A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus went through cities and towns teaching all the while making his way toward Jerusalem. Someone asked him, Lord, are there few in number who are saved? Jesus replied, try to come in through the narrow door. Many, I tell you, will try to enter and won't be able to do it.
When once the master of the house has risen to lock the door and you stand outside knocking and crying out, sir, open for us. The master will say in reply, I do not know where you come from. Then you will begin to say, why we ate and drank with you. You taught us in our very streets. But he will answer, I tell you, I do not know where you come from.
Away from me, you evildoers. There will be wailing and grinding of teeth when you see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the prophets safe in the kingdom of god, and you yourselves reject it. People will come from the East and the West, from the North and the South and will take their place at the feast in the kingdom of god. Some who are last they will be first And some who are first, they will be last. And this is the gospel of the Lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Attractive as this excerpt from Saint Luke is today, and remember, these passages from Saint Luke are continuous. If you'll take the time to go back and read Saint Luke in its entirety, which will take you all of about twenty minutes at the most. And then you will get something out of it, I think, much more than taking by dribs and drabs this way. And the same goes for this matter of reading Saint Paul's epistle to the Ephesians.
Taking it by little dribs and drabs, it it's it well, of course, the only word for is is absurd. That is if you're if you're reading a book, if you're reading a letter, if you're reading anything. The worst kind of lying is to tell the truth. And by that I mean by lifting out sentences from context. That's if you want to be a really first class liar, that's the way to do it.
Because everything you say there is true. See? As I say, it's only a foolish person who tells a downright lie, you know. That's what you call serpentine wisdom. I want to come back to this matter of Saint Paul because it's a matter which today is contradicted, right in the Catholic church.
Even among good Catholics, the word authority is not in high favor. We have become strictly egalitarian. Someone has discovered the the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. We we we don't like to think of god speaking, and then we having to obey blindly. Blindly.
Faith is blind. Never forget it. You can't believe what you see. You can't believe what you taste. You can't believe what anything that comes through the senses.
You can't believe what you discover by your reason. The only thing you accept by faith is what you cannot prove, what you cannot know by by reason or experience or any other way. Faith is blind, but not unreasonable. Any lawyer will tell you that. It's a matter of credibility, and it's a matter not of proof for what is accepted as true, but it's a matter of proof to justify the credibility of your witness.
And that has always been the doctrine of the the Catholic church until the sixteenth century when our dear friends Lutheran Zwingli and Company decided to change all of that. And now we convert what we call belief into trust, confidence, into feeling, into sentiment. You feel you are saved, say said Luther, therefore you're saved. I wish it were that easy. Now, Saint Paul here is not mincing word.
You recall that reading yesterday. He deals with the family, and he says there's got to be authority in the family. You can't have two quarterbacks on your team. Have you ever been in a in a in trying to put on a little amateur show in high school or college or any place. And you know how it is.
You have a director. The first thing that happens almost in your first rehearsal, somebody wants to be a co director. Or maybe two or three want to be co directors. You know how it goes. And you know what happens.
It's a de stacco. It's it's it's completely, anarchism. And you can't put a show on that way. You need one director. One.
Who tells everybody what to do. It isn't that his omniscient or she's omniscient. It means you can't have two people running a show. If you do, you'll never put a show on the road. And if any of you have been in amateur dramatics, you'll know how well I speak.
You know about the well, anyway, let's not go into it. But it can be very amusing, shall we say. Very amusing. Even to how a door should be opened, or who turns on a light, or, you know, where a table should stand. There has to be someone who comes in and says, Look, this is the way it's going to be.
You elected me, therefore it's going be that way. Or, I have authority from someplace else, and so this is the way you're going to do it. Anyone who's had experience with with these things knows how true this is. Now, today, there are some who don't like the idea of the church resting with its apex on god, who spoke to Saint Peter. Notice, Christ didn't tell the whole gang of apostles that they were all gonna be a lot of rocks, and all of them were going to the church was gonna be built on all of them, like you build a lighthouse on Thomas Point.
Christ signaled out one man, and he said, you are going to be the rock. And then he the rest of them, he said, you you are going to go out and you're going to teach all nations and teach them what I've told taught you. No. He didn't say, look, my friends, go out and get yourself a good pot of coffee and sit around a table, and then now we'll have a consensus of what you're to teach in my name. That's not the way Christ did it.
Now I as I say, you may not like what Christ did. You may like what Christ did. That's not the point. What did Christ do? He did he said to one man, on that rock I will build my church.
He said to the apostles, you go out and you teach everything that I have taught you. Not what you wanna teach, not what you think ought to be taught, not what we get it from a consensus of all the people of of Samariah and Galilee and Judea. You go out and you teach what I taught you. Nothing else. And behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.
Where is he? Is our blessed Lord speaking to us in a thousand, a million, a trillion voices? Where is his truth? Because if I can't discover it, the heck with it. What good is it to me if I can't find it?
Or if it's so difficult that only a genius or or some very special or extraordinary abnormal person can find it? Or that the only way I can find it is to is to leave my family, to leave my children, and to leave my wife, and go out in the Nile Desert and become a hermit, and enjoy life for the rest of my weaning years. Is that what Christ wants us to do? Where is the authority for that? Where is it?
The Catholic church is built on the authority. Whose authority? Whose? And Saint Paul, you see, is saying this. Notice how he talks about the whole familial unit, because slaves were part of the family.
And he doesn't ask them to be obedient, to accept the authority of those over them, for philanthropic reasons, for altruism, for self interest, in the sense of a temporal self interest, nothing like that at all. He says in her own little world, and it was a hotbed of dissension and even bitterness. So she wasn't leaving. Her home was much more tranquil than the convent she went into in Liesia. That's according to the latest.