A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus proclaimed aloud. Whoever puts faith in me believes not so much in me as in him who sent me. And whoever looks upon me is seeing him who sent me. I have come to the world as its light to keep anyone who believes in me from remaining in the dark.
If anyone hears my words and does not keep them, I am not the one to condemn him, for I did not come to condemn the world but to save it. Whoever rejects me and does not accept my words already has his judge, namely, the word that I have spoken. It is that which will condemn him on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own. No.
The father who sent me has commanded me what to say and how to say it. Since I know that his commandment means eternal life, whatever I say is spoken just as he has instructed me. And this is the gospel, the good news of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Indeed, the least we can say about it is that it is good news. That our blessed lord has told us time and again that he has come to be the light of the world, to save us from darkness. Now he said that. Now if he's talking about us, there's one thing sure, we didn't live in his time. So the question is, where is he now?
Am I going to wait for a personal direct intervention from almighty god speaking to me personally? Can that happen? Of course, it can happen. And the best example is Saint Paul. And there have been other instances since, without a doubt.
Although the church has never said it put her okay on any of as a dogmatic, authentic incident event. On the other hand, if we look at our Blessed Lord and his message, it's perfectly clear what he did. Before he ended his visible career, he said to his chosen disciples, not to a multitude, but he said, going you going therefore, teach ye all nations, baptizing them, and teaching them everything that I have taught you, and I am with you until the end of time. Now there is no question about that text, about its authenticity, and about there's no difficulty of translating it translating it. So what do you make of it?
We today, in this world of ours, I mean of our immediate world around here, you would think there was no such thing as truth. Now I'm not in the least saying that there was no truth in the world until Jesus Christ came. And I was I'm thinking especially of theology and morality. All you have to do is to read Plato. Where do you where do we get the four cardinal virtues?
It's out of Plato's Republic. Did they have a concept of soul as immortal? They certainly did. Look at Socrates, the apologia. Did they have a concept of of the world dependent upon an almighty eternal being?
Indeed, they did. Look at Aristotle, the uncaused cause. There was a great Now these truths are rejected today in many instances. Just last evening, a parishioner called who was taking courses within a university in this area in ethics. And the whole thrust of their ethics courses, there is no absolute.
Ethics is simply a matter of relative value. Of course, what in the heck is value? And I'm not fighting windmills. This is the world which you're living. This is the world in which we are getting most of our information from the newspapers and from TV.
And I've just been reading Malcolm Muggeridge, and if you want to I remember he was a newspaper man. He was a man of the TV. He was a man of the media. Read him and see what he thinks of the media. As he said, nobody can speak more with more knowledge and experience of it than I have.
And yet that's the world in which we're living. And our blessed Lord said, I have come that you may have light, that you will not be in darkness. He that's notice it's it's the same idea in the contrary. But it's notice, it's positive. He says, I have come that you may have light.
Then it's sort of an afterthought that you will not be in darkness. And yet for practical purposes, the world today, which rejects the living voice of Jesus Christ, I said his living voice, that's his church, is in darkness. Because remember, when you're in doubt and you don't know which way to turn, you're in darkness. Our blessed lord said, I have come that you may have light. Do we take that seriously?
Do we flounder around? Only yesterday I had heard someone say, Well, you know there's nothing You know everything is so much in doubt today. That is nonsense. Of course there's a lot of doubt about a lot of things, but there are a lot of things about which there is no doubt whatsoever, such as the existence of God almighty. Our blessed lord testified to that, I am the light of the world.
There is such a thing as man's spiritual nature. He's not just a composition of matter, whether it be electrical or energy or what have you. Our blessed lord said, you are immortal, And this is absolutely unambiguous in our lord's testimony. I have come that you may have light, that you may not have darkness. We don't need light when we're in a very well illuminated room or when the sun's up.
We need light when we're in darkness, when we're in doubt, when we're confused, when we don't know which way to turn with all our sincerity. Then's when we need the light. And that's when our blessed lord steps in. I am the light of the world. But you have to open your eyes.
Our blessed lord didn't come to give us all the answers to all our problems. As a matter of fact, most of the problems we face, he didn't even have a thing to say about it. Not a thing. He could have cared less. Look at all this talk today about dying.
You would think there was something immoral about dying. There's nothing immoral about dying. There's an immorality called murder, but there's no immorality about the victim. Just think if if we today I I mean, had a gut reaction to that the fact that we are immortal beings, that we have in this life merely a a a preface to eternity, that we are destined for a paradise with God. These are all our blessed Lord's assurances.
These this is his light. Supposing we honest to god believe that, then where then all these other problems, they'd still be problems, but they wouldn't. We would have light and darkness. We would have light in darkness because that light of Jesus Christ would illuminate first of all, it would show us their relative value. Their relative value.
They have value, but it's relative. Mugridge has a chapter on this. It's you know, he this man, as you know, was the was the editor of Punch. He was, I guess, the beginning a first rate atheist. Then he moved on.
I think last year he became a Catholic at last. But he writes with a vitriolic pen, believe me. And he said, Look at my life and look, I have attained everything I wanted. Did it bring me happiness? No.
No. It didn't. Now he says, I'm talking to you from experience. And so let us take our Lord at his word. We've gotta get our priorities straight.
What really matters? What really matters? You heard that, I guess most of you did, this the news item about the White House report on education in The United States. It's disastrous, not the report but the situation of what we call education. Of course, the only trouble with education, how can you talk about education unless you know that you have some light on the eternal verities?
Tell me how you do it. And the answer is you cannot. Because if all man is is just a little mechanism having a great deal in common with a mosquito in this life, then why bother? Why bother? Christ said, I am the light of the world.
Now you may try to I don't mean you, but we we you see, what I've said so many times, we're in this world and we have a fight on our hands. It's not easy to keep the light of Christ glowing. There is so much that impinges upon us. There's so much that demands our attention. You have to fight to see the light.
I mean, not always, but many times. It's not always translucently clear. Not always, but it's clear enough when we need it. It's clear enough when we need it if we are willing to see it. Sometimes we would rather not see it.
See, that's understandable. There's nothing nothing to be excited about it. That's the way you should expect it to be. But that shouldn't keep us from embracing it because we cannot have it both ways. Either we are what we what baptism says we are, we are reborn into the very person of the mystical body of Jesus Christ, destined for immortality in heaven with him, or we are not.
It's one or the other. We are with those destined for immortality. Let's live it with the light of Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.