A reading of the holy gospel according to John. Jesus explained to the crowd. Notice that word explained. I myself am the bread of life. No one who comes to me shall ever be hungry.
No one who believes in me shall ever 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 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. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. This particular reading that we're using these days from Saint John certainly deserves to be read in its entirety. That is going back to about the chapter six of Saint John to get the whole impact of our lord's statement here according to Saint John. Now what do we make of all of this? Where Christ is so bringing home to us so forcefully what it means to believe, to have faith.
Now as I said yesterday, this is the great dividing issue or was in the sixteenth century where you had a revolt against an exaggerated importance attached to works. And that was and that was geared in with historic events of what was happening in Rome with the building of Saint Peter, like a basilica, and in general, a a the best word I know is exaggeration of the importance in themselves of physical works or as we say, good works. In other words, and there's no reason to to downplay this or to minimize it or to try to deny it throughout Western Europe, including England, you had this view with that own that minimized the importance of faith and maximized, your pardon use of that expression, I hate it, but it came out naturally, The importance of deeds so that the two were interchangeable and and so that it was very easy for a popular view, emphasis on popular, to think that you could buy heaven. That's putting it in a nutshell. That you could buy heaven either by contributing money or by doing good deeds.
In other words, that god was a first rate bookkeeper up there with this I hope he was using double entry to make it very secure. Now this is a fact. So that the the the revolt, the uprising which came and remember, it was within the church. It started within the church. Luther didn't begin it.
One of the greatest men of the reformation was Erasmus and Moore, Thomas Moore. I'm only naming two, Dean Colette. These are only Englishmen. Erasmus, of course, came from from the continent. But the thing I'm pointing out is it wasn't the world didn't wait for Martin Luther to come along and and discover this great fact that there that the church was in bad shape as far as some of popular views were concerned and that it needed reformation.
Don't we all need reformation? Every human institution needs reformation. So this was the was the atmosphere of the times. It just happened that a concatenation of events focused a great deal upon Luther. And remember, one of his greatest opponents was Henry the eighth.
Now what what Luther did, and of course, after and much more Calvin as far as we're concerned, as far as England is concerned, they brought they brought back in a very dramatic, spectacular way, paid for on both sides with a lot of blood. On this particular point, what is the relationship between good works and faith? And it's a it's a tough problem. I there's no easy answer to this except if we go back to Christ and say, what did Christ say? It isn't that we're going to understand the whole business, but what did our lord say?
He didn't speak to us as a Plato or a Socrates. He spoke to us as the son of God. And we have, on the one hand, a Saint Paul echoing the word the the inspired word of God, emphasizing faith, but Luther didn't use the word only. Luther never said that salvation is by faith alone. That was Luther's contribution, that little word only, which is a titanic word, believe me.
It's like that little word n o. And on the other hand, you had the this this overwhelming attitude of trying to to keep the church together and to have the reformation, this renewal within the church. And so we have then this extremely difficult problem where Paul is emphasizing faith. And you can take plenty of texts out of Saint Paul which will will certainly minimize the need of doing anything. You can if you select this text and this text and this text.
But on the other hand, you have a man like James coming along and telling you that faith without good works is dead. So there you have the two of them, and the both of them go back to Jesus Christ. And here today, you have our Saint John telling us what our Lord said about faith in this instance. But it was our Lord who emphasized again the corporal works of mercy, didn't he? It was our lord who said and notice, this always strikes me, that when he tells us when the man who was who was generous in in giving food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, ransoming captives, visiting the sick, burying the dead.
When he comes up this is our lord, remember speaking, not James or Paul. When he comes up on the last judgment and says, lord, when when did I give when did I do that to you? Why? I only gave some bread to an to an old beggar. I how could that be you?
When I gave that when I was generous in giving drink to thirsty, I didn't see anything like divinity among the people that got that water or wine that I gave them. They were just crummy human beings. I can't believe it was you. And yet Christ said, when you did it to the did it. That's the verb in Latin, which means to do, to make, to accomplish.
When you did it to one of those least my brethren, least my brethren, You did it to me. Now this is what Christ said. So you have the text to like this text from Saint John with his great emphasis upon faith. At the same time, our blessed lord emphasizes the merit of acts even when you don't recognize what you're doing. And this is what has always struck me.
You know, today we and when I say this, I'm not downgrading the importance of motivation. But today, we make a great deal of this to know what you're doing, to to be to have explicit acts of the will. I'm all for it. But what did Christ say? When you even if you I didn't recognize you, even if I wasn't doing it for you, Christ said you were doing it to me.
Now this is strong stuff. Really strong. Where does that leave us? It leaves us, I hope, with Jesus Christ. Because when you read, I mean, read the the writings, not what someone says they said, of men like Dean Colette and John Fisher and Thomas More.
When you and on the other hand, you read the the writings of some of the the so called Protestants and later the Puritans who also laid down their lives for this on this problem. You say, what a pity. What a crap tragedy that these people weren't together because so little divided them. So little divided them. And in some instances, you you all you you see you're you're almost forced to say it was a matter of language.
And yet here they were all doing god's will, putting people to the stake in the name of the divinity. It's a heck of a picture. And yet that's the way it was. Now we find ourselves today, if we think a little bit in this situation to some extent, how do you put good works together with faith? The point is really we shouldn't put them together.
They ought to be together. They ought to be generated together. They ought to come into being together. Because if we are made supernatural by the holy sacrament of baptism, if we are put by that sacrament into an entirely new order, then everything we do is in that order. Everything.
And that's all we have to think about if we think about it. And think about it in these terms, that the merely physical, the merely philanthropic action, that these in themselves do not open the gates of heaven, do not bring salvation to anybody, that we must have faith. But, yeah, if we have faith and that faith is not active and remember, the Protestants never denied that we should should not do good works, that we should do good works. They never denied that. Of course not.
But the point is, unless we see that this faith given to us must be activated in action towards ourselves and towards neighbor and towards god, then it is dead. As Saint James said, faith without good works is dead. And so we put the two together. And with god's grace, we can do it because we have all the wisdom of hindsight. We can put this together and live our lives.
And remember, if a Christian life isn't lived on the Christian level, then what is it lived on? A pagan level? No. You're worse than a pagan. As I say, this is not easy.
But the more explicit this becomes in our life that we are children of god living in a in a in a unworldly world of Jesus Christ, the more our lives will reflect the great truth of our faith that we are truly Christians. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit. Amen.