A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The mother and brothers of Jesus came to be with him. But because of the crowd, they couldn't get near him. Someone told Jesus about it. Your mother and your brothers are standing outside, and they want to see you.
In reply, Jesus said, my mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of god and act upon it. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. First of all, this text as you all recognize is one of the texts which is, oh, commonly, normally quoted to prove that Christ had brothers and sisters.
And that, of course, that the blessed mother did not remain a virgin after the birth of Christ. Of course, that idea came with our with the reformation, the sixteenth century. This text was very well known before Luther came along or Calvin or Zwingli or any of the rest of them. And to understand brothers or sisters in this context as meaning a blood relationship, of course, let us say at the the most you can say for it is that it is a controversial. Doesn't prove a thing.
If I look at this congregation as I as I say, dear brethren, notice in Latin that becomes fratres. Am I calling everybody out there my brothers, my blood brothers? Well, anyway, let's get to something serious. Our blessed lord is saying here something that's terribly hard to put into practice, and that is to act out what we say we believe. Even if I say, you know, it's easy to say that.
Easy as anything to say it. But it is so frankly difficult to do this. You just think of all the wonderful humor that that we used to hear. You don't hear much as much as you used to about it, but about New Year's resolutions. It They were really nothing but a joke, and yet plenty of people made them seriously.
And how many followed through on? And in many instances, these resolutions, well, in some instances, they were matters of life and death. They were matters of preserving a family and a marriage or having it destroyed. And yet, where did the good resolutions lead? Somebody said that hell is paved with good resolutions.
William James, the great Harvard psychologist, beginning of this century, the end of the last one, the brother of Henry James, was a was an MD, a physician, and a psychologist, and and a good one. Good one. He was down to earth and he knew human nature. And in one of the chapters of his psychology, he has a famous description. You know, they say that William James should have that Henry James, the one the great novelist, you know.
That he should have written English the way his brother Willie did at Harvard, who was the psychologist. And if any of you have read any of William James, you'll know how true that is. But anyway, in his psychology, William James, the psychologist, draws a picture of the fine lady coming in her carriage to the opera. Of course, it's Boston. Being a Harvard man, he knew there was one city in the universe, and that name was Boston, of course.
Everybody knows that. Anyway, the dear old lady comes up in her carriage. Of course, the the the man driving the carriage isn't inside the carriage. He's sitting on a box outside the carriage. I don't know whether any of you have seen that kind of a carriage, but that was commonplace.
So she goes into the opera and spends three or four hours in there, and she feels very sorry for her coachman who's sitting out there in the snow. So she comes out and she is she feels sorry for him. What does she do about it? And here's what I'll never have forgotten this. Here's what William James says.
He says that that's the worst kind. That's he called that despicable. If I remember, he call and that's that's very strong language for him. He thought it was the worst possible kind of conduct. When we have all these fine emotions and do nothing about it.
Now that was a that was William James without any supernatural idea or not he wasn't bringing in God or anything like that. He was just looking upon it as common sense point of view, and not as a Freudian either. That the the most despicable kind of conduct is to have these wonderful wonderful feelings, sentiments, emotions, passions, and do nothing about it. And do nothing about it. Think of all the letters we have written tomorrow.
Think of all the wonderful things we have done on the basis of resolutions. Remember, resolutions all all resolutions face the future. It may be a very close approximate future, but they face the future. You don't make a resolution about the past. If you make a resolution about the present, it's future when you make the resolution.
Now, Newman has a wonderful passage on this. The how human nature We we become so enthusiastic about something, And we give it our all until we have time to sleep on it. And then he says, it's characteristic of human nature, what? To fade away. Gradually, not suddenly, but gradually.
A little bit here, a little bit there, a little bit over here. And that's why James says in a very very notable passage, if you make a resolution and you wanna keep it, one of the very basic qualities it must have is no exceptions. No exceptions. Keep it. No exceptions.
And so we, when our blessed lords speaks this way, he remember, Christ was human. Absolutely as human as you or I am human, with the exception of sin. Keep that in mind. It was on the cross that Christ said, my god my god, why have you abandoned me? He knew what what what we call despair was, if you in quotation marks.
So he our blessed lord is talking to us, not as angels, not as perfect beings, but as the human beings we are. And we try. We try. And we fail. I often think of the stations of the cross.
There's nothing in the bible in the new testament about Christ falling onto the cross. Not a word. Why do you think it's up there? These stations came about the time of Saint Francis of Assisi. We don't precisely know when.
Because the men and women of that time wanted to identify with Christ, and they know that carrying your cross means you're going to fall under the cross sometimes. Sometimes. And what matters is that your risings are one more than your fallings. That's what counts. And so when our blessed lord speaks this way, he's not speaking to condemn us.
He's speaking to tell us what we are, and he's also telling us where we get our strength. This is the important thing. Anybody can make resolutions. Anybody. And it's a good thing.
Resolutions are good. Nothing in this world has ever been accomplished without a resolution. Keep that in mind. Nothing. Nothing at all.
Worthwhile. And so our blessed lord is telling us this, that you you've got a problem on your hands. It isn't enough for you to say to give your intellectual assent. As Newman said, nobody was ever converted by a syllogism. It isn't enough to have good and noble feelings.
They are cheap. As James says, without action, they are despicable. Despicable. So let's come to our blessed Lord and realize who we are, but realize who he is. There's an article in the Reader's Digest for September about a girl 26 years old who, believe it or not, she was a some kind of an engineer with an appliance company.
Company. And she wanted to get a personal knowledge, she was in designing appliances, and she wanted to get a personal knowledge of of what the elderly people need in the way of appliances. So once a week, for three years, she dressed up as an 85 year old lady after finding out how to make up. Took her four hours to put on the, you know, all the rigmarole they put on. So for three years, once a week in in nearly all of the states of the union, all kinds of people.
She traveled around one day of the week as an 85 year old lady. It's in the September issue of the Reader's Digest. And here's one of the things she found, and this is the point she most makes. She found that the men and women, if her experience of playing the part of the 85 year old lady who had maintained or retained or recaptured or recaptured their self esteem, it was because they got to realize they were sons and daughters of God. Now that's the very same thing that Frankl, Viktor Frankl discovered in Auschwitz.
That the prisoners there who survived and maintained their self esteem were those who had a firm, whether they were Jew or Christian. And remember, were a lot of Christians. It wasn't just a Jewish monopoly on Auschwitz, that it was because of their firm belief in God as their father, and in themselves as his son and daughter. Let us not forget that. Let us not be us let I would say this.
Let us not expect too much of ourselves, but let us expect everything from Jesus Christ, if only we will do our little part. In the name of the father, and of the son, holy spirit, amen.