A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. In the sixth day month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph of the house of David. The virgin's name was Mary. Upon arriving, the messenger said to Mary, rejoice, oh, highly favored daughter. The lord is with you.
Blessed are you among women. Mary was deeply troubled by these words and wondered what his greeting might mean. The messenger went on to say to her, do not fear, Mary. You have found favor with God. You shall conceive and bear a son and give him the name Jesus.
Great will be his dignity, and he will be called son of the most high. The lord god will give him the throne of David, his father. He will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and his reign will be without end. Mary then said to the angel, how can all of this happen since I do not know man? The angel replied, the holy spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you.
Hence, the holy offspring to be born of you will be called son of god. Know that Elizabeth, your king's woman, has conceived a son in her old age. She, who was thought to be sterile, is now in her sixth month, for nothing is impossible with God. At this, Mary said, I am the maidservant of the lord that it be done to me as you say. And that with that, the angel left her.
And this is the gospel, the good news 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. Of course, what we're hearing are the different versions of the infancy narratives, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Now, please notice, these events concerning Mary are taking place up in the North country, in around Nazareth, which is to the west of the Lake Of Galilee.
It's about midway between the Mediterranean and the and the Sea Of Galilee. Elizabeth is down in Judea, or up, depending on how you look at it. Now after this discourse, after this dialogue, after this annunciation, after this whatever you want to call it, what does Mary do? I said yesterday, she gets out her Mercedes Benz and traipses down to Judea, to her cousin Elizabeth. Now another thing to keep in mind is that these documents were written, all all of them were written before a 100 AD.
Some of them as early probably as '65 or seventy AD. Our Blessed Lord dies in about '33 or '35, something like that. These events which are being recorded, it's easily possible possible that people were living when these documents came to be known. Because remember, they didn't just come out as we are reading them. There was a was a an oral tradition before we got the verbal and the written.
Now the point and these events were known to other people. You're not when Matthew, Mark, and Luke, when they sat down to to pour whoever put this into writing, they they had an audience in which some of them could have had firsthand information on this. At least they could have known the people who were involved in this. Now that's that is just a simple fact of the matter, and we all everybody has to agree to this. Keep that in mind.
These were not written for, by, or two hundred years after the events. And above all, keep in mind that you're dealing here with an oriental tradition, where people remembered things much more than we do without writing them down. See, unless in our culture, unless it's written, it doesn't count. You have to have all the footnotes, you know, to make your dissertation worthwhile. Now, these are the facts of the situation.
But what I want to point out is this, after this discourse that Mary had with whatever this angel is, I don't know how these people recognize people as angels. If I happen to meet an angel, how would I know what an whether that it's an angel. I have trouble with his angel business. But something happened to Mary. She had some kind of a vision.
Or she she knowledge came to her in some way or other. But the point I wanna make is what did she do? She leaves and and remember, to for her to make that journey from Nazareth all the way down south, it was no mean trip. Yet, that's what she does. Why did she make the trip?
I don't know. We're not told why. But she made it. That's the point I want to make. She made that trip.
Notice what the angel is saying, your cousin Elizabeth, an old woman, and we know she was sterile. In other words, she's she's really out of the ballgame. Is is already pregnant, and she's got a son. Notice, the sex of the child is given. They didn't have a lot of x-ray machines around those days.
They were very retarded country country over there, you know. So Mary goes down to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Then we have that the scenes of where she meted. Now I know the Magnificat didn't didn't come come out of Mary's mouth just like that that that I know that, and so do we all. But the point is, what I want to make clear is that when the angel tells Mary all these wonderful things, what does Mary do?
She leaves, and she goes down to her cousin Elizabeth. She may have been prompted by her cousin six months pregnant. So she may have felt, well, she needs help. I'm going down to help her, and so but But the point is she made the trip, and everything the angel said was verified. It was the only way she could do it.
She couldn't pick up her telephone, even the latest model, and get Elizabeth on the other end of the line and say, Is it true that you're pregnant? An angel just told me that, you know. Is that true? The only way she could verify was to go down and see for herself. Now whether that was her motive and purpose, I don't know that.
Neither do you. None of us know the motives. We're not told. But she went. The fact is she went.
And the fact is when she got down there, she found the predictions, the statements of angel verified. And as I said yesterday, if you want motives of credibility, can you get better ones than that? And I repeat, these events could easily have been known, easily been known, by people when these things became published, in the sense of being made known, by people who knew the persons involved in this, easily. You see, this is a tremendous thing. You see, either God became man, or he didn't.
You it's either or. It's either or. They're contradictory statements, and one of two of them is true. So and if God became man, and if this story of Jesus Christ and coming into this world as the son of Mary, if that is actual fact, it should change our lives. Now it has changed our lives.
It has changed our lives. It has changed the lives of millions of people. It has changed the lives of people over two thousand years. But it isn't something that you can be indifferent to. This is the point I make, you cannot be indifferent.
Because if it's true, then it's the greatest thing that's ever happened to man. If it's false, it's the thing we ought to do everything to get rid of. Because can you imagine anything that's so if that is not true, if there is there anything that has disturbed lives more than this, that has called forth all kinds of sacrifices, that has demanded everything, our our blessed lord said, give me everything. That's all he said. It's all he said.
All he asked is everything. What arrogance? What arrogance? Unless he is God. Unless he is God.
Now all this talk about the creches is a lovely word, and what they're talking about is the nativity scene. I don't know where that French word got into our language. But the thing is, you cannot be indifferent. Because if God did become man, then it's the greatest thing that's ever happened in the world. And if that is if that is just nonsense, then we ought to do everything we can to get rid of it.
But you cannot be indifferent. You cannot say it doesn't matter. And yet that is the tendency today in a article in the Washington Post yesterday. It says, after all, let's just take it easy. You believe, I don't believe.
We live together. Of course we live together. We do have a society in which we have differences of opinion, of course. But that doesn't mean we're indifferent to the opinions. And it doesn't mean that we have to accept as true ideas which we maintain as false.
And all of this without judging persons. Notice I said ideas. And to say that, well, you know, I believe this and you believe that, and we're both equally right and we're both equally wrong. You see, that is absolutely hogwash. And yet that is what we are washing in today.
They call it the agnostic attitude. It's the attitude, you know, which gives a person a certain aloofness, broadness of view, open mindedness. We call it liberalism. Well, as I said, either God became man in the womb of this Virgin Mary or he did or God did not. And if he did, it is the most how what word can you use?
What can you say about it? You can't say anything except to go down and say, my lord and my god, help me to believe. Help me. Help me in a world in which there is such great unbelief and disbelief and negation. It's all we can say, and thank god for our faith.
In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.