A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. On one occasion, our lord spoke as follows. Father, lord of heaven and of earth, to you I offer praise. For what you have hidden from the learned and from the clever, you have revealed to the tiniest child. Father, it is true.
You have graciously willed it to be so. Everything has been given over to me by my father. And no one knows the son but the father. And no one knows the father except the son and anyone else to whom the son wishes to reveal his father. 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. Previous to this reading of the gospel, in today's reading, there was a reference to the gospel of god. Now here we can go off the deep end and fall into a grievous error. And that is this, we identify the gospel with the written word. That isn't so.
You do not have what we call the New Testament. According to father Brown and other authorities, this is very, very hazy territory, believe me, when you talk about the dates of the New Testament or the the Old Testament is much worse. But the general opinion is this, you do not have the New Testament as we have it today, that is with the four gospels gospels and the epistles, until about the end of the first century. Now the second point I wanna make is this, Christ did not deliver us a book or a series of books. He didn't, as far as we know, write a single word.
He didn't transmit a book, a written document, a scroll, a roll. But he did give us the good news, the gospel. And it certainly was not a written gospel as it came from Christ. So we must not identify gospel, which means good news, with the with what we call the gospel because we should call these scriptures. They were written, and a thing is written to be read.
Keep that in mind, to be read. Because it's the it's the reader who gives a meaning to those little scrolls and funny looking marks on a piece of paper or the equivalent. Remember, there's no sense, there's no meaning in that ink on papyrus. Meaning only comes from a reader who thinks that they see meaning in those little marks, those things we call script or or the written word. Now my what I'm driving at is this.
And I cannot express it simply because it sounds so theoretical when you say it, and yet it it is embedded in our daily lives in a very practical, consequential way. Now you'll notice the reading of our what our lawyer is saying today. He's talking about God. Now, I don't care. This isn't a matter just of translations from the Greek or how you trans you can't miss this.
Jesus is talking about God. That's something distinct from him as a human being because Christ is a human being. One person, two natures. Now he talks about God is father, and he's saying that nobody knows the father except the son, and the father reveals himself. Now notice this is all at least two parties.
Christ doesn't look within himself and find truth within himself. He looks to his heavenly father. This is the point I'm making. Today, where do we find truth? First of all, it's denied.
That that's the first thing to remember. The world in which you are living, at least with the western culture, a lot of the easterns have more sense. But in our culture, going back to Newton, going back to Hughes, going back to Descartes, we have today a rejection of truth itself and the possibility of knowing the truth, and after Wittgenstein, the possibility of communicating the truth, if there be such a thing as truth. I'm not exaggerating this. You'll say, oh, that's academic.
You bet it's academic. But that doesn't condemn it to the grave. That doesn't condemn it to being absolutely impotent. Karl Marx and his doctrine didn't come out of the practical affairs of life. Keep that in mind.
Just a very practical example. And neither has its rejection. Now what what this boils down to is this, the Catholic church rests upon its being the creation of Jesus Christ, the son of god. Never forget it. When you say I obey the church, you are saying or you ought to be if you know what you're talking about, and you're consistent in your own thinking, which a lot of people are not including little old me.
Consistency is not a human virtue. Some people consider it a very bad vice. Now I'm not exaggerating this. One of the worst things you can condemn a person's position for is that it's logical. I'm not that's the simple God's truth.
Logic, to be logical, is two strikes against you. Today in your world. And so we are left with this position that the Christian, the Catholic, is a Catholic because they think the Catholic church is God's creation. Now right or wrong, that's what they think if they're if they're Catholics. And if it's and they think it's God's creation and has his his truth, not my truth, his truth.
His truth. I discover it. I do I'm not a I'm not a follower of old man Pascal. If the heart has reasons, the mind knows not what. He had a lot of truth in that, but it takes you into an abysmal error because it's really the denial of truth.
And if Jesus Christ stands for anything, it's for truth. The truth will make you free, and there's a lot more to that. If you if you look the text up, there's a lot more to it. It's not merely the truth. It's your pursuit of the truth.
It's your efforts to to get a hold of the truth, and this is not easy. The world in which you're living, it translates truth into what I feel. What are the consequences of this action? What is its utility? Or as my dear friend Willie James would say, what is its cash value?
That's how he put it, and you couldn't put it more concretely. You just ask yourself, what guides you in your decisions? Some abstract truth or some very practical considerations? Practice practical comes from the word to do, to achieve. It it's a time quantified term.
Truth is a universal term. It's abstract. It doesn't appeal to your senses. Quite the reverse. Quite the reverse.
And yet, you take go back to the council of Chalcedon, fifth century. Here people were were were shedding their blood over the controversies about how do you put God and man together in Jesus Christ. How do you do that? And that's and we have, of course, what is called monophysite heresy. People were at each other's throats because they thought there was such a true thing as truth, and they were willing to die for it.
Today, anyone who would stand up and say, I shall sacrifice for the truth, they are laughed to scorn. I have tried it. You are laughed to scorn. Better red than dead. That's the theme.
Better to flee to Canada at the first intimation of war than to be taken in and conscripted into the army. Now these are so this is practical. When you ask what is truth, a Catholic says, what has Christ to say about it? Not what he wrote, what has he to say in his good news? You're not talking about a dead book, you're talking about a living voice.
And where is that living voice? Well, where is it? It's either in his living church or it is nowhere. Nowhere. It's got to be somewhere unless Christ was that more the the most the supreme hypocrite and liar the world has ever seen.
In the name of the father, of the son, holy spirit. Amen.