IHS
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost—27 September AD 2020
Ave Maria!
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English Text
Latin Text
About 450 years before Christ, the Greek philosopher,
Protagoras made the rather famous statement that “man is the measure of
all things.”
His statement was a bit surprising, for most of the earlier Greeks were
awed by the insignificance of men and mankind when compared to the
enormity of the universe which even they were able to see with the naked
eye. Man had generally been thought of as nothing more than one
component among the infinitely many, that had somehow been brought into
being by the mysterious Force that brought order out of the primordial
chaos of creation. Man was nothing when compared with the Logos—the
intelligence that ordered the universe—literally, the Word that brought
cosmos [and chronos] out of chaos.
Christianity has always sided with the view of these
earlier philosophers. “In the beginning was the Word ... and the Word
was God ... and all things were made through Him.”
Man, of course, is important, but he is only God's “image and
likeness,” made to “show forth God's glory in this world and to be happy
with Him in the next.”
In Christianity, things are properly defined in terms of God rather
than in terms of man.
But the idea of putting man at the center of the universe
offers a certain temptation to all of us who share humanity. There is
something flattering—perhaps even comforting—to think that the universe
was made for us alone, and that we are the measure of all things that
are and are not. So it is not surprising that this notion of the Greek
Protagoras appears now and again in human philosophy. Indeed, it is one
of the central mistakes of modern philosophy, beginning perhaps with the
“Enlightenment” before the French Revolution, entering into
Protestantism in the 18th and 19th centuries, and heavily influencing
even those who call themselves “Catholics” during the 20th and 21st
centuries.
This erroneous modern philosophy and religion, in
defining all things in terms of mankind, seeks to deny the reality of
the supernatural. The Modernist God—“if there is a God” —is a Creator
who is isolated from His creatures—the “clockmaker” who built the
universe, wound it up, and then walked away to watch from a distance.
Prayer and spirituality are reduced to psychology, because to the
Modernist, his own thoughts are the most rarefied and spiritual things
he can imagine. There is nothing higher, the Modernist says, for “man
is the measure of all things.”
Our Lord Jesus Christ presents a special problem for the
Modernist: for, if there is no supernatural, and if man's thoughts are
the only spirituality, and if the Creator has walked away from His
creation—then there is no possibility that the “Word was made flesh and
dwelt among us.” To the Modernist, our Lord can never be more than a
great man, a philosopher who showed us a way by which we might live in
this purely natural world of ours. And, of course, when the Modernist
reduces Jesus Christ to the level of mere man, he makes Him just one
among many. If Jesus was just a great teacher, well, so was the Buddha,
and so was Confucius, and so were dozens of other men who speculated as
to how man might best conduct himself in a world that was defined by the
minds of men.
Now, the Scribes and the Pharisees, the Jewish leaders
about whom we read in today's Gospel, believed in a God who had given
His Law to Moses, and who was to be worshipped with the sacrifices of
animals in the Temple—but even they tended to think of God as someone
who was far away and unapproachable, “insulated,” so to speak, from His
people. They had taken up where the Sadducees were unsuccessful,
trying to trap Jesus into saying something that would get him into
trouble with either the civil authorities or with the authorities of the
Temple: “Was it lawful to give tribute to Caesar?” What were His views
concerning the resurrection of the body? “Which is the greatest
commandment in the Law?”
Our Lord's answer rings out as an answer for all times;
not just to the Scribes and Pharisees, but as well to Protagoras the
Greek, and to the Modernists in our own times: Man is important, but he
is not the measure of all things. One must “render to God what is
God's” and must love Him with one's “whole heart, soul, and mind.” Only
from this love of God do we have love of man—it is God who is the
measure of all things.
And, if that wasn't enough for the Pharisees and the
Modernists, His next statement says even more. He quotes Psalm 109,
written by King David: “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand
till I make thine enemies thy footstool.” Every Jew knew that the
coming Messiah, the Christ, was to be a descendant of King David. He
would be a King, and, as the Psalm continues, a “priest forever
according to the order of Melchisedech.” But if David spoke of Him as
“my Lord,” and spoke of Him in the past tense, of His “birth before the
daystar”—then this Messiah had to be one who came, in time, both before
and after David, and begotten of God Himself. How much more intimate
could the relationship between heaven and earth have been than for God
to send His begotten Son to redeem His people? How little was this like
the watchmaker who wound the clock and walked away!
“Neither did anyone dare from that day forth to ask Him
any more questions.” Nothing is more powerful than the truth to
confound those in error. If they had previously misunderstood our
Lord's references to “the Father” and to Himself as “the Son of the
Father,” there now could be no doubt. To the Pharisee, to the Scribe,
to the Modernist, indeed, to all men of all times, Jesus Christ—who had
healed the sick, and raised the dead, calmed the seas and walked upon
the waters—and proclaimed Himself to be the Son of God.
