A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus said to his disciples, now I go back to him who sent me. Not one of you, however, asked me, where are you going? Because I have had all this to say to you, you now are overcome with grief. Yet, I tell you in sober truth, it is much better for you that I go.
If I should fail to go, the paraclete will never come to you. Whereas, if I go, I will send him to you. When he comes, he will prove the world wrong about sin, about justice, about condemnation, about sin in that they refuse to believe in me. About justice, from the fact that I go to the father and you can see me no more. About condemnation, for the prince of this world has been condemned.
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. Our blessed lord tirelessly emphasized this truth that his kingdom was not of this world. Today, we have another statement of that great, great truth, that our lord's kingdom is not of this world. If you are in his company, you may be in the world, but you cannot be of the world.
Between this concept of the world, as it is used in these contexts, between the world in this way understood and our blessed lord, there's simply an impassable chasm, And compromise is practically impossible. Practically impossible. You cannot put the two together. Our Lord here talks about justice and sin and condemnation. You take the of course the world has a concept of sin.
I was just reading yesterday an article in the Reader's Digest about I don't know, I forget the title of it. Just saw a page or so of it. But it had to do with teenage sex. It's the the emphasis of the article is this, that one out of every ten teenage girls becomes pregnant. The great thrust of this article is on pregnancy.
As if that were immoral. Pregnancy is not immoral. Fornication's immoral. Adultery's immoral. But that's passed over.
That's just simply treated as as one of the girls who was interviewed said, we treat sex on weekend as a sport. But pregnancy, oh, that's a crime. That's a heinous crime because it's very disconcerting to society. It costs society money. You see how things are topsy-turvy?
How could you be more crazy? Here we on the one hand, we talk if you've been reading or looking at some of the TV programs in the last few months, we have gone overboard on the obligation to do everything possible to keep everybody alive as long as possible. Now we're giving a new definition of life, however, or and of death. At the same time, we have fifty million abortions a year in this country. Here's a doctor hailed into court because he didn't do everything he possibly could do for this child and was doomed to die anyway.
And yet, in the course of that baby's being born, the mother could have destroyed it. How can you put this nonsense together? It's impossible. Here, we're all hot and bothered about a nuclear war, and we're killing a hundred and fifty, I'm told, a million babies a year in abortion. So how true Saint John was.
I'm giving you just these few examples. How how completely topsy-turvy. The world uses words. Oh, yes, they use the same words. Justice, for example.
What that word's thrown around like nobody's business. Social justice. Oh, absolutely. Social that means everybody has to share equally in everything that's to be had. We're all for that.
But where do you hear any inclination on the part of this world, in quotation marks, where to fulfill its primary obligation, not to man, but to god. The first commandment is to worship god. How much of that do you hear in the line of justice? So when our blessed lord tells us today in the words of Saint John, I have come to condemn the world. The world's concept of sin, the world's concept of justice, and the world's concept of condemnation.
Look what the world condemns you for, and think in terms of how that condemnation would hold up before God almighty in many, many instances. In many instances. And so this truth, you know, we cannot we talk about baptism being a rebirth, and there have been magnificent things written about it. Just the other day in our office, the Breviary, there was a marvelous passage from one of the early church fathers on the transformation that baptism works in the human being. How it transforms the person, how they become a new being in Christ, and it goes on for a page and a half.
But you look around you and see all these baptized people and you say, How do they differ from the unbaptized? We are all pretty much in the same pot, and that we can't avoid. Our blessed lord said, you are in the world, and here we are. And we will stay in it until he calls us out of it. But the great the great challenge of being a Christian is not to be of the world.
In the name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit.