A reading from the holy gospel according to Matthew. When the disciples approached Jesus, they asked him, Why do you speak to them in parables? Jesus answered, To you has been given a knowledge of the mysteries of the reign of God, but it has not been given to the others. To the man who has, more will be given until he grows rich. The man who has not will lose what little he has.
I use parables when I speak because they look, but they do not see. They listen, but they don't hear or understand. Isaiah's prophecy is fulfilled in them which says now this is a quotation from Isaiah. Listen as you will, you shall not understand. Look intently as you will, you shall not see.
Sluggish indeed is this people's heart. They have scarcely heard with their ears. They have firmly closed their eyes. Otherwise, they might see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their hearts and turn back to me, and I should heal them. That's the end of that quotation.
Now this is our blessed Lord speaking again. But blessed are your eyes because they see, and blessed are your ears because they hear. I assure you, many a prophet and many a saint longed to see what you see but did not see it. To hear what you hear but did not hear it. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. As with so many of our lord's statements, this does not on the side of simplicity. However, the general thrust of this is perfectly clear. It's one thing to live on the surface of things. It's quite another to delve beneath the surface, to get at the nitty gritty part.
Now, as you know, I'm sure you do, if you don't, it's unfortunate. Because this century of ours, going back to the latter part of the nineteenth, has been greatly given to evaluating things, that is to deciding on the thing's ultimate worth in terms of what is on the surface, of what appears. We call it phenomena. And so we have a whole category of thinking which you can describe as phenomenalists, that is, the people who indulge in it. It's a whole system of thought.
It has its own literature, its own quarterly learned journal. Now there's a long story to this. It's tied in with logical positivism. I hate to use these words because they turn you off, but I'm dealing with the nitty gritty realities of daily life. I'm not talking about something in the history of philosophy.
I'm talking about something which today you will encounter in your lives and will have some consequence in your decisions of how you react to situations, of how you value things. Now, the point is, is there nothing to reality except appearances, or is there something beneath? And if there is, what is it? And if there is, how do you know it? How do you get at it?
Now our Blessed Lord today is telling us in very graphic, concrete term, notice there's nothing abstract or theoretical or academic about this. You have ears and you don't hear. You have eyes and you don't see. You don't notice this, you don't consent. You don't understand with your heart.
That's a very important phrase. Now these words, of course, that's in the Old Testament, and they need all kinds of work done on them if you want to really know. But if you use it in our sense of the word, in a well, let us say in a borrowed sense, without asking yourself what did Jeremiah mean by it. What do we mean when you say you don't understand with your heart? It means that you give kind of a notional assent, that you accept something on the appearances of the thing without delving into the heart of it and giving your assent to it with your whole being.
Now when we speak in these terms, of course we're talking about emotion, Of course we're talking about sentiment and passion, hate and love and fear and dread, and all the rest of these adjectives and nouns that you can use to describe the totality of a human act of knowing. But you see, when we say I hear, I understand, I see, what do you mean by the I? Do you mean e, just simply the name of the organ? Or do you, the irreplaceable, existential, historical you? And notice that word I used, historical, because when we see something, when we hear something, when we taste something, anything that comes into my way of knowing, I bring into a room that's already furnished.
It's not a vacuum. It's not an empty house. And so our blessed lord today is pleading, is pleading with us to have ears but to hear with them, to have eyes and to see with them. Let me give you just an application of this. Someone said that the greatest one of the greatest obstacles to the true worship of God is religion.
That sounds like a contradiction in terms. But ask yourself, what do you mean by religion? You say, I'm building a church. I'm building a church. Why are you building a church?
I'm building it to the honor and glory of God. It's very easy to forget the honor and glory of God when all the turmoil of building any old building. It's very easy to forget God in the practice of religion. It's very easy to forget God in loving your neighbor and being not not a man of charity, but just a mere philanthropist. It's very easy to do it.
It's almost inescapable unless we're on our guard. This is the problem. In other what we do in the name of Jesus Christ can be almost a caricature of the reality that it should be. Now last Sunday, we had this great story of Martha and Mary. This coming Sunday, we'll have something from Saint Matthew about prayer.
But you see, our blessed lord is harming at this all the time at the scribes and the pharisees. Why was he so opposed to? He scarcely ever has a good word for a scribe or a pharisee. And yet these were the good men. Now keep this in mind.
These were not a bunch of scoundrels. They were the good men. They were the the leaders. They were the men of prestige. They were the keepers of the law, right down to the finest detail of the law.
And yet these are the people that our blessed Lord had nothing but scorn for. He had no scorn for a good, honest to God sinner. Have you ever thought about this? In other words, Christ seemed to lamb face the good people and to be all loving towards sinners, and he is God. How do you like that?
And so we have this I'm not saying there's anything simple about it. There's nothing simple about living. As I've said many times, it's so easy to face up to a problem and say, it is nothing but. Oh, that's so easy. That's when you get off Freud and all the rest of it.
But you see life isn't nothing but. It's many and. It's complex. And all the complexity of the world is channeled right into my own ego, into my own self, into this thing thing. That's the least I can say about anything that it's a thing, But I am at least a thing.
And so our blessed lord is asking us today to give my cons my assent that I accept, that I live, that I hold, that I'm persuaded with the truth of things, not the mere appearance of things. That I that I not only hear, but I take in the truth of what I hear. And that I when I see, I perceive the truth of things. Because it's so easy to hear and not hear at all, and to see and to be totally blind, totally blind. There are so many instances of this.
I've just been reading, as you certainly are aware, several books about Flannery O'Connor and her stories. Now, if you haven't read any of them, I can't be I can't give you the problem. But her stories are a terrific problem because here's what she said, that everything she wrote was to show the grace of God working in human beings. She said this many times. Now when you read this story, you'll say, In the name of God, where is there anything about God in the stories?
I just finished reading a commentary by Robert Coles of Harvard, who happens to be a medical doctor and a psychiatrist. And the thing that he brings out is how many critics in these stories of O'Connor's, how they begin with a nothing but hypotheses, whether it be Freudian or Jungian or what have you. And then they interpret her stories on their pre on our a priori hypotheses. And you can get anything this way from anything. But this is the way things are done today.
We say this is nothing but, this is nothing but, and everything has to fall into line. She couldn't even write about a forked tree or having one of her characters open a bottle of wine with a corkscrew without having a sexual Freudian implication. That really made her mad. She wrote a letter about it. And so we have this problem of aiming to see when we do see, and to hear when we do hear.
How do we get underneath the phenomena? Is there a pnuema? Is there a substantial being under all the appearances of being? Is there a reality? Is there an absolute?
Because you see, one of the basic fundamental hypotheses of the logical positivist was there is nothing absolute. And the only kind of a proposition that has any cognitive value, that is it has any truth value, is what is empirically verifiable. Now you'll say this is highfalutic, I am telling you this impinges on your daily life, this attitude. How often you hear people say seeing is believing? That's an absurdity.
It's a contradiction in terms, but people keep saying because you see experience is the great test of truth. And so this para this story of our Lord, is no parable, it has its difficulties, and I haven't even touched on the difficulties. But the main issue is perfectly clear. What Christ is saying, Open your ears and hear. Open your eyes and see.
Get at the core of reality. Do not be satisfied with a like a tadpole on the surface of the water. Get at get at reality. That's his that's what our lord asked us to do. And it's very simple because he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
Name of the father, son, and holy spirit. Amen. Let us pray for our own personal intentions in silence. Oh god, we have listened to your word. Let us pray indeed that our ears be open, our eyes be open, that we will have an open mind towards God's truth and accept that truth with all our heart.
This we ask through Christ our Lord. Amen. Blessed are you, lord, god of all creation, through your goodness, we have this bread to offer which earth has given and human hands have made, it will become for us the bread of life. By the mystery of this water and wine. May we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.
Blessed are you lord god of all creation. Through your goodness, we have this wine to offer fruit of the vine and work of human hands. It will become our spiritual drink. Lord god, we ask you to receive us and be pleased with the sacrifice we offer you with humble and contrite heart. Lord, our way, my name is Pray, brethren, that our sacrifice should be acceptable to god the father almighty.