A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus explained to the crowd. I myself am the bread of life. No one who comes to me shall ever be hungry. No one who believes in me shall thirst again.
But as I told you, though you have seen me, you still do not believe. All that the father gives me shall come to me. No one who comes to me will I ever reject because it is not to do my own will that I have come down from heaven, but to do the will of him who sent me. It is the will of him who sent me that I should lose nothing of what he has given me, rather that I should raise it up on the last day. Indeed, this is the will of my father, that everyone who looks upon the son and believes in him shall have eternal life.
Him, I will raise up on the last day. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. I recently read, and I think you must take this with a bit of facetiousness, that one reason you hear so much today from the powers that be on sociological subjects is that they have so little to say about sin and salvation.
And yet, our blessed lord, the son of god, came into this world for one important reason, to save us from sin and to give us life everlasting. That's the thing in a nutshell. No one can deny this. I've said many times, you cannot quote one single sentence from the New Testament that Jesus Christ, the son of god, came to make this a more comfortable, a more physically satisfactory and fulfilling world. Indirectly, maybe yes, maybe, but definitely not directly.
He came to save us from sin and to preserve us for life everlasting. And every time I take a plunge into the world outside of Garrett Park, I am more and more aware of what seems to be a very unacceptable and unwelcome fact, that so many people are unaware of sin and salvation. So many people live as if there were no such thing as sin. And, of course, what we're talking about is virtue. Let's not be negative.
And as if there were no such thing as eternal life. Now here's where we have to keep our thinking straight. If we have no choice about eternal life, we are immortal. I am convinced of that if there had been no Jesus Christ and no New Testament, or certainly no Old Testament. I am convinced on that on absolutely rational grounds.
And the idea of immortality did not come in to popularity with Jesus Christ. It didn't come in with certainly the Old Testament because it isn't there. But you certainly can find it in the early Greek philosophers. So immortality is something we have no choice about. You're going to live beyond this life.
And notice, didn't say your soul. I said you. The the tremendously complex but individual you. You have no choice about eternal life. You have no choice about living for eternity.
You're doomed to it whether you like it or not. The great question is, how will you spend it? What condition will you be in to enjoy it or to suffer it? Because the other side of the coin to heaven is hell. And if we miss heaven, we get hell.
And if we get hell, we miss heaven. And this for eternity. Now these are the most basic truths of Christianity, absolutely the most basic. And when our holy father took leave of Rome to go into Central America at the beginning of this year on a most perilous journey he ever made, What did he the Sunday before he left, he sent a a tape TV program to Central America to say why he was coming. And what did our holy father say?
He said, I am coming to bring you the message of Jesus Christ and salvation. He didn't say I'm coming over to give you a new version of liberation theology. I'm not coming over to tell you how to run your governments. I'm not telling you what kind of an economic system you're supposed to have. I'm not coming over to give you any panaceas for poverty and disease, and all of the other horrors which we have or we think they're horrors in our, of course, highly evaluated culture.
All the holy father said he was going to try to do was to bring them the good news of Jesus Christ. And the good news of Jesus Christ in a nutshell is how you're going to spend eternity. And the the implication there is how you're going to spend this very short span of years you call your life in this world. Because in the palm of your hand, you hold the kind of eternity that you're going to spend. A sobering thought, my friends.
But do we think about it? Of course, a lot of people think about this for fifty minutes on Sunday. A lot of us think about it when we get down on our knees and say a prayer, or if we find ourselves in a difficult situation, or if things are going badly for us and we say, what in the world is it all about? Why? Why struggle?
If there's a God in heaven, how can these things happen? Oh, yes. We think about these matters when we're pressed to it. But in the ordinary, I say humdrum. I hate to use that word because it shouldn't be humdrum.
Every day that we open our eyes and see the sun should be an absolutely new experience because it is a new experience. You didn't live it yesterday, and you sure aren't going to live it tomorrow. And here and your eternity is in the palm of your hand today, Not yesterday and not tomorrow. Tomorrow isn't here, and yesterday is gone. And so if only we could bring the good news of Jesus Christ into our, I mean our absolute daily living.
Nothing about daily living is insignificant. This is the great message of the Opus Dei movement. It isn't anything new. I I told you this many times. I was brought up on that idea of the morning offering.
It's the earliest recollection I have of going to school when the monitor would ring the bell and we would begin class, let us recall the presence of God. How often is that brought out? How often during the day do you say to yourself, I'm living in God's presence. I don't have to run there or there or up there or down there. I don't have to do any of that.
I am living in God's presence, and that means Jesus Christ. So you begin that we used to begin that morning offering. That they're all that happened during the day, I offered to you in union with the holy sacrifice and the mass. Of course, we don't talk about the holy sacrifice of the mass anymore. We talk about a celebration, stuff and nonsense.
So let's be realistic. If we are honest to god Christians and believe in Jesus and notice this message today. I am the bread of life, and whoever comes to me will have life. Do you believe it? Or do you or or is it something and when you say when I say you, I'm talking to me.
Because you see, we're surrounded by so much that is absolutely opposed to this doctrine. Absolutely opposed to it. Don't make any mistake about it. You're not living in a vacuum. You're not living in a situation where you can make one fine commitment and say, now all is over.
It's nothing like that. This is something you must create every single day. This is something that is in your power to say yes to or to no to. And take our word, the Lord, at his his word. He said, if you come to me, you will have life.
He didn't say under what conditions you're to come to him, any and every condition. Come to him. Throw yourself on Jesus Christ. This is the great message of the fundamentalists who are so popular today. They believe in Jesus Christ.
They believe that if they're with him, they're okay, and they are right. So let us let us join the ranks of those who sincerely believe that Jesus Christ it's not a question of him being with me. He is with me. It's a question of my being with him. In the name of the father, and of the son, holy spirit.
Amen.