A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. Our Lord was addressing the crowds when his mother and his brothers appeared outside, and they wanted to speak with him. And someone said to Jesus, your mother and your brothers are standing out there and they want to speak to you. And Jesus said to the one who had told him this, who is my mother and who are my brothers? Then extending his hands to his disciples, Jesus said, There are my mother and my brothers.
Whoever does the will of my heavenly father is brother and sister and mother to me. This is the gospel, the good news of the lord. Praise to you, Jesus Christ. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
How do you know the will of god? Now anybody who believes in God has to ask themselves that question because if they believe in God, they have no choice but wanting to do his will. Now we may not always do it, we may not always be successful in doing it, but we've got to have that will or the want to do it. But how can you want something if you don't know what you want? How do you know the will of your heavenly father?
Because if you can't find it out, why bother? Why are sitting in church here this morning? Why do millions and millions of people down the ages, why have they sacrificed everything to do the will of their heavenly father if in some way they didn't know it? So that's just a pragmatic experiential fact. There have been a lot of people who thought down the ages that they knew the will of their father.
Because first of all, the father sent his son into this world to tell us the will of his father. He didn't leave us in the dark. And secondly, he he established his a voice that would be his even when his appearance had gone from this earth. On this rock, I will build my church. Who hears you will hear me.
What I have to tell you, you can't bear now, but after I've risen from the dead, then I'll then I'll the Holy Spirit will come and he will give you all that you need to know. Well, of course, that's the way it used to be. That ain't the way it is today in many quarters. We have today what we call progressive theology. We have today people who are call themselves Catholics, ecclesiastics, who don't even accept the hierarchy of the church.
They don't accept the fact that Christ gave us a body of truth. They don't accept the truth that Christ established the church to be his living voice down the ages. They have swept out all that. I'm talking about men who are called themselves priests of the Catholic church. And for heaven's sakes, I am not impugning their sincerity.
Please get me straight. I could care less about their sincerity. Nobody ever accused the devil or Hitler of being insincere. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in in objective truth or untruth or what have you.
Today we are told that this is especially true of the liberation theologians and don't don't underestimate their influence. We're not talking about Brazil, we're talking about USA. And I say that we have, right in our Catholic myths, USA speaking the English language, We have men who say we must go to the people. The people of God have the truth, and that truth is unfolding as generations succeed generations. So it's a completely fluid changing thing.
And we must listen to the voice of God's people. Just who God's people are or is, how you get to know them, how I guess you get a poll and find out what they think. Goodness knows I have no idea. They don't tell you how you get it. But they say you must appeal to the people.
So there's no appeal to the Church of Christ tradition and all that, forget it. We are living in the existential moment and it's God's truth coming to me at this moment through his people, whoever they are. And however I get it. Now I am not fighting windmills. That's what you must I earnestly You know, the last couple of mornings I talked to you about feeling.
I This is reality in the world in which you are living. And you may be insulated from it, you may not be in contact with it, but it's there. It's nibbling at the faith of your children. It's being taught in our schools by some of our teachers. What is where do we get the will of God?
It's got to become too we've got to be it's got to be accessible if it's gonna be worth anything. And God does not ask the impossible of us. You cannot love what you don't know. Knowledge comes first, and Saint Thomas Aquinas isn't the first to discover that. You cannot love what you don't know.
You've got to know before you can love, using that word any way you want to take it. And so where do we get truth as Jesus Christ told us? Remember, the church lived for fifty or sixty years without a book. And remember, the progressive theologians don't even hold up the Bible as the norm of faith. Oh no.
That they'll tell Oh sure, they respect the Bible. But you see, it has to be interpreted in the light of cultural status or cultural background. And what was true for Saint Augustine, who died in April, may not be at all true for a Saint Jerome over there at the other end of the Mediterranean. It may not be true at all for Saint Ambrose up there in Milano, because they were different cultures. And above all, when you come down through the centuries, what in the world, what what has the culture of The United States Of America in 1987 have in common with the culture of the Judaic Roman world of our Lord's time?
So you see, we have to take the book, which is of course a book. Whatever else it is, it's a book. And you read it, but it must be interpreted, you see. And how do you get the truth? From God's people, the people of God.
May maybe it's better to break them down to little communities. Fine. Then we'll have these little communities and they will all be people of God. I guess they'll all be be intertwined and hitched up with some kind of electronic communication system. I don't know.
Let's come back to something. The church says there are three ways we know God's will. Normally, if God wants to make his will known to me individually, he sure can do it. Let's get that perfectly straight. There can be private revelations, but the word there I emphasize is can, because I for one never know when you've got it.
The normal ways that God sent his son into this world to bring us his truth and therefore to know his will, first, that Jesus Christ came. We had tradition before we had a book. So we have tradition, we have a book, and we have the living church of Jesus Christ, which speaks with the magisterium of God. To the living age, the church is a contemporary thing for all peoples who are contemporary with it, if you follow that. And so it isn't that confusing.
The will of God is not that opaque. What is difficult is to accept it in many instances. In most instances, we know the will of God. First of all, it's usually defined in terms of that awful word duty. Duty.
It's a naughty word today, know, you mustn't use that. Duty. Men and women stand at its altar and they commit their lives to each other for life. Will feeling keep them on top of the turmoil and the turmoil and the and the discouragement and the tragedies of that life they have ahead? Can they rest their hopes, their lives, their eternity on feeling?
And I say the same thing about any of us. We have got to know God's truth to do it. Otherwise, you're fighting windmills. You're Don Quixote. That's alright as long as you know you're reading a novel, but your life is not a fiction.
And so let us come back. It's not exciting. It's humdrum. It's almost boring to do the simple things. As long as we know that what we are doing is the will of God.
And in many instances, as CS Lewis said about his conversion, in all of England, I was reluctant, the most dejected convert. And many of us can say the same thing when we know we're doing God's will. We do it most reluctantly and even with dejection. We sometimes we do feel good about it. Fine.
But remember, in my own experience, I can tell you that many people who have decided on suicide feel very good about that decision. So don't don't get don't be misled. Come back to the solid truths of your faith that God sent his son into the world, the son gave us the truth, he entrusted it down for down the ages to his church, and that church still speak with clarion voice from the Rock Of Peter. In the name of the Father, of the Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.