A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. This is sort of a repetition of a gospel we had a few days ago, but it's from a different evangelist. This is from Saint Luke. Has to do with the observance of Sunday or the Sabbath. So when Jesus came on a Sabbath day to eat a meal in the house of one of the leading pharisees, now notice that he this relationship between Christ and the pharisees, it wasn't as antagonistic as as you might think.
Here he's having a meal with him. So he's having dinner or supper or breakfast or something with a pharisee and he's in the pharisee's house. Now the pharisees observed Jesus very closely. They wanted to see what he was going to do. Now directly in front of him was a man who suffered from dropsy.
So then our lord asked the lawyers and the pharisees, notice they were proud of them, is it lawful to cure on the Sabbath or not? At this, they all of them kept silent. Then he took the man, healed him, and then he sent him on his way. Then our lord addressed himself to the lawyers and the Pharisees, and he asked them this question. If one of you has a son or an ox and he falls into a pit, will he not at once rescue him even if it's the Sabbath day?
To that question, they had no answer. The good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Well, it was my honor to be here when we had that other reading.
I think it was Saint Matthew. But the point is I stressed then, and as you all remember, word for word, of course, let's not let's get the situation here. The pharisees and the lawyers knew the law, and you know what it is. Keep holy the Sabbath day. That's what god commanded, and that's what the Jews tried to do.
But you see the trouble with being a lawyer is you've to get down to details and details and details. And the first thing you do, you wind up in absurdity. For example, we I'll give you two instances. Remember the scene of our blessed lord and his disciples walking through, what they call the cornfield, which was really wheat? We've all done well.
Some of us here have done it on a hot July before the wheat has been harvested. You grab a head of it, you slide your hand along it, and you have a handful of grain. So you chew it. Some people like it, some people don't. It can be pretty dusty.
Well, that's what his disciples did. So one of the pharisees said, look. They're breaking the Sabbath. They are working. They're harvesting grain.
Now you see, it's easy to say what an absurdity, but you got to see what behind that was a very decent proper attitude. You mustn't work on Sunday or or keep holy the Sabbath day, which meant you didn't plow and you didn't harvest. It made it impure. You were made impure by the law if you even touched a plow. Because as the the great lawyers argued, if you touch the plow, well, next thing is you're gonna put an ox in the plow and the next thing you're gonna be out there plowing.
You see how, you know, how how logic can can really kill you. So what our lord says, he he knows they're looking at him. He knows they're they're waiting to see what he can do because they think, you see, that they have him in a dilemma. If he cures the man, he's violating the law. But that's the god never said a word about curing a man of dropsy on the Sabbath.
He said keep holy the Sabbath. That's what God said. On the other hand, if he doesn't cure him, then what happened to his fine reputation as the as the healer? See, they thought that they had him in a dilemma. And all he does is ask them a question.
Notice he doesn't reject the law in the least. All he says is, which of you if you had a son or an ox? And it gets into trouble. Aren't you gonna go and try to rescue me, your son or the ox? And they have no answer.
They're honest men. They can't put these two things together. And you can't put them together if you begin to making one of them absurd. Now I I for the last three Sundays and this coming Sunday, I'm going to deliver myself of a fourth oration on this matter of this latest encyclical of our holy father, the splendor of truth, veritati splendor, which has to do with moral law, Moral law. Which has to be tied, what?
With God's truth. With God's truth. Not with man's truth. This is the whole point of John Paul in this 59 page well, it's longer than that, it's about a 100 and some pages depending on how you type print it. It's a very long encyclical.
But what he's pointing out is that moral principles, in other words, the laws of morality are not man made. Man discovers them. Moral principles, that is keep holy the Sabbath day. It goes back to god almighty and is an immutable principle. It is tied to freedom only in so far as it is with freedom, not from freedom, not from the law.
And you see, we all can fall into this rut. We can lose sight of things by getting too and then we become absurd. But do you see the the and here is where the great mistake comes. We pick up the absurdity and we forget the significance of it. We say how absurd to call curing a man work.
How absurd to call picking up a handful of grain work. Sure. Point is the principle that you are bound to observe the Sabbath, there's nothing insignificant about that. And we all realize that today in our secular world, the Sabbath is not being observed as a Sabbath. In my little where I grew up, I was it was a very Methodist dominated town.
Some of my best friends were Methodists. And come Sunday morning, the curtains were pulled down on the windows, and you didn't see those people except that they were going to church, and they went to church twice morning and afternoon. Afternoon. There was no playing. They didn't come out of doors.
And inside I'm not exaggerating this at all. If any of you grew up in that Methodist environment, you'll know it's true. It was and indoors, it was very solemn. In this particular family, they had an organ, and in the afternoon, they would sing hymns together, then they would go to church, then they would have a big meal. But it it was a day dedicated to God as they saw it.
And of course there was the origination of those blue laws that we had. Now you see these blue laws, we laugh at them today. But people forget why were they made. We've gone to the other extreme today. Now we have seven days in the week.
Not one of them, in many instances, is dedicated to God. Plenty of people. Saturday and Sunday are just days of even more work than the five work days. So let us not be misled here. Let us be let us see how sensible Jesus Christ was.
I mean, plain commonsensical. Common sensical. He was just a good ordinary man in many ways. But you see how notice he does not reject their principle. He asked them he asked them a question.
Question. They don't answer the question. See? It's very clever stuff. The more you study this, the the more the more clever or or you can use the word astute Christ Christ was, even from a legal point of view.
So not many people are going to read this encyclical, which which our which the holy father calls the splendor of truth. Not many it's hard reading. Yeah. I mean it's hard reading, But it's a wonderful, magnificent document. Probably nothing like it's been produced to show the whole the whole basis of Catholic morality.
Its fundamental basis in God and that our truest freedom is to be tied to god's truth, which in when it's all said and done, is going to be articulated in our daily lives through the living voice of his church and the head of that church, Peter, the rock. Name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.