A reading of the holy gospel according to John. Jesus said to his disciples, this is a continuation of that long discourse. As the father has loved me, so I have loved you. Live on in my love. You will live in my love if you keep my commandments even as I have kept my father's commandments and live in his love.
All this I tell you that my joy may be yours and that your joy may be complete. This is my commandment. Love one another as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you.
I no longer speak of you as slaves, for a slave does not know what his master is about. Instead, I call you friends. Since I have made known to you all that I heard from my father, it was not you who chose me, it was I who chose you. To go forth and to bear fruit. Your fruit must endure so that all everything you ask, the father in my name, he will give it to you.
The command I give you is this, that you love one another, and this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of holy spirit. Amen. Today, you hear a great deal about self fulfillment. It is one of the self evident absolutes in many instances.
At least it's projected that way. That is not a word, a frequent occurrence in the New Testament. It's not a word that fell easily or frequently from our lord's lips about self fulfillment. He talked a lot about love and peace and joy. Now I know it's very easy to to think of those terms and to forget other things that Christ said because he never divorced those concepts from other concepts which are a little bit sour, such as carrying a cross, giving up everything for Christ.
The whole business has to be held together. That's the problem of being a Christian, is holding it all together and not hanging ourselves from one hook. Now when you talk about love and peace and joy, as Christ used these words, what are you talking about? Are you talking about three different totally different things or what? Or is there a lowest common denominator among the three?
These words are you actually, you hear a great deal about peace today. That's one of our very commonly used words, peace. Love, you hear a certain amount of that, but the way it's used is questionable. But you don't hear a very great deal about joy or being joyful. We hear a great deal about satisfaction.
But how often do you do you meet the word joy and joyful and joyous? And Christ used, at least in these translations, it's used very frequently. In some way or other, Christ brings together joy, peace, and love. They they they they hang together in our lives or should. So what what is the core?
What is the secret of having these things according to the mind of Christ? Let us hasten to that. Well, it is simply union with our lord. That's that's what it amounts to. It's his peace.
It's his love. And from those things come as a consequence the the the joy which Christ himself said the world can't give you. Now this is not something that Christianity has has discovered, that the world that there is a kind of joy that the world cannot give. That's not specifically a Christian concept. But the core of joy, as our lord uses that word, as he uses the word love, as he uses the word peace, the core of that is absolutely, exclusively Christian because it's Christ.
Today, there is a tendency among some, I don't know how many, there may be more than we think, who have this well, don't know what, it's a feeling, it's an urge, it's a want, it's a need, it's something that drives them to to rise above this world. There's a reaching out to the orient now in a way that was unthought of twenty five or thirty years ago. We're trying to make more contact with the oriental's attitude towards life, towards religion, towards God. What are these people seeking? They're seeking something which they and many of them have certainly experimented.
They've been they have reproduced Francis Thompson's life more than once. These are not inexperienced little babes in the woods. They realize, well, from their own lives, the truth of our lord that their world there's a joy that the world can't give, and yet there seems to be something in us driving us towards that. Staple Lewis has a lot of it, Saint Augustine. The very first word of the confessions, it hasn't been improved upon.
Libraries have been written on it, but he put it in a sentence. Thou hast made us for thyself, o God, and our hearts will not be at rest till they rest in thee. The key word there is that word heart. What did Augustine in the fourth century mean by the word heart? He's talking about the totality of man, not man's disembodied spirit, not an angelic soul, not some kind of a disembodied idea or ideal or an archetype.
He's talking about the totality of man and he sums it up in the word heart. And there it is in a nutshell. If only we would take it to heart. As I said yesterday, to be a Christian is a joyful thing. We use the word celebration.
We use the word celebrant. We used to use it. Now we have the president, which is a big improvement. Everybody can lose that. But the whole idea of religion is joyfulness.
As I said, you give me one martyr who was not a joyful person, even Saint John of the Cross. And he was a he he wrote the dark night of the soul, remember. And so when we take Christ's cross or try to, and you can't accept Christ without it, He said, you've got to take it up and follow him. But when we do that, let's not divorce ourselves from the other aspects of being a Christian. This joy, this peace, this love, it is all ours if we are with Christ.
In the name of the father and of the son and holy spirit. Amen.