A reading of the holy gospel according to Luke. When Elizabeth's time for a delivery had arrived, she gave birth to a son. Her neighbors and relatives, upon hearing that the Lord had extended his mercy to remember, the background of this, Elizabeth was way beyond childbearing age. She was known to be barren all her life. And then you know the wonderful happening that took place in the temple when the father, Zechariah, was told that he was going to have a son, and he was silenced.
He became mute. And then we know we have the feast of our blessed of lady, the annunciation, how she, upon being told she was to be the mother of God, was told that her cousin Elizabeth, who was advanced in age and barren, was going to have a child. So we pick up that marvelous story at this point at the birth of John the Baptist. So the neighbors of Elizabeth and her relatives, upon hearing that the lord had extended his mercy tour, rejoice with her. When they assembled for the circumcision of her child on the eighth day, they intended to call the boy after his father, Zachariah.
At this, his mother Elizabeth intervened saying, no. He is to be called John. They pointed out to her, that is the relatives pointed out to Elizabeth, none of your relatives has this name. Then using signs, they asked the father, Zechariah, what he wanted the child to be called. He signaled for a writing tablet and wrote the words, his name is John.
This astonished everybody. At that moment, Zacharias' mouth was opened and his tongue loosed, and Zechariah began to speak in praise of god. Fear descended on all in the neighborhood, throughout all the hill country of Judea, that these happenings and these happenings began to be recounted down to the last detail. All who heard it stored these things up in their hearts saying, what will this child be? And was not the hand of the lord upon him?
The child John grew up and matured in spirit. He lived in the desert until the day when he made his public appearance in Israel. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. In many parts of the world, this is a great day, the feast of Saint John the Baptist.
Even in parts of The United States, this feast has great meaning for great numbers of people. But you if we're honest about it, we have to admit, I think, that Saint John the Baptist is not the most popular saint today. You see, in many ways he stands for intolerance. He just didn't like evil. He hated evil, and he spoke out against evil.
And that's very divisive. That is very divisive. Of course, that cost him his life, and that's rather ordinary. That's the penalty that more or less we all have to pay for being intolerant of evil. Now Saint John the Baptist is a to me, a very mysterious figure.
I don't know whether you've ever noticed it, but in reading some of Paul's epistles, you pick up echoes of John. For example, Paul is over here in the Greek world, and they talk about some of those Jews having received the baptism of John. I've often thought about this. How did that all happen? John must have been a very influential figure for a while.
Very influential. But let's just take one little facet of this man's life, not his miraculous, wonderful birth and all that went with it, but I do want you to notice how Saint Matthew says here how the people remembered these things down to their least detail. Now where John was born is within almost minutes of Jerusalem, practically within sight of Jerusalem. It was not an unknown place. This is the capital of the nation.
And those people in those days, they knew what it was to be barren and to be sterile and for a woman to be beyond the age of having a child. They were thoroughly familiar with this. And here you have this this couple, both of them advanced in age, a woman who was widely known as being unable to have a child, and now she's well past childbearing age, and, ye gods, they're becoming parents. You can't hide pregnancy. It was a big public fact.
And we are told explicitly here, explicitly, that the the people remembered these things down to their least detail. Just keep that in mind when criticisms are launched against these texts. But now the point I wanna make is this, that in a plural that Saint John, he's he stands for many things. But one thing he stands for in which he gave his life was his hatred of evil. You see, we don't even wanna use the word hatred anymore.
We must be so filled with love that there's no room in our hearts for hate. Well, my dear friend, you can't love one thing without hating its contradictories and its contraries. It's impossible. Those things go together. They're corelatives.
And yet today, in our so called pluralistic society, we are being asked to live as if there were not great differences between right and wrong, truth and error, as if there was nothing absolute, that there is nothing we can be absolutely sure of. They're all we can be sure of are probabilities. Probabilities. Things are not black and white. There's everything is just a nice gentle gray.
Of course, you can have a million shades of gray, but that's alright. See, we have become so so called tolerant that we have become immune to the difference between right and wrong, the true and the false, error and certitude and so forth. And let me tell you, living in a pluralistic society, it's practically impossible not to be infected with this attitude. And the the the consequence of that is is this, that as soon as you condemn, let us say, murder or adultery or fornication or say that or say that there are absolutes, people will immediately take it personally. We've lost that ability to make a distinction between action and the agent.
Just two days ago, our blessed lord said, look, you people, don't you judge one another. Don't you ever judge one another. There's only one judge, and that's god almighty. So even people who are supposedly good Christians, they they latch on to that statement of Christ as in as commanding me not to be severe in separating truth from error, right from wrong, black from white. And, of course, that's ridiculous.
Even in the purely natural order, it's a sign of maturity for a person to be able to talk about about actions and separate them from the agent. It's like the little boy who was helping his daddy. I've said this many times, but it's a wonderful example. And his father was a psychiatrist, and the father told me this himself. The little kid was helping his daddy dry the dishes.
His father was doing the washing. He couldn't reach up there. And, the little kid dropped one of a cup, one of his mother's precious cups. So he looked up at his father and said, daddy, you think I'm a bad boy, don't you? The father said, no.
I don't think you're a bad boy, but I think you did a bad thing. Now that distinction is so obvious, but you see it's lost today. You disagree. Someone says adultery is alright or fornication is alright if it's in an atmosphere of all this thing they call love, and you'll say, that's crazy. I hate it.
I'll do everything I can to extirpate it. And they'll say, you're being intolerant. You're accusing these people of being immoral. You haven't even talked about the persons. All you said is what they were doing is immoral.
But, of course, that distinction's going out of the window too. So if there is one remember, Christ stands. If there is a god, there's an absolute. And if there is an absolute, there's an absolute regarding right and wrong, truth and error, that there are certain objective realities in being. That just because I call something thing something beautiful doesn't necessarily make it beautiful.
Just because I say something is workable doesn't make it true. Just because I say something has a high cash value, as James would say, doesn't make it right. And so on this feast of Saint John, we certainly can look upon him as a man who stands absolutely statuesque, a man who's who was a God fearing man, who loved God and everything that God stood for and consequently hated things which are against God. And so he didn't have to stand up and accuse Herod of of immorality, but he did it because he loved God, and in that high place, could not tolerate being silent about the evil. And, of course, he paid for it with his head, which is not, as I say, an unusual thing.
Not at all. So that is one thing that we can learn today from Saint John the Baptist, that we should have backbones, that we should stand forthright, that this world is not a world of all just in betweens, that there are absolutes, that god is in his heaven, and this is his world. It is not a world merely of coincidences and probabilities and statistics. It is a world based upon, first of all, the origin in God, and God is its destiny. In the name of the father, and the son, and spirit.
Amen.