A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. On one occasion, in a certain town, a man full of leprosy came to Jesus. Seeing Jesus, the man bowed down to the ground and said to Jesus, Lord, if you will do so, you can cure me. Jesus stretched out his hand to touch the man and said to him, remember, even if a shadow of a leper or so called leper fell upon you, you were legally unclean. So notice, when the man asks to be cured, at once Jesus stretched out his hand to touch the man, not just stretching it out, but to touch the leper, and said to him, I do, will it be cured.
Immediately, the leprosy left him. Jesus then said to the man, this is always mysterious to me. I don't understand. Jesus then instructed the man, tell no one about this, but go and show yourself to the priest. Offer for your healing what Moses prescribed.
That should be a proof to them. The reputation of Jesus spread more and more, and the great crowd gathered to hear him and to be cured of their maladies. Jesus often retired to desert places. Notice what I said yesterday. He often retired to desert places and prayed by himself alone.
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. Welcome to winter. Now we are in the season of Epiphany, and you and you'll notice, the last three mornings, we had the miracle of the the feed feeding of the multitude of people.
We had we had forest miracles. We had Christ walking on the sea. We had him we had him quieting the storm. Now today, we have Jesus performing this miracle of curing the leopard. The leper, I mean.
You see what the church is doing? The church is saying, look. Jesus Christ is God. Look what he did, and we need this. As I said, don't take your faith for granted.
It's something to be cultivated. It can be lost, but it also can be nurtured, and that's our obligation. Now I spent yesterday, part of it, with my dear and late friend, the curie of ours, Saint John Vianney, eighteenth century. I was reading his sermons in translation. Now that's important to remember, I wasn't reading what he said.
I was reading what somebody thought he said, putting it into English. In the twentieth century, he was speaking to people in a little village in France. It was a sermon on the epiphany. I I wanted to see what that good man had to say about it. Among other things, he stressed perseverance.
Perseverance. And he pointed out these things. First of all, the wise men followed the star, whatever that is. Your guess is as good as mine, as good as anybody else's. But they followed the star.
That's clear. The text says they followed this thing, whatever it was. Now they were told that a king was born. They came with all kinds of gifts, and they go to the capital, Jerusalem. And as the the cure says, they had every right to expect that the whole city would be in in glorious exaltation, that the messiah was born.
Notice this was there was plenty of prophecy in the old testament about the messiah. Plenty of it. More than enough. Lot of it contradictory. So, he it's perfectly sensible to suppose that these three men coming from someplace in the East, bearing gifts for this newborn king, they thought that Jerusalem would be having one fine Mardi Gras.
You know, we're gonna have one here, I think it's in a week, isn't it? Anyway, that the whole city would be bursting at the seams. And when they got there, there wasn't anything. Moreover, the star disappeared. Whatever it was that had been guiding them, now they don't have that.
Then they go to the the main authorities, and nobody knows anything. That's discouraging. That's downright discouraging. Who wouldn't be discouraged? But they weren't.
See, this is this is the mystery of thing. I don't there are lots here I don't understand, but they weren't. So, they went to Herod. Herod didn't know anything about it either. So he says, Look, guys, if you find out anything, well, come on back and tell me, so I can get down and take his head off.
Anyway, they were not discouraged. They persevered. They got no help at all. Everything had dropped from the bottom. A star disappeared.
No one knew anything about this king. Even the even the most learned among the Jews, even the leader, the head of the the city, the head of the state, the Roman representative, he didn't know anything. Was they had every reason to say, well, let's gather our things together and go back home. It's just a nasty dream. No, they didn't.
And no, when after all of this disappointment, frustration, lack of information, enough to discourage anybody, once they start out again, the star appears. Then the abbey goes on to describe how how difficult it is for us. Now, this is very interesting, but I just happened to open up, just before I came over here, a pamphlet on Maximilian Kolbe. And in the very first part of the very first in inside of the cover, Kolbe, there's a quotation. He said we are he said that becoming saints is not something we choose.
It's an obligation. Well, we all know that. But then he says, it's easy. Well, with all due respect, I don't think it's easy, and I don't think his life shows it was easy. And the gurry of ours certainly never gave the impression that it was easy.
Because if there's such a thing as the virtue of perseverance, by definition it ain't easy. Perseverance means that you you fight in spite of difficulties and obstacles and disappointments and frustrations, that you keep on going in spite of everything to to tell you to quit. That's what perseverance means. I never heard anybody say that was easy. To be a saint doesn't mean you're infallible, you know.
And so I join my, as I say, my late and lamented friend, the Curie, perseverance is not easy, but absolutely necessary. Necessary. Now, if there's anything that anyone who's been involved in athletics factory or in the home or something. We all have experienced this fact of life. That sometimes when you're closest to winning, you're closest to losing.
Anyone who's done any climbing around hills or mountains knows that. That it's when you're closest to the top that you really want to get in and say, Oh the heck, it ain't worth it. Let's get back home. It's that last shove that counts. That I mean last in many instances.
Look how many horse races are run by are are won by a nose. And so I I go along here with my, as I say, the Curie of ours, Saint John Vianney, talking to those very simple peasants in that village. We he he showed them that you you bet your life we're supposed to be saints. And as I say, it's it's not a choice. This isn't something and I mean that that this is something that we can either say, yes, I'll do or I won't.
Oh, you can do that. I mean, you can make an act of the will. Of course, you can. That's the whole point of being a christian. It's a moral choice.
You we're not compelled. We are not deterministic. We're not Calvinists. So you can make a choice, but that choice is obligatory, and you have a moral obligation to choose being a saint. Because if you don't choose that, you know what you are choosing, eternal damnation, which is a very nice comforting choice, especially from the perspective of eternity.
But the question is how is it attained? And the accure emphasized in his sermon for Epiphany perseverance. And our blessed lord said that too, you know. He stresses perseverance. It's the last step that counts.
It's the last effort and hardest. You know, perseverance is the trouble with perseverance, you can't do it in a rush. You can't do it in a sudden burst of energy. You can't do it in a in a sudden wonderful and this happens in an elation of doing You take the young man, the young which I've never been quite able to approve. The young man, he was a hero when that Florida plane crashed into the 14th Street Bridge.
When he when he dove into that icy water, here's father, a a husband and a father with responsibilities to his children. All of a sudden, he dives into this water without even taking off his shoes to save and he he came out alive. So he's a great hero. If he had died, he would have said he was foolish. Whether he was prudent or not, I don't know.
But you see, human nature can do that kind of thing. Human nature can rise. But there's one thing that human nature finds it difficult to do, and that's to persevere in the commonplace. In the commonplace. Doing the ordinary things day in and day out, and they keep the fire of faith and vigor and hope and love and charity, keep all of that burning when everything is is helping you to think, let's turn back, let's not go the last mile, let's not go the last step, let's not make this final effort, it isn't worth it, I'm tired, I haven't seen any results, you know, go on and on and on.
Perseverance is a difficult virtue, Very difficult. As I say, human nature can rise to the heroic. We have plenty of proof of this. But many of us, if most of us, we cannot stand them. Even when you have the humdrum monotony of success.
I've seen more disasters in life from people successful than I have from failures. I say, for what it's worth, it's been my experience. Success is because that can become monotonous too. When you've conquered everything's to be conquered, then what do you do? And so let's come back to the dear old Abby talking that little parish of ours, which was a which was a disaster, which was a nothing when he went there, because he was almost a nothing too in the regard of most respectable, well intentioned, sincere, elite, God fearing people.
They thought he could do less harm there than any place else because there wasn't much you could do about anything. Well, he went there and he transformed the whole blooming place. But in that in his sermon on Epiphany, his perseverance that he hits hardest. And I I'll tell you, it is very important that we keep that in mind. See, all our lord asks us to do is not the heroic, but simply to follow him.
Follow him, and that's no mean task, but not impossible if we keep within his shadow. In the name of the father, and the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.