A reading of the holy gospel, the good news according to John. Jesus said to the Jews who believed in him. Notice that. He's speaking to the Jews who believed in him. Not all of them rejected him.
If you live according to my teaching, you are truly my disciples. And then you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. We are descendants of Abraham, they answered. Never have we been the slaves to anyone. That was patently untrue.
What do you mean by saying you will be free? And Jesus answered them, I give you my assurance, everyone who lives in sin is a slave of sin. No slave has a permanent place in the family, but the son has a place there forever. That is why if the son frees you, you will really be free. I realize you are of Abraham's stock.
Nonetheless, you are trying to kill me because my word finds no hearing among you. I tell you what I have seen in the father's presence. You do what you have heard from your father. And they retorted, our father is Abraham. Jesus said to them, if you were Abraham's children, you would be following Abraham's example.
The fact is you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth which I have heard from god. Abraham, your father, did nothing like that. Indeed, you are doing your father's works. And they cried out, we are no illegitimate breed. We have but one father, and that is god himself.
And Jesus answered, were god your father, you would love me. For I came forth from god and am here. I did not come of my own will. It was he who sent me, and this is the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
Among a number of chivalrous that we hear today is the great word freedom. Freedom. It seems to be the virtue of all virtues. Of course, no one knows what they're talking about when they use the word, but we use it. We do this all the time with most of the words we use.
They're talking about freedom within the church. Hans Keung holds that up as one of the objectives of his career, that he ought to be left to be free. Those who resented the Holy Father's pronouncements in regard to his teachings said one of the main criticisms was, Why this is an abnegation of freedom. And remember when you were down in Mexico you talked about freedom. So freedom is the great word on everyone's lips today.
If you can put the tag of freedom on something, it's supposed to be beyond all question or beyond all dispute. It's a self evident fact that it's good, true, and availing unto salvation. Well, in the midst of all this malarkey, the words of Clive Staple Lewis comes home to me very, very vividly when he said after his conversion to Christ, We were born not to be free. We were born to obey. How contradictory that is of the modern temper.
And yet it's true. Lewis develops the idea of freedom and he compares the freedom of a beautiful, well bred dog who has been trained carefully. And in the training process, how he was curtailed, How he wasn't allowed to roam around and go after automobiles and try to catch the tires and have himself killed. He was trained. He was disciplined.
He submitted, or whether he liked it or not, the discipline of his master. And did he come out a better or a worse dog for it? Is the dog who is very obedient to his master's words or gesturing, is has he less free freedom than the dog who's perfectly wild to go out and get himself killed under all conditions, to eat everything that's wrong? Which is the better dog? Which has the greater freedom?
Lewis develops this at at length in the idea that when we ask god to love us, that we better know what we're saying because god does love us. He loves us at least as much a master who cherishes his dog and doesn't let the dog run after automobiles and get killed. So when our blessed lord talks about freedom, he's talking about freedom in god's truth. This is not a matter of of words, of just throwing around a lot of signs and symbols. We ought to get our we ought to get ourselves perfectly straight.
What are we doing? What should be our objective? And in today's homily, our blessed lord is perfectly clear. It's truth. And today, how much do you hear about truth?
Everything is feeling. Fulfillment, my fulfillment, is the test of everything. I feel comfortable with that decision as if that had anything to do with its truth. Time and again, I've met people. I said, how do you know that decision that you made, this has to do with morality, is the right?
Well, I felt comfortable with it. And you can't contradict that. Of course, I can't contradict it. If someone puts their hand in a fire and their hand gets burning and I smell it burning, I certainly can't contradict them if he says, I don't feel any heat. I can contradict him.
So we today are living in a world which has rejected truth. It's a world at best of agnosticism, of doubt. I'm a great believer in doubt. There's a great I I I great wholesome doubt is wonderful. But the only way you can have wholesome doubt is to have some certitudes to which you can compare it.
If everything is doubtful, how can you be sure about your doubt? And so in this text today from Saint John, which has its difficulties, but some of it's perfectly clear, our lord is telling us, I have brought you the truth from my heavenly father, and he has sent me. I'm his emissary. And if you have any freedom, any honest to god freedom, any true freedom that will conform to your truest heights and aspirations of humanity, they are going to be in my truth, in my truth. And this is not an easy pursuit of knowing where it is.
Sincerity is not enough. Honesty is not enough. Martyrs have laid their lives down for all kinds of causes and contradictories and contraries and all the rest. So sincerity and honesty and all of that, that they're fine, but they're personal virtues. That has to do with my integrity.
Has nothing to do with objective truth. How I feel about something, it's irrelevant to the whether or not the proposition I'm accepting or rejecting is true. There may be plenty of things are true which disturb me frightfully. And so take to heart what our lord is speaking. One of the things confuses me here is that it begins by saying that Christ was speaking to those who believed in him, and yet everything in the text seems to be the contrary.
I don't understand that. But his message is perfectly clear. They're holding up here their father Abraham, and they haven't been true to him either. Think. How can they say we've never been slaves when for all the years they spent in Egypt?
How could they say such a thing? But they said it. Very easy to forget the past and to fail in any acknowledgment of history. And so let us take to heart, there is there either is a god and there is a God given truth or there isn't. Let's not play games.
And if there is a truth of God then it's our obligation to get it however I feel about it. That may take work and prayer, sacrifice, dedication, tediousness, perseverance. It isn't given to us on a silver platter always. On the other hand, it's not all that difficult. Christ, our blessed lord, came to give us the good news from a living voice.
If only we'll open our ears and our eyes first to see and then to hear or maybe first to hear and then to see. Let us pray that it'd be so. The name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.