A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. When, Mary, the sister of Lazarus, came to the place where g her brother had died, and they had sent word to Jesus that Lazarus had died, and instead of leaving immediately to come to express his sympathy with Martha and Mary, our lords didn't do a thing about it. And so that's where we pick up the story. Now when Mary, the sister of Lazarus, came to the place where Jesus was and seeing Jesus, she fell at his feet and said to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. When Jesus saw Mary weeping and the Jewish folk who had accompanied her also weeping, he was troubled in spirit and moved by the deepest emotions.
He said, where have you laid him? And they said, Lord, come and see. And Jesus wept, which caused the Jews to remark, see how much he loved him. But some others said, he opened the eyes of the blind, why could he not have done something to stop this man from dying? Once again, troubled in spirit, Jesus went near the tomb.
It was a cave with a stone laid across it. Take away the stone, Jesus said. Martha, the dead man's sister, said to Jesus, Lord, it has been four days now. Surely, there will be a stench. Jesus replied, did I not assure you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?
They then took away the stone, and Jesus looked upward and said, father, I thank you for having heard me. I know that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd that they may believe that you sent me. Having said this, Jesus called out loudly, Lazarus, come out. The dead man came out bound head and foot with linen strips, his face wrapped up in a cloth. Untie him, Jesus said, and let him go free.
This caused many of the Jews who had come to visit Mary and had seen what Jesus did to put their faith in him. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the holy spirit. Amen. More than one person, even those who had a purely literary interest in the New Testament, of which there are many, have said that the most beautiful line in the whole bible is this very brief sentence, Jesus wept.
Because in those few words, only two words, Jesus wept, you have a tremendous background of implications. He knew Lazarus was dead. He knew he was going to bring him back to life. He knew and saw the sorrow which he knew would be turned to joy. He knew that in the the gloom of the tomb there would be the glory of God.
He knew all of this. And yet, Saint John says, Jesus wept. Why? For the simple reason, out of sympathy for the sorrow that he saw with his great and good friends Martha and Mary. It was more than he could stand.
Jesus had emotions. He had feeling. And he wept over the city of Jerusalem, but he had reason to weep there because he he saw what was going to happen, and it happened under Titus in a few years. But here there was no cause for him to to be sorrowful as far as the outcome of this incident was concerned. He knew that Lazarus was going to come out of the tomb.
He knew that the that in this that this sadness would give way to joy exaltation. And yet Jesus wept. That was his sympathy for the mourners. Out of pure sympathy for his friends, Jesus, the son of God, wept. Now today we call it the feast of all souls, which I don't like at all because as I look at you good people, I don't see a bunch of souls out there.
What I see are human beings, individual human beings. And what our faith is, is not merely in immortality. There have been plenty of religions in the history of the world who've had some concept of immortality. Matter of fact, very few have not. The idea of immortality is a very commonplace idea, which anthropologists anthropologists have done more than their share to vindicate, to vindicate.
But the doctrine we believe in on the authority of Jesus Christ is personal immortality, individual immortality. And you're not individuals because of your soul, you're individuals because of your body and the whole the whole complexity that goes to make up you as an individual human being. Being. Absolutely unique in all the history of the world and in all the future age of the world. You are unique.
You are, as we could say in the Latin language, peculiar. That's a very odd word in English, isn't it? So this is what we must reaffirm, that we are talking about individual immortality, not souls. When we write the list yesterday of all the parishioners who have died in the past since last November, it's not souls we remember. We remember husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children, individuals.
They had some kind of a history. They had very definite and unique relationships with everybody else. They had memories which were uniquely their own memory. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about immortality, the immortality of the individual human being. And remember, it doesn't begin with death.
Death is a transition from one kind of existence to the other. We entered into immortality the moment we were conceived in our mother's wombs. We are immortal. We're not and we if you want to talk about being born in into immortality, put it back to the moment of your beginning, your existence as the individual human being you are. We go to God not as disembodied spirits.
We go before God not as angels. We go before God as individual human beings, and the good shepherd calls each one of us by name, by name. We don't stand up there as Social Security numbers. And so today, yesterday we talked about all saints. Here we're talking about the very same idea of of our people we've known and those we have not known from the history of the world, destined for salvation and eternal happiness, but they cannot enjoy it till their lives till they are as pure and as reflecting of God's glory as the most perfect kind of mirror.
There has to be an interim an interval of purification for most of us. And I consider myself immensely, enormously, unspeakably lucky if I can go into that and make it into that interim state. Now, you know, just a final word, it was on the eve of all saints that Martin Luther published his theses which triggered what we call the Reformation. It did trigger it, no question of that. The one thing that happened then, one among many others, but one of the items which was the nub of the problem was this matter indulgences and the idea of selling immortality.
Now, the church, that was never Catholic doctrine. And if you've been reading the current articles, this is the four hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther's birth. If you've been reading the articles in the popular press, they acknowledge this. Sensible people know it was never the doctrine of the Catholic church that you can buy immortality. You can.
It's given to you by your creation. But you cannot buy it in the sense of sin all you want and just pay for good for a good first class mortal sin. That was never Catholic doctrine. But has been Catholic doctrine. That there is this this is that when when God when Christ gave Peter the keys, whatever you bind on earth bound in heaven and whatever you lose, that we have what is called the treasury of the church, that the church can, by its power from Jesus Christ, who brought the Lazarus from the tomb, that that church can reach down and and by the good works, this was the number of the problem, by the good works of the mystical body of Jesus Christ can touch and reach into that state and hasten those good people on to their perfect joy in the perfect sight of God.
We call it indulgences. Don't underrate it. It is the doctrine of the Catholic church that by our good works, we can help them. We are not separated from them. Keep in mind the church of Jesus Christ, the church triumphant, we had that yesterday.
The church struggling, here you are. You are the soldiers in the trenches, and the church militant. Militant, our friends, our relatives, our dear ones, and maybe those who weren't so dear, but they're they're all there. Let us reach out and touch them with our prayers and our good works, works, and to hasten the day of their fulfillment. It's just a matter of transition from better to best.
Let us hasten that this month of November with our prayers, our good works. In the name of the father, of the son, and holy spirit. Amen.