A reading from the holy gospel. The good news according to Saint Matthew. Jesus entered a boat, made the crossing of the lake. This is Lake Galilee and came back to his own town that would be Capernaum. There are the people at once brought to him a paralyzed man lying on a mat.
When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, have courage, son. Your sins are forgiven. At that, some of the scribes said to themselves, the man blasphemes. Jesus was aware of what they were thinking and said to them, why do you harbor evil thoughts? Which is less trouble to say, your sins are forgiven, or to say, stand up and walk?
To help you realize that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins, he then said to the paralyzed man, stand up, roll up your mat, and go home. The paralyzed man stood up at once and went toward his home. At this sight, a feeling of awe came over the crowd and they praised god for giving such authority to men and this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
There's lots I would like to say about that reading this morning but I have something else. I want to go back to our holy father's arrival two weeks ago in Warsaw, Poland, two weeks ago today, the sixteenth. And he proceeded to the Cathedral Of Saint John there and gave his first homily in Poland. This was his return trip. He'd been there, as you know, once before.
In the course of that homily, which had special significance because it was the first speech he gave upon his arrival, One sentence out of it, strikes me and which I wanna quote to you, I think is worth our attention this morning. Now before I read this, remember this prayer that we have been saying morning after morning. And as usual, they're words. And, you know, we hear them day in and day out, year in and year out, and we're just blah. They don't strike home.
They don't strike sparks. We don't really actually get in touch with what's being said until something hits us. Until as a man dealing with a little jackass in order to get his attention and hit him with a two before. That's how we have to be hit sometimes for god just to get our attention. But in that opening prayer that we've been saying all week from last Sunday, we pray to God, first of all, to relieve our darkness and that we will walk in the radiance of his light.
Now, I want to tie that in with this sentence. This is a translation. My Polish isn't quite what it ought to be, you know. In a special way, our holy father said, the redemption is available to those who suffer. And perhaps suffer more intensely because they cannot fully perceive the meaning of their own suffering, and even more, the meaning of their own existence.
Now this is a sentence taken out of our holy father's first sermon or homily or address as he arrived in Poland two weeks ago today. The second greatest killer of our young people is suicide today. The first killer is the automobile. The second one is suicide. And I'm talking about young men and women in their teens.
What is the meaning of life? If we can't answer that question, then it's a mess. It's a confused mess. And that's the only word to describe it. Because none of us can hold clearly in any given moment explicitly the whole and entire explanation of what is happening around us.
Take this gadget. Here I speak into it and my voice is magnified beyond and contorted and distorted and everything else. How does it work? What's what is it? You say, well, it's an electronic device.
What's electricity? What is this stuff? We know how to handle it. We know what it can do. But what is it?
We're surrounded with questions of which we don't have the answer. But there's one thing we do have an answer to, and that's to the meaning of life, to the meaning of existence, to the meaning of all that goes into our existence. We have a meeting. But I'll tell you, it didn't come until Jesus Christ came. At least as much as I know culture, of western philosophy, and of western theology, and I don't believe the easterns have anything better.
The book of Job summarizes the best of what you can say in Old Testament times, And the book of Job ends with an unanswered question. Why am I clobbered? Why have I suffered? What is the meaning of my life if it's just going to be spent on a dung heap licking my sores? The book of Job doesn't answer the question.
It's a beautiful book. It's one of my favorite books of the Old Testament, but that question is not answered. Our blessed Lord answered it. Christ came to save us. Now we think of what what what do we mean when we say Christ saves me?
Do we think of some future date when I'm gonna commit a murder or a heinous crime of some sort? And then I can go and say, Lord, I sinned. Forgive me. Of course, it means that. You bet it means that.
But it means much more than that. It means that Christ reaches down into our daily lives Where we ask ourselves, my god, why do I even live? What in the world is the meaning of this? It's so crazy. As I say, the best description of this is the book of Job.
Now, out of the second world war came a man by the name of Viktor Frankl, f r a n k l. Frankl. He was a Viennese psychiatrist, a disciple who broke away from Freud. He wrote a book, it's a paperback which is attainable today called Man's Search for Meaning. Now before he ever went into Auschwitz, Frankl had this theory.
Of course, see, we take these things for granted, as every Christian should take it for granted, that we do know the meaning of life. We don't have to search for the meaning of life. It's given to us on a silver platter. That's not the way all people get it. So before Frankl even went into Auschwitz, he had this theory that the most important thing for mental health is to have a motivation for living.
And then when he went into Auschwitz, this book is a product of that. It's not merely just a story about a concentration camp. It's a story of of how to back up his theory, that the the ones who survived as he saw it were those who had motivation. And he gives a striking story of a Jew who was just on the point of committing suicide, when out of the lining of his coat, he picked out one little Psalm taken from the Old Testament. I forget what it was.
I didn't have time to reread it. But that one verse from the Psalm gave him meaning to his life and meaning even to Auschwitz, and he walked out of that camp. Now right now, one of the big movements, you might I could call it either journal workshops or journal retreats or inter intensive journal retreats or internal I mean, intensive journal workshops. But it's it's an effort to draw away one of them was just held down at Mary Baldwin College. About 50 people attended it for a solid week in in silence to try to recover their lives, to look back, to look at the present, and to look at the future.
What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of my existence? What is the meaning of suffering, of evil, so we call it? I say there is no answer beyond Jesus Christ. No answer.
No answer. Our blessed lord gave us the answer. He came to relieve our darkness that we might walk in his transcendent light. In the name of the father, and of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.