In the name of the father, of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. Sometimes, and I've been in this number, we make a big deal of the crowds which apparently follow Jesus. At least the text says there was a crowd. Well, you know, how many is a crowd?
Sometimes if you add one person to two, you have a mob depending on who the two are. But the point is that it was not uncommon in our Lord's day and it's not uncommon in our day for any demigod to get a crowd. It doesn't take much to get an assembly of people. And in our Lord's day, it was much easier than today. Remember, they didn't have the forty hour week.
And it was plenty, there were plenty of people around Jerusalem and everywhere else who had plenty of leisure. And so, any little diversion that came along was welcomed. And so, I don't think we should make too much of this business of the crowd. What's more important is how our Lord handled them. What did he think of them?
Did he cater to them? Did they dictate to him? Did he flatter them? Did he invite them? Did he entice them?
In other words, was he a demagogue? And the record shows that whatever else our Lord was, he was not a rabble racer. As a matter of fact, if you think back and we can all do this because these are the highlights of the New Testament. When our blessed Lord had the largest number of people in the palm of his hand, when they wanted to make him king. When a whole town wanted to keep him because they liked the way he he did they he took away the problem of furnishing food and drink.
Wouldn't like to have a guy like that around. The woman he was was begged by different towns to stay with him, and our Lord led the crowd. He withdrew by himself alone or he took just one or two of his favorite disciples. This matter of the crowd, the demos, from which we get the word democracy, remember, it's a very dangerous thing. It wasn't a Christian who said, I fear the crowd and I keep them at a distance.
Timmy Olvocos at Archio. I I have a dread of the public and I keep them at a distance. You see, it is so easy to lose ourselves in a crowd. It is so easy to have our lives dictated by a crowd. And as I said, the definition of a crowd is extremely relative.
Extremely relative. How many? I have no idea. But the point is we know fairly well what we mean by the crowd. As I say, it can be a very few people, but it can still be my gang.
Today, you know, we talk about peer pressure. That's a lot of nonsense in many ways as if that was something new. This has been around in memorial. On the one hand, we cultivate our the concept of the self as an autonomous responsible person. When I was at Gathwick U during the sixties, this was the great highlight from the students.
Treat us as responsible people. Treat us as adults. Don't give us a lot of regulations telling us when we have to come in and turn off our lights and get up and study and what we have to do and what we don't have to do. We listen. We're old enough to have been be married and have kids.
Treat us this treat us as you would with the man working for you. Well, you are all acquainted with this. They wanted to be treated as responsible human beings. Now, what is one of the most important aspects of being a responsible human being? Most of them couldn't help being human.
We gave them all the benefit of that doubt. But how about that new to responsible human? What does that mean? If we are sucked in by the crowd, what we call our peers or whatever words you want to use, it all comes down to the same thing. If we are if we, as a person, captivated by the people around me, the bulbous, the crowd, the demos, then who am I?
I've lost my autonomy. I've lost my my sense of personal responsibility. And here's the point. We don't go before God almighty. We do not live in the presence of God as a mob or a crowd.
None of us. None of us. This is the great thrust of our present holy father. Almost from the beginning, he referred to human beings as unrepeatable. That's the translation.
I don't know what the Polish is, that word escapes me from all the Polish I know. But our Holy Father is extremely fond of calling us unrepeatable. He wrote a book on the matter of the person, which some of you heard, read reviews of, it's supposed to be completely understandable. Well, it's a translation from the Polish so you can draw your own conclusion. It's not an easy book to read, I'll tell you.
But the whole thrust of that book, which the holy father wrote before he became pope, is to take the philosophy of the phenomenalists and bring out the value of the human person as an individual being, not part of a mob or a crowd or just one peer among a multitude of peers. That we have for every single human being an individuality, a uniqueness. As he said, we are unrepeatable. That's what we lose when we lose ourselves in the mob, in the crowd, be it three or four or five, no matter how many. We have to stand up on our own two feet and be erect with our own backbone, and make our own decisions.
Because in the presence of God, we are told here in the book of Proverbs that that the Lord reads the heart, and you bet he does. And it's not enough for me to say, I did what everybody around me did. I am a man of my times. I am a man of my peers. Nonsense.
What God asks is, who are you? He doesn't ask me to live your life, and he doesn't ask you to live my life. And I want to bring this down to the individual, Whether you're married or single, whether you're a child in a family, you are an individual. A unique person made to the image and likeness of God, a unique creation, each individual. Not one of us have the same set of fingerprints or the same kind of an ear, not one in the whole human race.
So we are unique. Believe me, this uniqueness is just the beginning. And so, let us let us understand our blessed Lord. We have to be part of society. I am saved in union with my fellow human being.
That's cannot I lean on him. I cannot dissolve myself in his personality. I have to be alone before God. And we have to learn, as our Lord gave us the example, when to withdraw, when to be myself, when in order to be more fully my responsible unrepeatable self, I withdraw. Now that can be done in various ways, but it is absolutely essential if we are going to maintain our sense, our consciousness of being me and not you.
In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.