A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The disciple this, of course, follows the readings that we've been having for the last few days. The the disciples, you know, were going to Emmaus from Jerusalem. Our lord joined them. They didn't recognize him.
He explained to them all about how the Messiah had to fulfill the old testament prophecies. They recognized him in the breaking of the bread, and as soon as they recognized Jesus, he disappeared. Very mysterious. And now we take up that. So after the disciples recognized Jesus, then they hike back to Jerusalem.
So the disciples, when they got back to Jerusalem, recounted what had happened on the road to Emmaus and how they had come to recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread. Now while they were still speaking about all of this, Jesus himself stood in their midst and said to them, peace. Now what is their reaction? If this was a plot, if this was something that they had all planned out. See how listen how they reacted.
In their panic and fright, They thought they were seeing a ghost. Jesus said to them, why are you disturbed? Why do such ideas cross your mind? Look at my hands and my feet. It is really I.
Touch me and see that a ghost does not have flesh and bones as I do. And as he said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. They were still incredulous for sheer joy and wonder. So Jesus said to them again, have you anything here to eat? They gave him a piece of cooked fish, which he took and ate in their presence.
Then Jesus said, those words that I spoke to you when I was still with you. Everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms had to be fulfilled. And then Jesus opened their minds to the understanding of the scriptures. Then Jesus said to them, thus it is written that the Messiah must suffer and must rise from the dead on the third day. In his name, penance for the remission of sins is to be preached to all the nations beginning at Jerusalem.
You are witnesses to all of this, and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. If there's anything that I have been impressed by of late, it is the lack of a supernatural point of view. Our Holy Father, after his journey to Venezuela and Ecuador, and after going back to to Rome, this was just about the middle of April, in a discourse that he gave in Saint Peter's, he referred to Colombia, South America, and its materialism. Now these these Latin American countries are called Catholic.
There are Catholics in The United States are are we're we're a very sizable group of people, you know. And yet now let me cut that off there, and this is not a parenthesis. Then you let us say you take up a book like George McDonnell. I haven't been reading him now, so you you share in my woes. You take it now he wrote in the the mid the last half of the nineteenth century, Scotchman.
And his so called novels are very Christian, very Christian. And the characters are mostly Scotch Christians. Their church allegiance doesn't seem to be very strong, but they're very biblical, and they are solid Christians. By that I mean is this, their outlook upon life, whether they should get a new pair of shoes, the tragedy that happened to their boy. Anything you mention, these good, simple souls, as we call them, refer it all to their solid Christianity.
What would Jesus think of this? What how would he react to it? What would Jesus do under these conditions? Life was very hard for them. Mcdonald doesn't smooth it out at all, but there's no complaint.
Because they look upon life as necessarily difficult. They don't expect it to be anything but difficult. And hard, and hard. I mean, the very physical the physical gesture of living was hard. Even to get a drink of water, you had to walk out and get and drop a bucket into a well and pull it up and just to get a drink of water.
Anyway, life was hard. They don't complain about it because everything, the totality of their lives was viewed not in respect to this world as we all think, literally. This is the truth. We can't escape it. They didn't look at it.
They didn't look at their existence as beginning and ending in this world, and they didn't live that way according to this these novels. They had a supernatural point of view that they were destined for heaven, and Jesus Christ was a tremendous reality to them. Tremendous reality. I mean tremendous. Tremendous.
When the young people are faced with grave temptations, what is the big objection? This would be a sin. Well, today you can't scarcely can use the word sin even from this pulpit. It doesn't have much meaning anymore. That is as a dis to dissuade people from doing what's right or what's wrong.
The head of the holy Roman Catholic church, with all the authority and power and everything else he has, says that direct abortion is a crime, it's murder. And nuns and priests stand up and say it, oh, well, you know, there's a difference of opinion about that. Not a word about it being sinful, you see. We have lost this supernatural point of view. I hope it's not lost beyond recovery because we say, why did god make you?
You know, we come back to this. Why did god make you? And you say, oh, we used to say God made me to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world so that we can be happy with him in the next. Not to do not that we're here to make this world a very beautiful, comfortable, pleasant world. This is what we still profess in words.
But how does it enter into our daily decisions? How does it do it? How do we and I mean we. Because you see, we are in this milieu. We are in a world which now is becoming more and more man centered.
This goes back, of course, to the to the days of of liberal philosopher the philosophers, the eighteenth century. And we were and now we're just reaping all all the weedy crop of those great thinkers. You know, it's Dostoevsky, who himself started out to be a very radical socialist and was ready to and was was about to be shocked for his socialism. He's he was he wound up by being against all socialism of any sort. Because as he said, well, if it's socialism, it misdirects not that I agree with this, but he said that if it is socialism, it misdirects man's thinking.
And instead of looking at God and and and our promised heaven, whatever you wanna call it, we look to Earth and making this our paradise. And he wasn't talking as a Marxist. He wasn't. He had very little he had nothing to do with Marx. And this is the world we're living in.
Everything. Everything. Even the pronouncements of our hierarchy are all centered upon this world. And yet we say, why did god make you? And we say, god made me for himself.
He made me to be happy with him forever in heaven. Now if Easter has any meaning, it has the meaning of confirming our faith in Jesus Christ as a living reality. A living reality. Not something I read about in a book, not just a hero that I can put up on a pedestal and say, there is the model I like to be. No.
No. Of course, our lord is that, but he's so much more than that. He's a living presence. And as one of the ancient fathers says, his living presence becomes real for us in the sacraments. In the sacraments, not in reading a book, even if it's the bible.
This is our faith. This is our religion. This is not froth. And we've got to come back to it if we are going to realize the richness of what Jesus has given us. Because all that Jesus has given us is himself, and he is God.
In the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit, amen.