A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. There was a certain prophetess, Anna by name, daughter of of the tribe of Asher. And Anna had seen many days, having lived seven years with her husband after her marriage, and then as a widow until she was 84. She was constantly in the temple, worshiping day and night, in fasting, and in prayer. Now coming on the scene at this moment, she gave thanks to God and talked about the child to all who look forward to the deliverance of Jerusalem.
When Joseph and Mary had fulfilled all the prescriptions of the law of the lord, they returned to Galilee to their own town of Nazareth. Their child grew in size and in strength, filled with wisdom, and the grace of god was upon him. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
If there one thing that comes through very, very clearly in the different accounts we have of these very dramatic days surrounding the nativity of Jesus Christ, at least what strikes me as very, very significant, is how personal and individual it is. It's very individual. There's no mass movement. There's no great community involved. There's no great collectivity or multitude of people involved.
Look at it. Joseph and Mary come down from Galilee. That's way up in the North, and they came well, it's not so far a couple hours by automobile. But in those days, they were walking. It possibly Mary had some kind of transportation, but for the most part, it was done by walking.
So it was a good four days walk. So they come down simply to obey a law, individual. Each had to return to their birthplace. The Roman emperor wanted to know how many people he had in his empire. So it was an individual thing, and each person had a name, individual.
It wasn't society. It was individual, Joseph and Mary. And Mary was pregnant. That's an individual thing too. You don't have collective pregnancies.
Then you have the birth. That's an individual thing. Ask any mother. She'll tell you. And they ought to have some sense some experience of the situation.
They are there, you know. And Christ is born in in a in some kind of a very, haphazard situation. We don't know what it was, really. This business of them being thrown out of the inn, I don't that may be true. I don't know.
But it may not be true too. But it was individual. And then, of course, you have the the appearance of the angels, not to a great crowd. They didn't Jerusalem was packed with people. Very likely, Bethlehem too was crowded.
Very likely. We're told that. There was no room in the inn. So there were great crowds of people there. Why didn't the angels come down and appear to the whole mob?
No. A handful of shepherds out in the field close by. There's a very pretty beautiful chapel there now. Very, very lovely spot. But it's a it was an individual thing.
See, and this very same argument is brought up. Why didn't Christ after his resurrection appear to great numbers of people? Well, as a matter of fact, it's we are told he did, but not as a general rule. It was very personal. He cooked a breakfast for his apostles.
And in many instances, they appeared to them individually. And the shepherds, they go back to their flock. And so then there's an individual situation between Joseph and Mary and the Christ child going into Egypt, whatever that was, but it was certainly something very odd. And then they go back to Jerusalem I mean, back to Nazareth. Then they come back again to fulfill the law.
And, again, that's an individual thing. Anna speaks of this child, this child here, just Anna. Anyway, this is very significant. There was no mob scene. There was no great appeal to community.
There was no great appeal to society. And all of it was individual human being, Joseph and Mary and Jesus and Herod and all the rest of them. Individual people with individual human characteristics. And as our holy father never never ceases saying, unrepeatable. That's a very favorite I don't know what the the Polish word for it is, but it's a very favorite word with his, that we are individual, unrepeatable beings.
Unrepeatable is the word he likes a lot. He used he he preached his whole Christmas sermon in 1979 on that. Now this is the point I wanna make. We are not saved by Jesus Christ collectively. All this talk about community today, it's fine.
I I realize that. We begin by having a society of a mother and a father. We hope that we're married. I don't know. But the thing is, I am perfectly well aware that man is a social being.
But before I'm a social being, I'm an individual being. And this is extremely important because I have rights not because of society, but because I'm a human being, contrary to a great deal of talk you hear today. And so it irritates me when we in one of the prayers of the mass, I don't know why I've often wanted to look the Latin up, but it says that who we are speaking to god who take who takes away the sin of the world. There's no such thing as sin. The only reality are sins and sinners.
You don't have collective sin any more than you have collective virtue. I know society can be can be very helpful in helping me to be virtuous or in helping me to be vicious. I know that. But in the last analysis, I make up my own mind, and I do and I have to accept the responsibility of my own decisions and of my own actions. That is the bottom line, and a lot of people don't want to look at it.
You just I I assume you've been reading about the Fuller case. Well, it's gotten under my skin, believe me, that poor woman who was assaulted by 10 or 11, who knows, young black boy, she was black too, and she was raped and brutalized and tread upon battered, and of course murdered in the end. A mother of, I don't know, four or five children. The trial was just finished now. There have been at least two letters in the eminent Washington Post, at least two letters, which says, well, well, now we are all guilty.
After all, these poor boys were so underprivileged. What we must do this was in the day before yesterday, or maybe it was yesterday. What we must do is to give them more education, give them more job opportunities. We must give them a better social milieu in which to grow up. We have to show more interest in them individually.
That was a good point. But what I'm making my point is, we are shuffling off the individual's responsibility. There's no such thing as society. The only reality is individual people. That is, as our holy father says, individual unrepeatable human beings.
Don't ever forget it. Don't ever forget. And when we go before god almighty, we are individuals, and we say, through my fault. Not through. It's.
My. I'm the one who's blame for it. Don't let's be afraid of it. There's nothing there's nothing pessimistic about this because the whole point of it is that we have a savior, that Christ came to save me because I am an individual, because I am unrepeatable, and because I am a sinner, I need a savior. And that I have.
Thanks to a virgin Jewish girl named Mary. In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.