A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint Luke. Jesus, on being asked by the pharisees, remember, Saint Paul was a pharisee. Jesus, on being asked by the pharisees when the reign of god would come, replied, you cannot tell by careful watching when the reign of God will come. Neither is it a matter of reporting that the reign of God is here or there. The reign of God is already in your midst.
Then Jesus said to his disciples, a time will come when you will long to see one day of the son of man but will not see it. They will tell you he is to be found in this place or in that place. Do not go running around excitedly. The son of man in his day will be like the lightning that flashes from one end of the sky to the other. First, however, he must suffer much and be rejected by the present age.
And this is the good news according to Saint Luke. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. I have heard not long ago this statement. I'd rather be red than dead.
And even some members of our episcopate were quoted in the paper as saying that a nuclear war would be the absolutely the worst evil that could hit the earth. Yet, Cardinal Newman said that it were better if the whole universe were destroyed rather than one single venial sin be committed. Put that together. Last night, I happened to see a program that I thought was a little unusual. I think it's unusual, present tense.
It it brought on to the TV screen whole numbers of people of various levels who had who survived the second world war and the Vietnam war. Veterans, their families, widows, fathers who lost their sons, some of you may have seen it. Parts of it were very touching especially about the final episode about the missing in action people. Now we are today, for a very mysterious reason, and I mean this, it isn't something which is obvious. We are being inundated by a lot of pacifism.
There's no question about the fact. John Barron has written a whole book on the matter. And when you have almost a worldwide movement which seems to be so concentrated on certain issues which are so beneficial to the commies, you begin to wonder who in the world's behind all of this peace talk. Who is behind in many instances all this talk about democracy in South America? It isn't peace lovers.
Now we're in a funny kind of a world. See, we're in a world today where we say, what's the bottom line? In other words, as William James says, this is this is just another expression of pragmatism. Don't ask whether a thing is true or good. Just simply ask what is its cash value?
See, that's how we think today. And by the we, I mean the the world in which we are living in The United States because this isn't true of a lot lots of parts of the world. There's far more idealism and communism than there is among Democrats and Republicans in this country. There's far more effort and willingness on the part of many communists to be martyrs than there are on the parts of peoples people living in democracies. When you can see had people in democracies saying, I'd rather be red than dead.
What's happened to our thinking? What is our concept of evil? Are there different kinds of evil, or do we put evil altogether? Do we think that dying is the worst possible evil? Just look.
Just look how we treat our money with reference to what we buy, and you will see what we think of dying. It's not only politics that talk from the pocketbook, believe me. Take a man I I refer I'm not referring to Thomas More because he's absolutely unique. He is not unique. I am not I'll be the first one to say that you can get martyrs for almost any cause.
But the fact that you can get a martyr for a cause doesn't downgrade the martyrdom no matter what the cause is. A man may be mistaken a person, a man or a woman, may well be mistaken as regards what they're dying for. And you may you may fight that, you may oppose that, you may condemn that with your very soul and maybe with your very life. And I'm not drawing upon imagination here. These these are the common places of history.
But that does not diminish one iota bit the quality of the person who's giving his life will for what he thinks he ought to be giving it for. And the word ought there is frightfully, eternally important. You take Thomas More. All he had to do was decide with every bishop in England except John Fisher and simply say that the king was head of the church in England. He wasn't renouncing any dogmas.
He wasn't renouncing Christ. He wasn't renouncing any of the sacraments. He wasn't becoming a Protestant. He wasn't becoming a heretic. He wasn't becoming a schismatic.
Then why did he do it? Why did he refuse simply to sign that note an oath admitting the king as head of the church in England? Remember, for years, for centuries almost, he had been in practice practically that. And as I say, every bishop in the country except John Fisher went along with it. And here's more in the solitude, and believe me, it is solitude.
It's not like going ashore with hundreds of other men all around you in all the fury and the excitement and the passion and the the forgetfulness that comes from a terrific effort, whether it be in a football game or landing in Oak Okinawa, there was none of that. This is the solitude of a prison cell where he where everybody says you're a fool, including his wife. Why can't you be sensible like other people? Moore didn't say, I'd rather be red than dead. Not at all.
All he said, well, when are you if I die tomorrow, when are you going to die? And that's the thought that struck me last night when they brought on when when in one instance you were given figures of how many died here, how many lives were lost there, and then you had the the veterans from some of those encounters, some of those battles coming on, what have they gained? Well, I'm not minimizing life. I'm not in the least downgrading the importance of living and the joy of it. Not in the least.
But we make such a terrible mistake in equating death with a great evil. We're all going to die. It's not only military cemeteries that hold corpses. We all wind up as a corpse, At least there's pretty good evidence for thinking that. That's one of the predictions I'm going along with.
And yet in so many instances, you see, we equate death and dying as the worst possible evil, which is such a horrible mistake. Not so long ago, there was a an advertisement shibboleth being thrown around. When you when you lose your health, you've lost everything. Can you imagine anything more silly than that? That as if that as if the greatest value in this life was to be a good viable horse or a mosquito.
They all have life. And so today, the November 11, let us pray for the men and women who gave their lives because they did not agree that it was better to be read than dead. In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.