A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. The lord appointed a further 72 and sent them out in pairs before him to every town, every place that he intended to visit. And he said to them, to that is to the 72, the harvest is rich, but the harvest master to send workers into his harvest. Be on your way and remember, I am sending you as lambs in the midst of wolves. Do not carry a walking staff or traveling bag.
Wear no sandals, and greet no one along the way. On entering any house, first say, peace to this house. If there is a peaceable man there, your peace will rest on him. If not, it will come back to you. Stay in the one house eating and drinking what they have for the laborers worth his wage.
Do not move from house to house. Into whatever city you go, after they welcome you, eat what they set before you, cure the sick there, and say to them, the reign of god is at hand. The gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. As I said, we are celebrating today the feast of Saint Luke, evangelist.
He wrote the third of the synoptic gospels. Now that and the fourth gospel, of course, is Saint John. And Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called synoptic because they look together. They take a sort of a single view of the life of Christ. He is the third of Saint Luke, and we know practically nothing about him except one one thing is is pretty clear, pretty well accepted, that Luke, whoever he was, wrote the third synoptic gospel and he also wrote the book of the acts of the apostles.
Now whoever wrote the whoever wrote the gospel of Saint Luke, in all probability it was Luke, is also without a doubt the author of the acts of the apostles. So we know that much about him anyway that he wrote these two, documents which are of well, who can exaggerate their importance? You can't. Especially the acts of the apostles because there you have the a recording, a report of the earliest days of the church. Of course, you'd say, well, if that's true, then every Christian would would be would be very knowledgeable about the acts of the apostles because if that records the early days of the church, who would wanna be the first readers to know what the church was like in its earliest days?
That's laughable. It's not really laughable because they do especially Catholics, they don't read it. They don't read the New Testament. Don't ask I don't it's a peculiar situation, very peculiar. But on the other hand, how many people within the last year have read the constitution of The United States?
Look at all this well, we won't go into that. But the point is, by and large, human beings don't read what they ought to read. By that I mean, the kind of documents which are of, well, inexpressible importance because we say, well, they're hard to read, they're boring, I don't understand the language. Well then, I say go to your comic strip. I never will forget, I was one of the first subscribers to Time Magazine.
I was also a first subscriber to Life Magazine. And somebody said in the course of the those early years that life was for people who can't read and time for people who can't think and I qualified under both categories. But the point is that we we shy away from the most important documents we ought to be reading. Not only read but know about and argue about and discuss about and think about because this is solid stuff. But instead of that, people like to wander off.
They'll they'll they'll spend an awful lot of of they course, don't they won't be able to find money to buy the latest version of the New Testament, but they can buy a ticket to go thousands of miles away to some shrine or something. It's a way I don't know. It's a way human nature is, I guess. So we're not gonna try to reform it including my own. But the point is we should put first things first.
And if we call ourselves Christians, we ought to know who Christ is. I mean, isn't that simple? And the best and the only documents that we have of a primitive sort about Christ are the well, it's the New Testament. The New Testament. So you 'd you'd think that every Christian would have it at their elbow right up on top of the refrigerator where you could re reach it at any moment and read a bit of it.
Well, that just ain't so. It's not the way it is. You ask a Catholic, do you have a bible? Do you read the bible? They'll say, yes.
I have one. Well, do you read it? Well, then you get, you know, a blank stare. Gathers dust or maybe they keep it dusted anyway. The best way of keeping it clean of dust is to use it.
Now Saint Luke's gospel is is he he rests without a doubt. He rests a lot on Saint Mark. But Luke has his own particular thrust and he's much more theological than Matthew, and Mark, much more so. And furthermore, he's a gentile Christian. He's not a Jewish Christian.
He came as a gentile. He's writing for gentiles. And there are many aspects of his gospel which are unique. For example, narratives. His attention to women, his attention to the poor, his attention to the weak, God's our Lord's curing of the many of the sick people.
He's much more attentive to that than Matthew or Mark. I'm not saying you should read Luke to the exclusion of the other two. I am saying that you should read all of them. You know, it's such a trifling thing. They're only a few pages long each gospel.
You can you can read it in two sittings without any problem. And if you ever do that, you will see what a tremendous difference it is than picking it up by dribs and dabs from Sunday to Sunday. You wouldn't even read a comic strip that way. And whatever you can say about the scriptures, they are documents to be read. And so let us join the multitudes of people who have read them.
It's not a great deal but you can't get anything more authentic than the word of god as it's displayed in the New Testament and in the old if you wanna go into it. I'm talking New Testament and read it and read it it and read it. It is the one document. I'm not saying the only way, but it is the one document that we have that bridges the twentieth century to our blessed lord. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit.
Amen.