A reading of the holy gospel. According to Saint Luke. Now, this of course follows right after the annunciation of Mary. The eight the Gabriel announced that she was to become the mother of a son. So Mary set out.
She's up there on the north country up there in Nazareth, the lake country. So, Mary set out proceeding in haste into the hill country to a town of Judah. It's all the way to the south where the city of Jerusalem is and there she entered the house of Zechariah And greeted her relative Elizabeth. Now, when Elizabeth heard Mary's greeting, the baby stirred in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and then cried out in a loud voice, blessed, she speak in a course to Mary, blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.
But who am I that the mother of my lord should come to me? The moment that your greeting sounded in my ears, the baby in my womb stirred for joy. Blessed is she who trusted that the lord's words to her would be fulfilled. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
This morning, I want to direct my remarks to the narrative, the the infancy narrative of Saint Luke. And I wish you to note in a special way the text I've chosen. Now this text I'm going to read to you is from Saint Luke's prologue to his gospel. It's chapter one, and it's what Saint Luke wrote as an introduction to his gospel. So he says, this is Luke.
After making a fresh review of everything, I have decided to write it all down in an orderly fashion for you, oh, excellent Theophilus. Now why? So that you might have no doubts about what you have been taught. That's from the prologue. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. Now notice that word. Now the most of the English translations say very excellent. Well, if you're going to write English, let us give a try at being English. You know?
Very excellent is certainly sloppy English. But that word, the the Greek word, which is, it it means it was a salutation. We're sure of this. This is solid ground. That this was a salutation from one person to another where the person being saluted is either a high official political official, which means he would probably be Roman, or a person of very much higher rank than the person saluting him.
Now it didn't have to be a Roman official, but it could easily have been because I can't go on have to keep my eye on that clock this morning more than usual because, you see, this gospel, I remember Saint Luke wrote the book of the acts too. They're really one book. Very likely, he wrote this for a a Roman convert in order to reaffirm, to confirm, to bolster up his faith that Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, was lord and god, the messiah. That's very, very probable. Not certain, but very probable.
Now four Sundays of Lent I mean, of Advent, the on the feast of the Immaculate Conception and two masses of this coming feast of nativity of our lord are all taken from the gospel according to Saint Luke. And chiefly from chapters one and two. And it's chapters one and two of Saint Luke which are generally referred to as the infancy narrative. Now Saint Matthew also has something to say about the birth of Christ, but it's nothing like Saint Luke. Remember, Saint Luke's gospel, 50% of it is not in Matthew or Mark and this other synoptics.
Keep that in mind. Luke is saying, look. I've gone over all the material fresh. That's what the man says. And he said, I'm putting it in an orderly fashion to confirm your faith.
Now we have been reading these two chapters. I got a stopwatch yesterday. I read those two chapters. It took me less slightly less than nine minutes, and I'm not a quick reader at all. I urge you to pick up your New Testament, read chapter one and two of Saint Luke.
It's the only sensible thing to do. I think there's an ad about eating oatmeal. But it really is if you take your faith seriously now. That is if you attack it as you would as as if as you would attack any other intellectual problem of certain seriousness. In your memory of it?
It's just fragmented. It's splintered. You wouldn't do that with a comic strip, would you? If you did, you wouldn't get sense out of it. So I urge you.
It won't take you more than ten minutes. Read these two chapters because there's nothing I can say that's going to improve on Saint Luke. Remember, if you even if you wanna read his Greek, you're reading pretty elegant Greek. I recommend the translations really are I I I don't understand. But the point is do the best you can.
Read it in your French or your German or your even in the English. It's the story of Saint Luke, and I can improve upon it. The only thing I wanna bring out this morning is the unity of it. The unity of it. It's a it's really a work of art.
Really. Now the first before I go into that, I wanna have a wanna make a very important introductory remark. The church of Jesus Christ and if it's not the church of church of Jesus Christ, let's get out of here right away and go bowling or have breakfast. The only reason we're assembled here this morning is that we have a conviction, call it faith, that Christ founded a church, which is a living organization. We wouldn't be here otherwise, I hope.
I know I wouldn't. I have more important things to do than waste my time on nonsense because that's what it is if it's not the church of Christ. Now the church of Christ does not rest on a book. Now you'll hear this said. You'll hear it said that that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity rest upon books.
Two of them do. Two of them do. The Jewish religion and Islam, not the church of Christ, not the Catholic church of Christ. It does not rest upon a book. And if you wanna see what happens to the church of Christ when it rests on a book, take fifteen minutes and review Luther to the present time and see what's happened to Protestantism.
Arrest my case. The church of Jesus Christ does not rest on the bible. The church gives us the bible. The church gives us the bible. So we go back to the church as a living organism or if we remember, the church was in existence for seventy years before we had all of the New Testament.
Keep this in mind. Saint Luke's gospel was certainly written before '70. That's when Titus destroyed Jerusalem. It was certainly written before that. It was probably written about '62 or '63, probably, but certainly before '70.
But that's about forty years after Christ's death, and the church existed before those forty years. So I do not want to give you the impression that the Catholic church rests upon the authenticity of Luke's gospel or upon the four gospels or upon the whole of the New Testament. It can all disappear, and the church of Christ would endure because it was here before any of them were here. Is that clear? That's what we have to be keeping our minds.
We belong to a living church that is that is the embodiment in the twentieth century of the son of god. If it's not that, then it's a terrible, terrible error or worse. You talk about a conspiracy of two thousand years, that's a whopper. And so I don't wanna over exaggerate this, whether it's authentic or whether Luke wrote it or whether it or whether how he wrote it or what he these are all important questions. A lot of people make their living.
I put bread and butter on their table. I'm all for it. But our faith doesn't rest upon the book. It rest upon the living voice of Jesus Christ. Notice what notice this is is terribly basic.
Our blessed lord, he was born, he lived, he preached. Or we have no evidence that he wrote a single word. When the time came, when he was going to depart, when the good news that he had brought, his his gospel, when that was going to be left without anybody to teach it, what did he do? He didn't go and close himself up and produce a manuscript. He called his apostles over.
He said, going, therefore, teach ye all nations. Teach them everything that I have commanded you. Notice, not a word about a written word. And behold, I am with you all days even to the end of the world. There is where our faith rests, on a living church, a living tradition, not upon a book.
But the book is important. I'm not minimizing it. But we don't wanna make a agree egregious mistake of thinking that the Catholic church rests upon the a written word. Remember, the written word you read is in English, which is not, of course, does not enjoy inspiration. It's the original text which is inspired.
Now I'm gonna have to skip. But the point I wanna make is the old tradition, the earliest tradition of the church, verified by scholars and writers in the second and the third centuries, they unanimously say Saint Luke was the author, and they unanimously understood the gospel as history. Now that doesn't mean the Magnificat was just that that Our Lady actually pronounced it just as it's written. Of course not. That's not the way they wrote history in those days.
But the main facts the main facts of Saint Luke's gospel, which was certainly written before seventy AD, certainly before seven, which he says before I wrote this, notice he was not an eyewitness. He's and so he knows that. He says that. But he says, what I'm telling you, your excellency, I got from eyewitnesses and from ministers of the word. I don't know what that means, but he says ministers of the word.
Now what does he say? I wanna give you a very brief summary that may hold the whole thing together that we've been splintering up for four weeks. There are two annunciations, there are two births, and there are two verifications. Simple, isn't it? That thing came to me only since yesterday.
Two annunciations, two births, two verifications. Now let's look at that. First of all, it opens with with the annunciation of the birth of the the not the birth of the conception, of John the Baptist. And that's surrounded by the the message given to Zachary, his father, about his wife who's old, who's sterile, who who's publicly known to have been barren her whole life. And Zachariah is told by the angel Gabriel, the angel's the same.
That's the the connecting thing, that his wife is going to have a son. Notice the sex is is forecast. And that they must call him John. That was the first enunciation. And then you know what happens.
The angel says you're not you're going to lose your speech. So John became mute. He couldn't talk. He had a write on a tablet. That's the first enunciation.
Down now that takes place down in Jerusalem, near Jerusalem, what would probably around Ayn Karim now. But it's down relatively close close to to that's down in the South. No. Up in the North, up near the lake country, a little after the time after this, the angel Gabriel appears to a Jewish girl, a virgin. Now virgins aren't supposed to have babies.
The Jews knew that, you know. Sterile women aren't supposed to have babies either. Women in their late age aren't supposed to have women. They the Jews of that that time knew that too. They weren't they weren't listening around for doctor Spout.
They knew a thing or two about babies. Now so you have these two annunciations that Gabriel then announces the birth of John to Zachariah that his wife, sterile, old, known to be barren all these years, she's going to have a baby son. And and Gabriel even tells him what it's gonna be. He's gonna have a tough life. Then up in Bethlehem, Gabriel appears then to this virgin girl, maiden, and tells her she's going to have a baby.
And she says, how can that happen to me? She says, I don't I'm not married. I'm not having intercourse with any men. How I'm how am I going to have a baby? Notice she doesn't say, how am I going to believe you?
She says that she's she's very biological. She says, how how is this gonna happen? There's not a man in my life that I'm living with anyway. And the angel then says, look. Your relative down there, down south near Jerusalem, she that that you have relative of yours who was sterile and barren and who's now way up in years, she's going to have a son.
And notice the angel talking Gabriel talking to Mary tells her that she's going to have a son. Now if you had even if parathyogenesis, that means having a baby with only the mother, even if that takes place, if it could, you will have only a female baby, never a male. You know that, of course. And so Mary then gets the word. And what does she do?
She takes off to go down to see her relative. Now you talk about verification. You talk about credibility. That is certainly credibility. When Mary, up there in North, goes down and sees her relative Elizabeth very definitely pregnant just as the angel said.
Just as the angel said. And then we have the two births. Saint John is born. As you know, the the people who are that they can't believe that this old woman's having a baby. And when it's when it comes to whole communities overjoyed, they are absolutely astonished.
And, of course, what we they say, we'll call the baby by his father's name. And Elizabeth says, oh, no. You're not. It's gonna be called John. And the relative said, well, there's nobody in your family named John.
She says, oh, yes. We're gonna call him John. So they turned to Zachary. Zachary takes a tablet and writes, John is his name. You see how that ties it in with the angel's announcement to him?
It ties it all together. And then and then Zachariah recovers his speech. Meanwhile, Mary, after visiting with her relative, had gone had went back up to Nazareth. And then what happens? Well, Caesar Augustus wants to know how many citizens he has, so they wanna have an enrollment, a census.
Now each each Jew had to go back to his native home. And now Joseph remember, Mary was betrothed to Joseph, has to go back to Bet to his city of David, which is Bethlehem, just a short distance from Jerusalem. So he and Mary, Mary now very far gone in her pregnancy, they go down in order to fulfill the law of registering in their town of David. And while there, she gives birth to her baby son. Then what happens?
Then we have the verification of the shepherds who see this strange stuff in in the sky, multitudes of angels hollering, shouting for joy. And then the angel tells them, look. I'm telling you what's happened. And if you go to Bethlehem, you will find what I'm telling you. You're gonna find that baby, the Messiah, in a manger.
No pompous circumstance, but in a manger, in a cave that was used as a stable. And what do the shepherds do? They wanna verify just like Mary hiked down to to see whether her cousin whether her relative was truly pregnant. So they said, come. Let's go over there and see whether this stuff is true or not.
It's unbelievable. And they go and they come to Bethlehem, and they find it just as the angel said, a baby is lying in a manger. So you have two annunciations, two births, and two verifications. Isn't that simple to keep in your mind? It hangs together completely as a unit.
As a unit. Don't let it get splintered. And don't be afraid of it. This isn't a bunch of just myth stuff. This is realistic.
Saint Luke's gospel is is extraordinary in his attention to chronological and geographical details. He tells you who was ruling, what year it was, where it happened. See, he's very different from Matthew and Mark. Well, of course, very different from Saint John's fourth gospel. This is a wonderful story.
It even from a literary point of view, it's great stuff. You know? I'm not the one who discovered that. But get the story whole. Get it in its completeness.
Now, you see, if you have this in then you can tack it on to all these texts we've had Sunday after Sunday as forecast, as prophecies about the coming of the Messiah from Isaiah. It all adds up. It all adds up. It's a marvelous, marvelous story. And the heart and the core of it is, again, I say, two annunciations, John's annunciation I mean, the annunciation about John to Zechariah, the annunciation put by the same angel of Gabriel to Mary, the two births of John, the birth of our Lord, and then the two verifications that Mary went Mary hastened to visit her relative to see for sure whether she was pregnant, and the shepherds said, come.
Let's see whether this stuff is true. And they went to Bethlehem and found the baby in the manger. It is the basis of our crying with the shepherds. I mean, joining what they were hearing from the angels. Glory to god in the highest.
Why? Because we have a savior. In the the name of the father, and of the son, and of the spirit. Amen.