A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. After Jesus had washed the feet of his disciples, he said to them, I solemnly assure you, no slave is greater than his master. No messenger outranks the one who sent him. Once you know all these things, blessed will you be if you put them into practice. What I say is not said to all, for I know the kind of men I chose.
My purpose here is the fulfillment of scripture. He who partook of bread with me has raised up his heel against me. I tell you this now before it takes place, so that when it does take place, you may believe that I am. Now there's that I am again, and that's in the text here. It's written in big caps.
But remember, that's the definition of god given to Moses in the burning bush. It's very difficult to communicate that. So our blessed lord says, I tell you what's going to happen before it takes place so that when it does take place, you may believe that I am. I solemnly assure you, he who accepts anyone I send accepts me, and in accepting me, accepts him who sent me. And this is the gospel of the lord.
In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen. Our blessed lord was sent. He is a messenger. He comes from his heavenly father. He comes to bring us the good news, the gospel.
And the good news of Jesus Christ is that he has come not to make this a better world, but to make us better for the next world. And yet, our the our problem, our living, our daily problem is to keep this in mind and to hear his voice over and above all the other voices that are pounding on our ears. All the other attractions of this world, which is God's world, he created it, which are pulling us in some directions away from him. And we have these choices to make. We are in a in a state of being pulled in many directions, and this we cannot avoid as long as we're living.
And so we ask ourselves, what in the world is existence all about? Christ came to give us an answer to that. Not to not to remove all the the pulling and the pushings, the confusion, the complexities, the attractions, the weaknesses, and all the rest, he didn't he didn't remove any of that. All he did was to come to give us the direction and the means himself himself. Now I want to read you just a brief paragraph from Malcolm Mubrid.
I ask you to note that this is from an address he gave at Oxford University in 1968. In 1968 it was a question whether Muggerich was even a Christian. But listen to his commentary upon the world in which we're living. Now I I remind you, Muggerich was the editor of Punch. He was and is an outstanding newspaper man, a commentator on TV, a writer.
He is very much a man of his time. And this he did he spoke in 1968 at Oxford. He says, What then is our brief existence on earth about? The media, I mean television, the color supplements, the magazines, the newspapers, all the different organs of this immense apparatus of persuasion which has been developed in our time, all of this answers the question with the utmost clarity and gusto. It's about being successful in terms of money, sex, and fame, with violence thrown in for kicks.
As trendy, sexy, affluent children of our time, we may be consider we may consider ourselves as living to the full. By the same token, if we are out of that swing, physically unattractive and poor, we must consider ourselves as outcasts and deprived. Anyone, he says, who has lived at all in the real world knows must have understood that this fantasy of the media is a total absurdity. This is not a happy age, even perhaps particularly for its greatest ostensible beneficiaries. The parts of the world where the means of happiness in material and sensual terms are most plentiful, like California and Scandinavia, now listen, are also the places where despair, mental sickness, and other twentieth century ills are most in evidence.
Sex, fanned by public erotica, underpinned by the birth pill, and legalized abortion, is a primrose path leading to satiety and disgust. The rich are usually either wretched or mad. The successful plot relentlessly on to prove to the world and to themselves that their success is worth having. Violence, collective and individual, bids fair to destroy us all and what remains of our civilization. Now when he wrote when he said that, it's questionable whether he was even a Christian.
Yet that's his commentary upon the real world, and he knew what he was talking about. No one could accuse him of speaking from ignorance of the media. And this is what we must not overlook, how how we are almost victims of this, what he calls, this glut of persuasion from the media. It speaks, he says, with clarity and gusto. Indeed it does.
Just pick up your morning paper, you'll see that it speaks with clarity and gusto for its own values. And you can set them all up on one side, and you can say this is what Jesus Christ did not come into the world to save us. He did not come to further these goals. He did not come to encourage us in that direction. Quite the opposite.
Jesus said, if you want to preserve yourself, you've got to lose yourself. That's what Jesus said. He said, and if if you if you sacrifice yourself for my sake, then you will find yourself. Absolutely contradictory of this world. And that's his message.
Whether I'm not saying whether we like it or don't like it, but that's Jesus' message. And I don't see how anybody can possibly escape it. That is as long as they as they accept Jesus Christ and and the testimony we have. Now if you want to fictionalize Jesus, that's another story. But I'm not interested in fiction.
And so let us take to heart and understand ourselves, the world we're living in, and what we are called to. That's the important thing. Not all this negative stuff. I I I merely bring this in to show you what we are the actual struggle we're having, and don't minimize it. Don't minimize it.
If you're seasick, the first thing to do is to admit you're seasick. And so if we're in this world as we are, if we are called to be not of this world as we are by Jesus Christ, let us recognize that. Let us realize that that creates a real problem, that we will be fighting not till our last breath, but until after our last breath. That's a perennial problem struggle. And again, I say, this is the struggle which we cannot lose.
There's the point I want to make. We cannot lose it. We may have to fight. We may come up bloody. We may come up pretty bedraggled, but we can't lose it as long as we are fighting the good fight in the company of Jesus Christ.
In the name of the father, the son, and the holy spirit. Amen.