A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. This this continues the message of yesterday. Same thing. Jesus said to his disciples, you know as well as I do, that if the head of the house knew when the thief was going to come and break in, he would not let him do it, but he would be on his guard. He'd been expecting it.
The son of man will come when you least expect him. Peter then said, do you intend this parable for us, Lord? Or do you mean it for the whole world? Jesus answered, who in your opinion is that faithful, farsighted steward, whom the master will set over his servants to dispense their ration of grain in due season. That servant is fortunate, whom his master finds busy when he returns.
Assuredly, his master will put him in charge of all his property. But if the servant says to himself, my master is taking his time about coming, and then he begins to abuse the house men and the servant girls to eat and drink and get drunk. That servant's master will come back on a day when the servant does not expect him, at a time he does not know. Then he will punish him severely, and rank him among those undeserving of trust. The slave who knew his master's wishes, but did not prepare to fulfill them, will get a severe beating.
Whereas the one who did not know them, and who nonetheless deserved to be flogged, will get off with fewer stripes. When much has been given to a man, much will be required of him. More will be asked of a man in whom more has been entrusted. 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 letter of Paul to the Ephesians is extremely important letter because here you have Paul explicitly explaining to the Gentiles, and these are authentic Gentiles. These are not Jew, Greek speaking Jews, That he has been called in a very special way to bring the good news of salvation, the message of Jesus Christ to the non Jew. That's explicitly stated in today's reading. Now the one little point I want to make is this.
You have to go back a little bit. Remember, Paul explicitly tells us that his knowledge of Jesus Christ, the information he has about salvation came to him directly by special private revelation. Paul explicitly says, I didn't get it from the apostles. I got it straight from Jesus speaking to me directly. Paul says this, this is no opinion of mine.
And the only way you can get out of this is to throw the text out, and no one does that. I mean, there's no question about these epistles of Saint Paul, none at all. Now, here is a man who from his youth was dedicated and committed to God, and to serving God as he saw that service should be. Don't ever forget that. When we talk about the conversion of Saint Paul, what do you mean?
He didn't change in his attitudes towards God. The big change came in the in the way he served that God. He was doing before his, this wonderful event on the road to Damascus. He was serving God as he saw it his duty to do. And then something very wonderful happens.
No question about this, whatever it was. Remember there's nothing in the text about his being thrown from a horse, but he was thrown to the ground. And he was blindness succeeded. And you and you know the story. But the thing is that Paul got the knowledge that he had of Jesus Christ from Jesus Christ directly.
Now, and yet, and remember Paul was proud of that. I mean, he made that very clear. Despite that, when a controversy arose of how certain problems should be handled, what did Paul do? Did he stand up and say, look, I know whereof I speak. I am Paul.
I had a very special and private revelation, and no one can ever deny that, and he's right. I don't need to refer this to anybody. I tell you what the truth is. Is that what he did? Absolutely not.
Absolutely not. He hiked himself back to Jerusalem. This was the big problem over circumcision. How do you receive non Jews into the fellowship of Jesus Christ? Some good, sincere followers of the new way, that's what they were called at this time, said you have to go through the formula of becoming a Jew to become a follower of the new way.
Paul said, nicks on that. But there was a controversy among the brethren. And as I say to Paul, up and say, look, don't talk to me. I'll talk to you. I have the word of God straight from his son Jesus Christ.
I'll tell you. He made his view perfectly clear, but he did not he did not make any effort to enforce his view with authority until he went back to Jerusalem and met with the apostles and with Peter. And Peter was the spokesman back in Jerusalem. Keep that in your mind. This We're talking about the earliest days of the church.
We had no New Testament. We had no scripture. If you wanted to have a scripture reading then you had to read the Old Testament, which they did. Just keep that in mind. You don't have a book until well into the end of that century.
Well into it. Now here we have another very important little phrase where Paul says, you will listen to the church. He didn't say you listen to me. He said, you I have the message through the church, and you must listen to the church. That's there you have it.
Now as I said, we're talking about the earliest days of this ecclesia. That's the Greek word. Ecclesia, which means ecclesia. Remember, that word ecclesia, the Greek word ecclesia, from which we get ecclesiastical ekklesiastics, that is a very special word. That doesn't mean a crowd.
That doesn't mean a mob. It may it mean ekklesia was an organized, formalized association of citizens, the classical Greek word. Organized to give service to the city or the city state. That was the technical, the classical meaning of ekklesia. It's not just a crowd, it's not just a community, in the sense you gather a bunch of people together and and you all sit around.
It was an organized administrative thing. Organized and it was organized for the benefit to give service to the city state. Keep that in mind. And that's the word used. When Christ said, upon this rock, I will build my church.
The Greek there is ecclesia. You could we could I know there's all kinds of controversies about this, but you can't get away from that fact that Christ said, on this rock, I will build my ecclesia. And when Paul's talking here to the Ephesians, he says, you're going to get this to the ecclesia, through the church. And when Paul needed to have verification of his own views, he went back to Jerusalem, to the ecclesia in Jerusalem. And the spokesman was Peter.
As I say, these are the earliest days of the new way of the new way of Jesus Christ. You see today, there is such a downgrading in some ways of the authority of the church. I said authority. Now the essence of authority is that it speaks without demonstration. It orders without argument.
It operates be because of the dynamism behind it. A man commanding troops. I never will forget. I was invited down to the naval academy to give this a good many years ago when they did not have a chap or a catholic service on the the the the academy grounds down in Annapolis. In those days, the Catholic committees, it was a very to me a very inspiring sight to see them marched over to Saint Mary's Church on a Sunday morning.
And they would they would almost fill the the two center aisles of Saint Mary's Church which is a big church. And could those boys sing? They really went into it. Now, I went down there to give a talk on patriotism or something like that. Anyway, I don't know the whole story of it.
But there there was a a a a very fiery controversy going on in the academy. And it had to do with the with the competency of some of their officers. That is their own guys, you know. And they got me after the talk and I had no background and I had sense enough to know, you know, you have to be very careful. The ground on which you stand a tread in those places is very delicate.
So the point that one of the middies said, they were arguing among themselves about the competency of the officers and orders that they should give. And I never will forget how one of the fellows young men stood up and said, it's not the man in the uniform, his stripes count. And he was absolutely right. It's the stripes his authority that counts. Now you either have it or you don't have it.
You either have the authority to put your name on the bottom of a check or with the money in the bank or you don't. And it doesn't make how much difference whether you're a good man or a bad man or a or a benevolent man or a malevolent man or a thief or a robber or a rapist or anything else. Do you have the wherewithal to sign the check? It's all that matters when you sign the check. Have you the authority to do it?
That concept, you see, but you take the family. We talk about the family being a difficult. Its main difficulty is the one of authority. Children now, they'll say, why should I do something? Prove it to me.
Show it to me. Or they'll say, well, you know, everything is Nothing is either black or white things. And now this has been shot at me. I'm not theorizing at all. After all, this is a high school boy.
Says, after all, you know, nothing is black or white. Everything's gray. The church is built upon authority, not upon reason, not upon argumentation, not upon demonstration. It is the ultimate authority, and the ultimate authority in the church is the pope. Christ said it that way.
You are you're Peter and on this rock, I'm gonna build my church. Look what a mess he turned out to be, you know, the very first pope. Then we talk about Alexander the sixth. We've got and I I said I I don't it isn't a question of whether or not you accept this. I'm saying this is the way the church is.
This is the Catholic church. It's not a consensus of theologians or scripture scholars. It's not a consensus of philosophers. They're the worst of the crowd, really. Because they've tried it, you see.
This has been going on for as long as we have any records. Men have used their reason to try to get at great truths and look where they've gone. It isn't because they haven't tried. And so we come back to this position of Saint Paul. Listen to the church.
In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen. The lord