A reading of the holy gospel according to Luke. Of course, you've noticed that we are reading the gospel according to Luke every morning if there it's a continuation of it. Now on this occasion, Jesus said to his disciples, let your loins be girded and your lamps burning, And be like men who are waiting for their master to come home from the marriage feast so that they may open to him at once when he comes and knocks. Blessed are those servants whom the master finds awake when he comes. Truly, I say to you, he will gird himself and have them sit at table, and he will come and serve them.
If he comes in the second watch or in the third and finds them awake and waiting, blessed are those servants. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. There's one little phrase in Saint Paul's letter to the Ephesians, the excerpt that we've read this morning, where Paul says, Christ Jesus is your peace.
Now, of course, as you know, there are a number of words in the English language which which we should eliminate. The first one, of course, is love since it has so many meanings that it's meaningless. Another one of those words is peace. It practically has no meaning because it has so many. But whatever it may mean, Paul says here today that whatever peace is, Jesus Christ is our peace.
Now, whenever I hear that phrase, I think of my long and illustrious and less illustrious past. Now a number of people have come with problems from time to time in my illustrious career. I get all they got was a an ear, but they got an ear. Now I say this simply as a matter of fact, without any criticism or anything else. Just as a matter of fact, all of these people who came, young and old, male and female, educated, uneducated, etcetera, etcetera, they were all Catholics, maybe one or two exceptions.
They were all Christians with one or two exceptions. So we can say without a doubt, speaking generally, they were they all believed in Jesus Christ. And they had various problems, a lot of them marital. Not once that I can recall has anyone come and said, what does Jesus Christ want me to do? Now they may have thought that and all, but I'm saying they never said it.
I never got the impression that they were thinking it either. For the most part, you got the impression that they wanted you to agree with what they wanted to do, and that would be, of course, the voice of god, naturally. That's the voice of god we like to hear when it agrees with me. Now I've looked into this word peace at some length. Do you know that the word peace in the Old Testament has been used at least on one occasion as a synonym for war or almost a synonym for war.
So right away, you can see what in the world does this word peace mean. I was talking with a a young Jewish gentleman, a friend of mine, still is, marvelous to say, some time ago, and, he he also had looked into this matter of peace in the Old Testament in his bible, which is our bible too. And he came up with a he says it's equivalent to salvation. And the best I can do from what I could gather from the New Testament, and I'm willing to go along with what he said about the old completely, completely, is about the same thing. Peace means salvation or words nothing to do with tranquility and and, lack of disturbance and lack of turbulence, lack of suffering, has nothing to do with joy and feeling good, has nothing to do with it, nothing at all.
And yet, we'll be getting a lot of peace. We're getting it already. The card advertisement. Merry Christmas is already in the air. And, of course, peace.
No one knows what they're talking about when they use the word. It you see, in most instances, it's a negative. When we say peace came to the war it came in 1944, what do we mean? The cessation of hostilities. That's a negation.
Can peace be a negation? Can it remember, a negation is a nothing. It's like illness. It's like evil. So, obviously, peace has gotta be more than nothing.
It is a something. So when when when when Paul says here, Jesus is your peace, what what do you mean by that? What did he mean by it? Well, I'm not at I'm not standing up here and presenting myself as an interpreter of Saint Paul. Saint Paul is, I would say, a difficult man.
It's the it's a lucky woman that wasn't married to him, believe me. But the thing is he's saying is this, that Jesus Christ is the key to your life eternal. Eternal life. And so what he's saying in this instance is, you have problems, difficulties of various sorts. You wanna you wanna save yourself from the problems.
You wanna survive them. You wanna surmount them. That's what he's telling the Ephesians. You know, Paul didn't write letters because he was a literary man who wanted to make a full professorship at the University of Athens. Paul wrote letters because there was a need.
The churches he had founded, the people he had left were in trouble, all kinds of trouble, most of the trouble from within. You notice the peace of the early church. I like to know where the peace of the early church was. If by peace you mean, this all this business of of tranquility and lack of turbulence and disturbance and all that, It's not there. Paul wrote these letters because there was a problem, a difficulty.
There was a there was a civil war going on in some instances. So he wrote his letters for a definite purpose. And so he's writing to the Ephesians about their problems. Read the letter. It only take you a few minutes.
In this business of reading a paragraph or two every morning, it's awful. It's dismembering the body. But anyway, today, Paul said, look. The key to your problem is Jesus Christ. He is your peace.
He is your salvation. He is your eternal life. And notice how that keys in with our lord that you better be awake when he comes because you don't always know when he comes. You don't always recognize him when he does come. And when I say you, I mean me.
So here is a message we can take straight from Saint Paul. You cannot improve on it. Jesus Christ is your peace, and that is because he first loved you long before you ever loved him or even thought about it. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.