A reading of the holy gospel according to John. Jesus said to his disciples, this is my commandment. Love one another as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer speak of you as slaves, for a slave doesn't know what his master is about. Instead, I call you friends since I have made known to you all that I have heard from the father. It was not you who chose me. It was I who chose you to go forth and to bear fruit. Your fruit must endure so that all you ask the father in my name, he will give you.
The command I give you is this, that you love one another, and this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. I wish to comment upon a sentence from the gospel reading, but I can't resist the temptation. See, the way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it.
Everybody knows that. And to call your attention to this reading we had this morning from the acts of the apostles, when the emissaries who had gone up to Jerusalem to get a decision about how Gentiles should be received into the church, they have now returned to Cilicia to and have brought the word. And notice this sentence in there. They said, by what authority did you people down here prohibit the Gentiles from coming in? By what authority?
In other words, who gave you any authority to do that? The authority was back in Jerusalem with Peter and the apostles, and it was Peter who took the floor that was yesterday's reading. Don't overlook it. This has tremendous significance. And as I say, this is there is no history of the church more primitive than the acts of the apostles.
And, there's no question about the authenticity of the text and all of that sort of thing that you have about some of the gospels. So the authority that it's absolutely astonishing, this development. And remember, this is in the earliest days of the church. Now to come back to the sentence I want is the the last sentence we read from this excerpt from Saint John's wonderful, wonderful passage on love. Of course, it's our lord speaking.
And Christ says, the command I give you is this, that you love one another. And you see people take that, and they say that's the command of Jesus Christ. Love one another. Well, yet nobody can deny that. Christ said it.
The bible also says there's no god. You see, the best kind of a lie, the only kind of a lie a sensible person tells is the truth. Trouble is it's just a little bit incomplete. Christ never gave us a commandment that that that embodied the law and the prophets in a statement, love your neighbor. Now I'm going to say something now that can be grossly misunderstood, but I hope it won't be.
There was a brief well, it wasn't so brief documentary, I suppose you would call it, on the this matter of the four nuns who were murdered in El Salvador. And in the course of this documentary, they gave they gave a lot of shots into the life of the Maryknows, how they started and all that. Not once not once in that entire documentary did the word god come in. Not once. It was all for relieving the poverty of the poor, for identifying with the poor, for for helping the poor to realize their dignity.
Now you see now you see, I know this can be you're if you could take me and quote me now, you're gonna make me look pretty bad. But the thing is this is what happened. Christ never gave us a commandment that was all inclusive to love neighbor. That's altruism. That's the stuff that goes back to the Benthamites and John Stuart Mill of the nineteenth century England.
The commandment that Christ gave you, you recall the scene when the young guy comes up and said, what do I have to do to be saved? And Christ said, well, you know what you have to do to save. Keep the law. And the young man says, I've been doing that all my life. And then our blessed lord tells him, he said, when the man when the young man asked you, what have what do I have to do now?
And Christ said, you have to keep the commandments. And the guy says, which? He says, thou shalt love the the first commandment, the first commandment. Thou shalt love the lord thy god with thy whole mind, with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul. That's the first commandment, not to love neighbor, not even to love neighbor as yourself.
The first commandment is to love god. God's first. And then our blessed lord said, and the second commandment is like the first, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. Notice, self is in there. You don't love neighbor just for the neighbor's sake.
Again, that's just rank altruism of the nineteenth century, philosophies of men like Bentham and Mill and his father James Mill or any others. You could mention others, Rousseau and Comte de France. So you see, it's so easy. If only we could if only we could be truly integrated Christians by just practicing one virtue or two virtues. You cannot do it.
You cannot you cannot obey the law of god without taking the law in its entirety. And that law puts god first, not man, either myself or my neighbor. It puts god first, and that can be easily overlooked. Easily overlooked. It's easy to and then you see we have coined this beautiful word today, Christian Marxist.
Now if you can imagine anything more self contradictory than to put Christian with Marx is beyond me. And the and when our holy father has come out and condemned that, he has his critics even among the hierarchy of the holy Roman Catholic church. So you can see we're in a confused state, very confused. Because, you see, once no matter and remember, good intentions, sincerity, self sacrifice, even to the extent of giving up your life, what does that prove? The fact that somebody's willing to to gamble their life on something, that only proves their integrity, their sincerity.
It may prove they are the most ignorant of men or of women. Merely laying down your life for something merely, I don't wanna underestimate this, but all it proves is my conviction. It has nothing to do with the with the truth of my conviction. Nothing at all with it. You can get martyrs for almost any cause.
And so we have to come back. As I say, the bible says there is no god. And, of course, the next sentence is says the fool in his heart. So when we quote when we quote our lord as regard some of these matters, we should be extremely careful to quote him properly, not to take one line or one sentence or one verse, but to get the the integrated doctrine of Jesus Christ. Now in some things, this isn't entirely easy.
You just take this question. People are saying, what what is the morality of these four Irishmen who have starved themselves to death? I'm not about to to give a decision on it. I give the principles and all that, but who's gonna judge them? Point number one, who has to judge and accept god?
And, actually, when we appear before god, we judge ourselves. And so truth is a pretty vital and essential thing. Action doesn't prove anything. It just proves you're alive. Truth is something much harder to get at, much harder.
In many ways, it's less rewarding, much less rewarding. Just look how within the last twenty five years, our religious orders have been decimated by the activists. They've left the classrooms because it's so dull and boring to fool around in the classroom. And yet that's where truth resides. That's where truth is transmitted.
That's where the mind is cultivated, not in action. Action's only the result of thinking. And from a rational point of view, thinking should precede action. Of course, that's not the way we act at all. To confirm Newman's definition, I correct myself, as Newman said, it is almost a definition of a human being to say that it is an irrational animal.
See, we don't really act irrationally most of the time. So the the god Christ's command and god's commandment of love because Christ is god. It's a complex thing. It's tripartite. God, myself, and neighbor.
The three things, and you can't separate the three. You can't you cannot say I'm going to take these two. You cannot do it. One involves the other two. Two involves the other one.
You can't separate. You cannot have a stool which is going to be a good, firm, self supporting stool that has three legs and take one of the legs away. The other two will complain bitterly. So this command this wonderful I I certainly urge you to read some of these passages in their totality. Not the whole text, I mean, whole acts, But go back and read this business of the controversy about the Gentiles coming in the church.
Read that it's in its entirety. There's where the truth is. And read this wonderful chapter 15 of Saint John about love. That's where the truth of God is, in the entirety of God's word, not in a sentence. In the name of the father, the son, the holy spirit.
Amen.