A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Matthew. When John the Baptizer made his appearance as a preacher in the desert of Judea, this was his theme. Reform your lives. The reign of God is at hand. It was of him that the prophet Isaiah had spoken when he said, a herald voice in the desert, prepare the way of the lord, make straight his paths.
John was clothed in a garment of camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist. Grasshoppers and wild honey were his food. Now at that time, Jerusalem, all Judea in fact, and the whole region around the Jordan were going out to John, John the baptized the tis. They were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they confessed their sins. When John saw that many of the pharisees and sadducees were stepping forward for baptism for this bath, John said to them, you brood of vipers.
Who told you to flee from the wrath to come? Give some evidence that you mean to reform. Do not pride yourself on the claim Abraham is our father. I tell you, god can raise up children to Abraham from these very stones. Even now, the axe is laid to the root of the tree.
Every tree that is not fruitful will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I baptize remember, this is John the Baptist speaking. I baptize you in water for the sake of reform, but the one who will follow me is more powerful than I. I am not fit even to carry his sandals. He it is who will baptize you in the holy spirit and in fire.
His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and then gather his grain into the barn. But the chaff, he will burn in unquenchable fire. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. My text is not from today's gospel but from Saint Matthew's, report, his gospel, and it has Jesus walking with his disciples towards Philip's Azariah.
And they've been talking about apparently, the crowd and so forth have been talking about who is Jesus? What is Jesus? So now our lord talks speaks to ask his disciples, not the crowd, but his chosen ones. And who do you say that I am? And then Simon Peter spoke up and said, you are the Messiah, the son of the living god.
Of course, that's chapter 16 verses fifteen and sixteen. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. In 1988, Time Magazine, that's just four years ago, Time Magazine had a had a mosaic portrait of Jesus Christ. That portrait, I called it a mosaic and that's what it was.
This was the sixteenth time that Time Magazine had some kind of a picture or a portrait of Jesus on its cover. Now this portrait was made up this this sixteenth portrait was made up of from 17 separate portraits or pictures or images, imaginative, of course, of Jesus beginning with the sixth century and coming all the way down to the latest one of him by Hooper. Curtis Hooper, an Englishman or English artist who made a or tried to make a portrait of Jesus based on the Shroud Of Turin right down to our present time. Now this was in 1988, and that was the cover of the issue for August 15. You know what the story was, the cover story?
The last temptation of Christ. Now all of you in those pews remember that. I know whether you saw it or not, but you remember the controversy it made. It was blasphemous, it was obscene, some thought it a great work of art, but it was absolutely a fictionalized picture of Christ just as all the other 16 pictures on the cover of Christ. Now who is Christ?
Every culture, every human being, if he thinks about Christ, has some kind of a conception. What's your conception of Jesus Christ? And how does that conception affect your daily lives? If it doesn't, there's something wrong. Either he was not the son of god or you haven't made contact.
Now your last week, last Sunday, as you absolutely remember, word for word, of course, I spoke to you about secularism as being the the main obstacle between man and god today. And you can call it human secularism, but other words, it simply means the world. This world, time, space, limited world. Everything in this world contingent. In other words, it doesn't account for its own self.
It depends on something else. Everything. Nothing is in in this world is secular, is an absolute. And secularism means that that's all there is. And I quoted TS Eliot.
Men have left god, not for other gods, they say, but for no god. And this has never happened before. It sure hasn't. And that's the world we're living in. Now today, I wanna focus that secularism on what it's done to the New Testament and to the gospels and to the the answer to the question, who is Jesus Christ?
Are we prepared to stand up with Peter and say now with all kinds of knowledge, thou art the son of god? And then do we try to live it? Or are we in the boat wobbling, negotiating, compromising, being modern, being contemporary, being with it with like Scorsese's The Last Imitation of Christ or other late books that try to answer the question, who is Jesus Christ? Now this is absolutely a most proximate. You can't escape this question and then you oh, you can escape the answer.
You can flee the answer and say, the heck with it. I can't I don't know anything about that. I go to church on Sunday. I say my prayers. And believe me, I don't underrate that.
Don't you think for a minute. But the point is as you as human beings in this world today, can we be so offhanded about answering the question, who is Jesus Christ? Now in 1991, we had an answer to it by Wilson. I think his first name is Andrew Wilson. He's a he's a novelist.
He's also a biography. He wrote a biography of CS Lewis. Not a very good one. It's all this psycho stuff. But then he came out with a his conception of Jesus Christ.
The title of his book was Jesus. Alright. What is Jesus? He's nothing but a but a good man. A good man.
And all this, what we call the infancy narratives, the annunciation, the visitation of our lady to to Elizabeth, the the the murder, the slaughter of the innocent, the coming of the magi, the flight into Egypt. All of this, they could as Wilson Wilson said, they are the most trivial things in the world. They just throw them all out as being non historical because you can't prove it on a fact of his on what they call a fact of history. Now behind that is this. This it's an attitude towards the gospel, the four gospels, that if you cannot explain what is reported there in terms of nature of what we call the natural and have to appeal to what they call the supernatural, and I do too, then you have to reject it.
It's un historical. So the the the infancy narratives of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke, they're tossed out. You'll say, yes, but you know who is Wilson? He's gone he's been he's been a lot of things. Well, how about if I tell you this?
In 1992, that's the year we're kind of ending. Two Catholic authors each tried their hand at writing what they conceived to be the story of the historical Christ according to modern biblical criticism. One is a professor, a layman from DePaul University of Chicago, a Catholic university founded by the Vincentians. The other one is from a scripture scholar from Catholic University, John Meyer. And what do they come up with?
They take the same attitude, and it's based upon this assumption that you can divorce what they call the Jesus of history from what they call the Jesus of faith. Now if you say this is sounding complicated, what's this got to do with my adoration of Jesus? It has everything to do with it. If you can separate those two and say that the Jesus of history is nothing more than what they call a good man, which you can't, and then you say we have this Jesus of faith which is a creation of human fiction, doesn't that have an effect on what the answer to your question and the question of our lord himself, who do you say that I am? Do who do you say that I am?
Carson, the, the author from I think it's just 1992 from, DePaul University. The title of his book is that Jesus well, it's the essence of his story, that Jesus was a Mediterranean Jew who preached a doctrine of egalitarianism for peasants of which he was one. So that Jesus was nothing more than a Mediterranean peasant who is preaching egalitarianism to other peasants. Fine and dandy. That's great, isn't it?
From a Catholics man from a Catholic in a Catholic university. Father Meyer from Catholic U, he's a little bit more sophisticated. We had his first volume of a two volume work. But according to him, he makes that fine distinction between Christ of history and what he calls the Christ of faith, and then a third one of theology. So he puts that aside and says, I'm gonna concentrate only on the Christ of faith.
So Christ of faith comes out to be a Jewish man from Nazareth. Of course, nobody today denies there was such a person and that he was born. Whether he was born in Bethlehem or not, that's something else, or whether all the rest of it, the narrative of the infancy. Now according to father Meyer, doctor Meyer, Jesus was a good man, of course. But he wasn't he was just a Jewish boy that was born and grew up, had no understanding of who he was, was subject to human weaknesses, and even to sin.
Old Scorsese had that, as you know, most spectacularly. And that's that's the Jesus of history. This, of course, goes back to a to a German named Rudolf Bultmann, died in 1976. That's not ancient history. Born in 1884.
Now Bultmann was a son of a of a Lutheran minister and was a very was a very learned man. All these people are learned. They are erudite. They know their their scripture. Let's and let's not accuse them of insincerity either.
They're good men, at least let's give them the benefit of the doubt. But the point is, what do they come up with? They're following Boltmann. And according to him, following existentialism, you see how you get back to these philosophical concepts? And following a philosopher named Heidegger, he he took this attitude that anything in the scripture that can't be explained naturally, that you have to go and bring in the supernatural, forget it.
Forget it. Only what can be explained in the natural terms that is existential terms is acceptable. But do they reject Christ? Oh, no. The Christ that they lord, speaking of Boltman, not not of the of Carson or of Meyer, this is what they call the Christ of faith.
This is the Christ which was created by the faith of the faithful and which has, of course, grown by the centuries. And that's very important, and that's the one that counts. I just read just read a a book of supposed to call spiritual writings by a a a Catholic a Frenchman who said it makes no difference to him whether Christ rose from the dead physically. What is matters is the Christ of faith. Well, of course, the Christ of faith is a human fiction.
And is that the Christ you believe in? Is that the Christ you sacrificed for? Is that the Christ you're laying your life on the line for? The Christ that you're sacrificing in this life because of your hope for eternity and everlasting happiness with God in heaven, we call it? You'll never get that Christ from Boltman.
You won't get that Christ from the historical Jesus of these writers. You won't get it. He's disappeared. And to substitute what they call the Christ of faith, it's nothing but a fiction. It may be a good fiction.
It may be a a it's a very helpful concept and all of that. I don't deny that at all, but so are a lot of fictions. And is Christ just a fiction, a creation of of the early Christian's imagination or need or what have you? So we have to make this choice. This is a you've got to answer this question.
Who am I? There's no question that Jesus lived. No one denies that today. There's no doubt that we know a lot about him, that even these these modernists, accept as history. But if that's all you can know about Jesus, then he is not the son of God.
He is not the messiah. He is not the savior. He is not the redeemer. He is not the son of Mary conceived by the Holy Spirit. The third person of the most holy trinity.
He's a fiction. That's all he announced. Are you going to did you hand your life over to a fiction? Just because you say it's uplifting, it keeps us human, it keeps us civilized, and all that. Well, you know what's happened.
He has been rejected too. Now I wanna give you what the Catholic church has to say about this, and let us not forget. We are disciples of Jesus. We are not in the ignorant crowd. I hope not.
That is the crowd that followed Jesus. Jesus asked this question of his disciples, his his proximate followers, who and Christ says, who do you say that I am? The crowd, of course, had given all kinds of answers just as they do today. And old Peter speaks up, you are the Messiah, the son of God. And on that, Jesus stands or he falls.
If he's not that, forget it. Let's go bowling. Let's use our money instead of building churches. Put it to a good use. Let's go to Las Vegas.
Put build cathedrals in Las Vegas as we're doing in many instances. There is the secular world. Now here's what Vatican II said on this subject of the historicity of the Gospels. I'm reading verbatim. It's from the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation number 19.
Holy Mother Church has firmly and with absolute constancy maintained and continues to maintain that the four gospels whose historicity she unhesitatingly affirms faithfully hand on tradition what Jesus, the son of god, while he lived among men, really did and really taught for their eternal salvation. So the the the position of the church is absolutely unambiguous. We are reading facts, the actualities of the life of a baby born to a Jewish maiden and named Jesus. That's what the church teaches. And that's what we have believed, and that's what we will try to believe.
Now you see, this all ties in with what I said last Sunday and going back to the previous feast of Christ the king. Remember, he was that was made an official, feast, Christ the king, in 1925. Elliott wrote that poem of which I gave you an excerpt. Men have left god not for other gods, they say, but for no god but for no god. And this has never happened before.
Now he'll say, well, of course, everybody knows Christ was a good man. I wanna bring in here what I've used many times. You cannot say that if Christ if Christ if he was only a man, he was not a good man. And my that that no one has said that better than CS Lewis in his mere Christianity. He as Lewis says, there's one thing you cannot say about Jesus Christ and that is that he was merely a good man.
Lewis goes on to say, you can call him a madman. You can say he thought he was a novelette and ought to be put in an insane asylum, but you cannot say, he says, you cannot be patronizing and say that he was only a good man. Because Christ, if he's only a good man, was the worst charlatan that the world has ever seen. Two thousand years of his hypocrisy and lying, misleading, good, sincere, honest people. That's what you're faced with.
On the other hand, let us with the Catholic church which has been around for two thousand years, which we will have more to say soon. Let us stand firm and confident. This to stay with the early for to stay with the