A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Our Lord said, this is a continuation of what I call the woes because almost every sentence begins with woe to you scribes and pharisees, hypocrites. So that continues. Our lord says, woe to you pharisees. You pay tithes on mint and rue and all the garden vegetables while neglecting justice and the love of god.
These are the things you should practice without omitting the others. Woe to you Pharisees. You love the front seats and synagogues and marks of respect in public. Woe to you. You are like hidden tools over which men walk unawares.
In reply, one of the lawyers said to Jesus, teacher, in speaking this way, you insult us also. Jesus replied, woe to you, lawyers, also. You lay impossible burdens on others, but will not lift even a finger to lighten them. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Well, obviously, our blessed lord never took a course in Carnegie or Dale Carnegie's how to win friends and influence people. In other words, to be this abrupt, to be this forthright, to be this insulting The people face to face is not the way to sell fuller brushes. You know, this picture of the gentle Christ is true, but there's a lot more to that picture of Christ. Believe me, he was a hard man in many instances.
Very hard. Talked about crosses and all that kind of stuff. Now the point I'd like to make this morning is this. Notice our lord is saying that all you you should not omit these things. Notice that he said, you should not you're doing these things, and our lord seems to condemn them.
But he almost immediately says, you shouldn't omit them. The point is, you should keep them, but not lose the soul of the body. Now in all of this talk that we have been hearing in the last six days coming from Constitution Avenue, the Supreme Court Justice steps as of yesterday and the day before and the day before. And all this, talk has been going on for a couple of years now about morality. And most of it, as I say, is below the navel.
How often do you even hear the word God? Just just the word. As I have been saying, it's a very curious development that beginning with a period of enlightenment and above all becoming very prominent in the eighteenth and then and and even more so in the nineteenth century. You have a very definite and severe change. We used to talk, as our lord is today is talking about what you your duty is, that you're supposed to worship god and obey his justice.
The word justice there means holiness or salvation. It was the whole emphasis up until that period, beginning with about Rousseau, you have an idea of what I have to do to be a good person. Virtue, obligation, responsibility. Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife. Thou shall not kill.
The the the responsibility was put upon the person who was supposed to have the obligation of respecting other people's lives. But the emphasis was not so much upon respecting the other people's rights as in fulfilling my duty. Do notice how this whole thing had just done a 180 degree term? Now all you hear about is our rights. And goodness knows what people think a right means.
Here we're talking about rights of the homosexuals. That's like talking about the rights of murderers. If a murderer has a right, it's not because he's a murderer, it's because he's a person. If a homosexual has rights, as indeed they do, it's not because he's a homosexual, it's because he's a hoe or she is a human being. You can't have right.
Evil has no rights. And if something is evil, don't talk to me about that that evil has a right because evil is a nothing. The evil is the privation of a good. Therefore, in itself, it is not a thing, and you can't have nothing having a right. Well, let's not get into all that.
But the point I'm making is what our lord is saying this morning is all of these things that you were are are supposed to do according to the law, you should do them. But but don't forget the what the basis is, what the essence is, what the substance is, what the soul is, and that is God first and my obligations to God. And then everything else will fall into place. Everything will fall into place. If a person cannot love God without loving neighbor, but you sure can love your neighbor without loving God.
That's easy. That is very especially if you select your neighbor. Now yesterday, I had quite a little discussion about Christ. There seems to be in some people's mind a dichotomy. Christ as God and Christ as Christ, the son of Mary.
Well, you to me, a lot of this is just nonsense because Christ isn't two things. Remember that Christ is one person, and that one person is divine, but with a completely human nature. Now this I'm not explaining this. We call it the hypostatic union. That just simply means that you have diverse things united in a hypothesis or a substance or a one thingness.
That's all that means, which is but it that's a lot. And so when we talk about God, we can't visualize God. We can't see him or touch him or feel him or any we can't get a hold of God. But we can get a hold of god incarnate in his son, Jesus Christ. And when I look at the son of Mary, as Martin Luther said in his very he has a whole sermon on this sentence after it's very impressive that that when Christ was walking down the street of Nazareth, you could say, there walks god.
When he was nursing at the virgin's breast, there nurses god. And Luther was right in that, perfectly right. But and so that our blessed lord represents the perfect human conception of god. We can't be anthropomorphic when we go to Christ. We can't unless you forget that Jesus Christ is divine and the son of God.
And you can forget it, and some people wanna forget it. And I heard something new in that discussion yesterday. They talk about pagan or atheistic Christianity. That was a new one on me, although I've seen it in miss Marks business down south in Central America. The idea is that we emphasize, you see, the the humanity of Jesus and forget his divinity.
So there you have a religion of Christ without the divinity. It's it's a pretty expletive thing, isn't it? And we can have that. But the the problem of being a Christian and above all a Catholic, it is a is to hold so many different things together together. There's the problem.
If only god had said, there's one commandment. Keep it. Love god, and then do what you want. It would be really relative or he said, if just love your neighbor, do good to your neighbor, don't worry about anything. It would be so simple, wouldn't it?
But that's not the way it is. That's not the way life is. The virtuous life means that we try to cultivate all the virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, all four and all of their sisters and their brothers and their cousins and their aunts. And so we come back to this in our daily lives, does god have an effective place? I mean, operational.
And the answer to that question for you, individual, will be, how does it affect my decisions? How does it affect my judgments? How does it affect my conduct? I mean, explicitly, explicitly. And there's your test.
How often do you think of God? Now it's not easy to do your job and to take up all the responsibilities of life and and be thinking of something else. If you're laying bricks and you wanna lay a good layer of bricks, whatever the course of bricks, you can't be thinking of a thousand other things. But what you can do is say, lord, I'm thinking you up as I lay this brick and I'm gonna lay it as well as I can. Opus the work of the lord.
You're not forgetting him. You're serving him. But then again, it's so easy to forget it and just to see the brick and the mortar or your paycheck. And so our blessed lord came to give us the good news. And the good news is, first of all, to bring god into our daily life.
He made us to know him, to love him, and to serve him. And secondly, he gave us the way. I am the way, Christ said. And it's not that all difficult to be a disciple of Jesus. Remember, there wasn't a single well educated, well placed, one socially acceptable, one successful man in a sense in the 12 disciples, not one of them.
We certainly can emphasize with the apostles. And so let us take to heart our lord's words. Your first duty is to god almighty. Your first virtue is the virtue of fealty, of going to god as his creature. And the answer to it simply is the lord's prayer.
In the name of the father and the son, the holy spirit. Amen.