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Fr. Brian Larkin preaches on the readings from the 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time on September 19, 2021. -"Taking a child he placed it in their midst." (Mark 9:36) -paidiá (Greek) — child, or servant -"Then he sat down, called the Twelve, and said to them, 'If anyone wishes to be first, he shall be the last of all and the servant of all.'" (Mark 9:35) -The Gospel teaches that one human soul, one, is worth more than all the created universe. -Fr. Brian -The greatest Christian heresy of all of our history is called gnosticism. -Fr. Brian -Gnosticism is already being addressed in the New Testament: 1 Corinthians, 1 John -The reason gnosticism is so dangerous is because it has so much truth in it. But then it distorts it. -Fr. Brian -gnosis (Greek) — knowledge -Gnosticism is the belief that some kind of wisdom, knowledge or polished mysticism will save you.... The Gnostics couldn't handle the cross. -Fr. Brian -Christianity is not a collection of wisdom, it is not a moral law, it is not good advice. Christianity is good news. The good news is not that God has good advice for your life. The good news is that you were a slave, you had no hope and neither did I.... Until [the crucifixion] happened. -Fr. Brian -"The good news that Jesus announced, like the good news that his first followers announced about him, was not a piece of advice, however good. It was about something that had happened, about something that would happen as a result, and about the new moment between those two, the moment in which people were in fact living, whether they realized it or not.” -N.T. Wright in Simply Good News -The Bible is not simply wisdom for your life. The Gospel is the story of how the world was set free by the love of God. -Fr. Brian -The old world died on the cross. The old world that was captive to Satan, the world that was in rebellion against God. The day Jesus died on the cross, it wasn't me that did something, it was the day that Jesus changed all of history and all of eternity. -Fr. Brian -"But may I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which* the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world." (Galatians 6:14) -"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” -H. Richard Niebuhr in The Kingdom of God in America -“The cross is the key to understanding reality in God’s new eschatological age. Consequently, to enter the symbolic world of the Gospel is to undergo a conversion of the imagination, to see all values transformed by the foolish and weak death of Jesus on the cross.” -Richard B. Hays