writing table tablet and wrote the words, his name is John. This astonished everybody. At that moment, the mouth of Zacharias was opened and his tongue loosed, and he began to speak in praise of God.
Fear descended upon all in the neighborhood throughout the hill country that these happenings began to be recounted. Now listen to the last detail. All who heard him stored these things in their hearts saying, what will this child be? And was not the hand of the lord upon him? And this is the gospel of the lord.
Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Well, here we have another installment of the infancy narratives of Saint Luke, which have come under severe criticism in late years in a school of scripture scholars called historical criticism. That's the name of their approach.
Now would you please just remember what we've read? This was not a private affair. First of all, Zacharias was a well known notable figure who served in the temple of the Lord. His wife was known. They were not just a couple of nameless, anonymous people living around Jerusalem.
And notice everybody around in the whole neighborhood, and notice how the text is careful to point that out, that people remembered these things. Well, who wouldn't remember them? And even if the actual writing of Saint Luke's Gospel wasn't as early as, for example, the epistles of Saint Paul, nevertheless you're dealing with at the most about two generations or maybe three. That's all you're dealing with. And here you have people, they didn't have their, all the means of communication that we have and of retention and of of stuff.
They kept it up here. They kept it up here. And it's simply to me incredible that some of these objections are raised because we cannot, you see, have nice little footnotes and references to well known authorities and all of that kind of business. Business. Just keep in mind the the human scene and how and how what Luke is writing.
Of course, Luke wasn't around when this was happening. But my heavens, is there any problem about that that he could have gotten it easily secondhand or thirdhand? Is there something wrong about that? Most authors who write histories weren't around with when a lot of the histories they're writing about happened. It's commonplace.
So you say, well they rest upon authorities and then you have every page a series of footnotes. That's the kind of thing we like today, you know. I mean, some people do. But when you take this scene in its human element, it is so detailed, it is so exact, it is so down to earth. It's like reading the a news item in the morning paper.
It's very simple. Although although what is being narrated is absolutely stupendous, absolutely stupendous. And I mean absolute. We don't think enough about it. We talk about the incarnation, we say God became man, then we go out and have a smoke or something in the same way.
But you see, if we must remember that that we're we're celebrating the birth of God in man. Nobody knows God as God. We use words. What do these words mean? And we're and we're saying that this this being or whatever came on earth as a baby.
And I often think when when our lord said in regard to Saint John, when they came to him, you know, and he said, who are you and all that? And Christ said, when you went out into the desert, what did you expect to see? I think the same question can be asked of us when you go to Bethlehem to celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ. What do you expect to see? God become man in an absolutely helpless baby that needs to have its diapers changed, that can cry when it's hungry, that it suckles at its mother's breast.
You say, that's God almighty? Now keep this in mind that there have been good serious people who could not accept such a concept that God could demean himself to take on our human bodies. I know that I know some of the antecedents of this kind of nonsense, but you have to see what they were what their real problem was, and there is a problem. And so their answer was, sure. God became man, but the body was just an illusion.
Just seemed to be there. It wasn't actually there because they couldn't think, they couldn't admit, they couldn't conceive in their minds of God almighty taking on a human on the flesh and the emotions and the feelings and everything else of a human being. Yet, that's what we say. That's the that is what we're saying, that God became man and ended up on the cross. That's it's is that what we went out to see?
Is that what people expect to find in Christ? In most instances, the answer is no. They think they're gonna find in Christ peace, tranquility, joy. Now wait a minute, before I go, these things are found in Christ, but the definition is our Lord's definition and not the world's. Just this morning, just this morning there's a I noticed there was a there's a pamphlet in the rack back there about Colby, and in the very leg there that is Maximilian Colby, the Franciscan who lost his life by taking the place of another condemned man in Auschwitz.
And at the end they speak of his joy. Now that's the joy you're talking of, but that's not the world's concept of joy being pushed into a dungeon to be starved to death. So today, you just all the Christmas cards you get and the sentiments on them, they're good, they're fine, but they certainly overlook the cross. They overlook they overlook so much of what our blessed lord told us. They overlook the fact that as far as I can see, our blessed lord didn't move his little finger to make this a better world in the sense of a better government or better welfare programs or any such thing as that.
He didn't even did not even offer one word of opposition to slavery, and not only to slavery, but to selling people's children for debts. He used that as an example and never said a word in opposition to it. And so I said this morning, think of this, what do you expect to find when you look for Jesus in Bethlehem? Is is it going to be the Jesus of your imagination, of your of your profound wishing, of your unfulfilled desires, of your inadequacies? Is that what you expect to find?
Or are you going to be looking and be prepared to accept the real honest to goodness Jesus? That infant, just as much a human infant as any baby born of woman, who lived a very short life and God himself was put on the cross. In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.