A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Certain pharisees came to Jesus. Now note what they say. Go on your way, they said. Leave this place because Herod is trying to kill you.
Our lord's answer was, go tell that fox, today and tomorrow, I cast out devils and perform cures. And on the third day, my purpose is accomplished. For all that, I must proceed on course today, tomorrow, and the day after, since no prophet can be allowed to die anywhere except in Jerusalem. Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you slay the prophets, and you stone those who are sent to you. How often have I wanted to gather your children together as a mother bird collects her young under her wings and you refuse me?
Your temple will be abandoned. I say to you, you shall not see me until the time comes when you say, blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. All you have to do is to get out your dictionary and look up the pharisee the word pharisee to discover the meaning of that word.
It's pretty pejoric. Good morning. It has very unhappy, unpleasant connotations. Set by his enemy. But if we believe all of that, we're greatly mistaken.
The Pharisees were not all that bad. Remember, they were the top echelon of Jewish society. They were the best educated, culturally advanced. They kept the law down to this down to the tiniest iota. Breakthrough.
They were good people as far as all the externals go. Self perception. Remember that that old pharisee who came into the temple and started to tell god how good he was, he was a good man. Concentrate only on the past. Well, every time I read it, I say, good gosh.
I only wish I were that good. You. But you see, the word hypocrite is attached to the word pharisee. You have Christ. Because apparently many of them or some of them weren't exactly living the interior life that their exterior life manifest.
May not be as And so remember those famous passages in the New Testament that called the woe passages where our where our lord's passage after verse after verse says, woe to you scribes and pharisees, hypocrites. The only thing I care about is But we will be making a grievous mistake if we think all the pharisees were a bunch of hypocrites. They weren't. The MX? Now here today, we have an instance of where these pharisees are who are so often the antagonists of our lord, the opponents of our lord.
So often we are told the pharisees sought to betray him in his speech they might be. And all of that. Yet today, it's a pharisee who comes to Jesus and says, look. Herod's getting Herod's on your trail. He wants to kill you, so get out.
But there are people who say that. Our lord says, Nicks, can't do it. Can't do it. And then he goes on to this famous passage, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, and he wept over the city. Now we are invited to the heavenly Jerusalem.
That's where we're called. But it's so difficult to keep the heavenly Jerusalem before us. It's very difficult. Many a person who's tried to improve their lives has taken the motto quid odd eternity. To be.
In any given instance, pull back, pause, stop, look, and listen. What has this to do with eternity? What bearing has this great problem that I have now, what has that to do with eternity? It either has something to do with it or it has nothing to do with it or it has a little bit to do with it. And that's a question we have to ask.
Now one of the things that comes out of answering that question is to give you a better perception of and to evaluate things that are happening in daily life. You're aiming to get a job, you're aiming to get married, you're aiming to have a baby, you're aiming to have a kid get into school, you're aiming to have someone stop drinking, all of these. And notice they are all good. And in many instances, we couldn't be fulfilling our due responsibilities in this life without being involved in such questions, in being interested, in being enthusiastic about getting what we seem to be what is needed. And yet, that's the time to pull back and say, hold it.
Quit on eternity. What has this to do, whichever way it goes, with eternity? That's one way of looking at it. But eternity is a pretty vague thing. I always like to Again, here we're faced with a concept.
It it it doesn't appeal to our imagination. It doesn't appeal to our emotions, our passions, our sentiments, our feelings. And yet, if we wanna win a person, that's what we have to appeal to. Colonel Newman with his in his grammar of assent brings out and out in what he calls real assent as opposed to notional assent. And it's real assent that matters.
And the real assent is the yes or the no that I give with my whole person, not with just my head. Another thing I would like to say because when the conflict comes between the head and the heart, as we say, using those figures of speech, because that's all they are, you know which one's going to win out. I see the good and approve it, said the Latin poet Ovid. That's not Saint Paul. I see the good and approve it and do the opposite.
Say evil. Or Saint Paul says, I see the good or, the good that I would to deprive ourselves. I do not. And the evil that I would not I do. So this this contrariety in human nature wasn't discovered by Saint Paul.
We didn't wait for Christ to tell us about it. We don't have to read Genesis. Greet all of it. I see the good and approve it and do the opposite because that's human nature. And it's not because we go after evil.
No one loves evil. It's only the good that moves the will. But when you have something that appeals to me, my feelings, my emotions, my sentiments, my passions, my imagination, which appeals to all those things, these abstractions are going to lose out except for the grace of god. Which, of course, we we have every right to think we will get when the chips are down. And so that the sacrifice heavenly Jerusalem, this city that our lord is weeping over They continue Jerusalem, oh, Jerusalem, if only you had listened to me.
And notice that figure of speech. You you can't say some of these things anymore. I was going to say you all have seen the way a hen does bring all those little chicks under its wings. I've often seen this in the barnyard when a storm was coming and how the mother hen would just cover every little chick that she had under her wings. And that's the figure speech our lord uses here, that that I would have taken you to the city of Jerusalem and covered you as a mother hen does her little chicks, but you would not.
You would not. You even have slain the prophets and those who have come to save you. Now we're all headed for the heavenly Jerusalem. We're headed for it. Baptism put us on the way.
The sacrament strengthen us, but it's difficult to keep on course, very difficult. And our lord never said it would be easy. Never did he say it was easy. And it's extremely unpsychological to think it would be easy. And you can read the life of any saint, and you will find it was not a bed of roses for any of them, any of them, the most ordinary and the most extraordinary.
We all don't have to be an Ignatius of Antioch. But you just take the little flower of Saint Therese of Lisieux, who's held up as being so ordinary. Well, she was very ordinary, but she was extraordinary in her ordinariness. And we are called to be no less than they, not in the what they did with their lives, but in the fact that they kept the heavenly Jerusalem before them. And and there's where our lord comes into the picture.
Here, we're not dealing with an abstraction. We're dealing with a human being, A man who had feelings, sentiments, he cried at the tomb of Lazarus just as he wept over Jerusalem. He was a man of sentiments, all albeit one person, the son of god. And so when we look to him, we are not dealing with something that we can't visualize, that we can't imagine. We are not dealing with something that is not appealing to our emotions and our sentiments.
And don't be afraid of your feelings. The only thing you want to be sure about is that they are lodged on a solid rock because feelings and sentiment and emotion can be traitors. They are not guides to anything, but we cannot downgrade them. We cannot give them anything less than the importance that they have, and we must use them to keep that vision of the holy city alive. Jerusalem, our home, our destiny.
Let us realize it. Keep it before us. That's where we're heading. And when things get tough or when things are great, Remember, some people can stand tragedy, disappointment, failure better than they can stand success. That's certainly been my experience in life.
So whether life is good to us or not so good, let's keep the heavenly Jerusalem before us. Quit on eternity. What's the worth of this to me in eternity? In the name of the father, and the son, and holy spirit. Amen.