Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke. Glory to you, Lord.
The rulers sneered at Jesus and said, he saved others.
Let him save himself if he is the chosen one, the Christ of God.
Even the soldiers jeered at him. As they approached to offer him wine, they called out, if you are the King of the Jews, save yourself.
Above him there was an inscription that read, this is the King of the Jews.
Now, one of the criminals hanging there reviled Jesus, saying, are you not the Christ?
Save yourself and us.
The other, however, rebuking him, said in reply, have you no fear of God, for you are subject to the same condemnation.
And indeed, we have been condemned justly, for the sentence we received corresponds to our crimes.
But this man has done nothing criminal.
Then he said, jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.
He replied to him, amen. I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise. The Gospel of the Lord.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
One of my favorite quotes I've read over the last year was a description of the evolution of the Christian church, where we begin with the teachings of Jesus, which taught us how we are to live versus what the church tends to focus on what we believe.
And there's such a vast contrast. Sometimes you could walk into my office and I could literally pull out volume after volume of theological treatises on what we are supposed to believe.
They would not only leave your kind of eyeballs spinning counterclockwise, but you'd probably have to spend, as I would to fully understand them, the rest of my life focusing on just a small portion.
And part of that problem is that God is always bigger than our human intellects or our words can ever describe.
So sometimes it's easy to look at our theology and just want to throw up your hands and say, we're not getting anywhere.
But if we go back to Jesus, we see that his focus was how we live, how we relate to one another, how we. How we love one another, and that that's what he was worried about.
Well, if you want to know how he expects us to live, I can think of one very short scriptural passage that kind of lays it all on the line. And my guess is if you think about it for more than 30 seconds, you're going to come up with the same one, love the Lord, Your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your being, and love your neighbor as yourself.
He even told us everything comes down to that reality.
But we also know that while part of it can feel easy, part of it can also feel horribly difficult.
To say we love God is. Is an easy thing to do.
It's an easy concept to have in our heads, but it requires virtually nothing other than thought.
And that's why it's so easy.
The secondary part of it is where it gets difficult to love our neighbor as ourself.
Now, now, when we do that, it's not just about loving those people that are closest to us, those people who are our family, our friends. That's easy.
Think of the people you dislike the most and love them.
That's where it gets real hard.
But the ideal person in the minds of Jesus is one that does that.
And if we look at today's gospel, we can see an example.
It's in the one person crucified with Jesus.
Now, we don't know any details of his life, but he probably wasn't the nicest guy all the time, or he wouldn't be hanging on a cross with Jesus.
He was executed for something, be it a crime, be it insurrection, be it not paying his taxes properly to Rome. We don't know what it is, but he probably wasn't living life perfectly.
But he also had, in the depth of his heart, an understanding that Jesus had done nothing wrong and that there's no way he should be facing this. And rather than worrying about himself like the other person crucified, he worried about Jesus first and say, come on, this guy did nothing wrong.
And he trusted enough to say, jesus, help me.
And for each one of us, those two things make us as good as we can be.
The first is to look out for the other, to love the other as he did.
And the second is to trust with all our being that in Christ's love we find what we need.
If we can do those two things, we're not far from the mark.
