A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus went up into a mountain to pray, spending the whole night in communion with god. At daybreak, he called his disciples and selected 12 of them to be his apostles, those he was going to send. Simon, to whom he gave the name Peter, and Andrew, his brother. James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Matthew and Thomas.
James, son of Alpheus, and Simon called the zealot. Judas, son of James, and then Judas Escariot, the one who betrayed Jesus. Then, coming down the mountain with these apostles, Jesus stopped at a level stretch where there were many of his disciples, those who followed him. A large crowd of people was with him from all Judea and Jerusalem and the coasts of Tyre and Sidon at that whole area. People who had come, people who came to hear him, and to be healed of their diseases.
Those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. Indeed, the whole crowd was trying to touch Jesus because power went out from him which cured them all. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
Well, during the past misspent weekend, on my apostolate to the Chesapeake Bay, Litrap in Oxford, I had occasion to hear considerable amount of commentary from our youthful young people about this great moving picture or whatever it is called the last temptation of Christ. The opinions that I heard expressed by our Catholic educated young people were absolutely startling. That's the only word I they have no conception, absolutely no conception of anything about the personality or the psychology or anything else about Jesus Christ. Their common complaint I mean, their common remark was, well, what's so wrong with the the the last temptation of Christ? After all, he was human.
I said, well, yes. What do you mean by being human? Well, he was a human being. Absolutely wrong. Absolutely wrong to say that Christ is only a human being.
Absolutely correct. He had a human nature. That's correct. But to say that that person, the son of Mary, is just a human being, it's absolutely as blasphemous as anything you can imagine because it's denying the divinity of Christ. Now it took three hundred years.
I mean, I'm sorry. It took a hundred years for the early church to unravel this tremendous mystery. Notice I said mystery. It isn't something you go to a physics book and get an answer to. Even the even the Britannica doesn't have an answer to the mystery of the incarnation, and neither does Scorsese have an answer, the ex seminarian, the ex candidate for the holy priesthood of the holy Roman Catholic church.
People are taking their theology from him. Imagine the craziness of it. It took a hundred years for the primitive church, Greek speaking, for the most part, to try to make some kind of an intelligible answer to the problem, who is Jesus Christ? Now the answers given were, first of all, to deny his divinity and to say that baby born of Mary was a human being and that subsequently to his birth and his growing up, someway, god was infused into that body. The church says that is wrong.
The next thing was to deny his divinity, to say that you just had a human being there and that in some way it it had divine entanglements. The church says that is wrong. Another church words, the church was very clear from the earliest days that you cannot deny his divinity and you cannot deny his humanity. You've got to say his both. But how do you put those two things together?
Now these were Greek speaking. They were the philosophy such as they had was was an Aristotelian neo Platonism. They used the language that they had to try to make some sense out of a mystery. But there was never any doubt in the primitive church that is the orthodox church of Jesus Christ that this person or whatever this was born of the blessed mother was both god and man and not two people, not two persons. Because if they're two persons, then you don't have a one being.
And you're talking about the son of god. After a hundred years, after the councils of Ephesus, Nicea, and Constantinople, you the the formula couched in Aristotelian terms was this, that that being born of Mary was truly god and man. One person, one person, one individual person, and that that individual person is truly god, not human. And that that one person has those two natures, the complete human nature, complete human nature, and totally divine nature of god. The mystery is, how do you have two natures and one person?
I don't know. I'm waiting to get the answer in a few more years. I hope there are more than few. There that's the formula. But now Martin Luther, that's my late friend, you know, sixteenth century.
Martin Luther saw this absolutely clearly. That's the reason some of his hymns are so terribly good. And he was so dramatic and so concrete. I remember one of his sermons where he here's the way he puts it. That baby nursing at the breasts of the virgin Mary, that is god nursing.
That kid walking down the streets of Nazareth, everybody knew him as the son of Joseph the carpenter and the son of Mary. That boy walking down the street is the son of god. Not a man, but the son of god. That's the reason you can say that that person on the cross is that god died. Now this, you say, this, at least now remember, there's nothing nothing defined or infallible by Aristotelian philosophy or psychology.
But these ideas of nature and person, which are Aristotelian, these are the these are the categories of thought that the early Christians who were mostly Greek and Greek speaking understand what I mean by Greek speaking? They could have been Jews or anything. They used that philosophy to try to formulate this tremendous mystery. How do you hold these two things together? Now there was a group of people called the Gnostics, and we still have them around who will tell you, oh, the human nature was just some kind of an illusion That we must emphasize the spirituality and the divinity of Jesus.
And so they'll tell you, well, whether Christ rose from the dead is in that's immaterial. Makes no difference. What is important is the resurrection of the spirit in all that garbage. So there's nothing new about this. Now there's a very strong idea brought today in in among Catholics, some Catholic scholars too, that Christ didn't know who he was, that he grew into the knowledge that he in some way was divine.
In other words, that Christ didn't know what it was all about. That's the basic idea behind this attempt last temptation thing. That is in you can't support that. If that if you have only one person in Jesus Christ and that person is truly divine and he has these two natures, how can you say that god is ignorant of his own destiny? It's ridiculous.
It's absurd. But you see, these people wanna make a god unto themselves. They wanna make a god they're comfortable with. They wanna look upon Jesus Christ as my brother. Well, you can't go wrong.
Jesus Christ is your brother. Absolutely. But he's the son of god. And that's your that's the clinching argument that you have, that you are the brother of the son of god. The church has never minimized the humanity of Jesus Christ, but it has never minimized his divinity.
The church has never rejected the idea that Christ was subject to to emotions and to feelings and to appetites. Didn't he ask the Samaritan woman for a drink of water? He was thirsty. That was a tremendous thing for a Jew to do, to ask a Samaritan to give him a drink of water. Christ wept.
He had emotions. He had sadness. He had feelings of regret. He had re feelings of repulsion in the Garden Of Gethsemane. He sweated blood blood at the thought of being crucified, and he begged god, his father, to free him of the cross.
But there is a virtue we call decency. Decency. There are certain functions of the human body we don't go around advertising. We used to talk about an outhouse. Now we talk about a powder room.
You get the point. You can make applications. And so I'm not explaining the mystery. I'm only saying we are dealing with a mystery, a tremendous mystery of the incarnation. And that here we need guidance.
Here we need truth. And where do I look for truth? To a next seminarian? To a moving picture? To a novel?
Where do I look for truth? In a most important and mysterious matter, unfathomable. Or do I go to the living voice of Jesus Christ speaking through Peter, the church of Jesus Christ founded on a rock? And in all of this turmoil, all down the century, from the very beginning, this problem came up because you had thinking, reasonable people. The church has stood firm, absolutely firm.
That this that this person that this being, born of Mary is god and man. How in the world do you put them together? Well, one formulation of this is this idea of person and nature, That Jesus Christ is one person, one ego, one self, and that that person, instead of having one nature, has two. Total, complete. But that that one person is not a human but is divine, the son of god, the son of god.
And everything that is human, you can impute to that person except sin. Except sin. God cannot be guilty of sin, and Jesus Christ is God and man. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit, amen. The lord