A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Jesus left Samariah for Galilee going north up into the lake area. He himself had testified that no one esteems a prophet in his own country. When Jesus arrived in Galilee, the people there welcomed him. They themselves had been at the feast and had seen all that he had done in Jerusalem on that occasion.
Jesus went to Cana in Galilee once again where he had made water into wine. At Capernaum, there happened to be a royal official whose son was ill. When the official heard that Jesus had come back from Judea to Galilee, he went to him and begged Jesus to come down and restore health to his son who was near death. And our lord replied, unless you people see signs and wonders, you do not believe. Sir, the royal official pleaded with Jesus, come down before my child dies.
And Jesus said to him, return home. Your son will live. The man put his trust in the word Jesus spoke to him and left for home. He was on his way homeward when his servants met him with the news that his son was going to live. When the official asked the servants at what time the boy had shown improvement, they said to him, the flea the fever left him yesterday afternoon about 01:00.
Then the father realized that it was at that very hour that Jesus had said to him, your son is going to live. He and his whole household thereupon became believers. And this was the second sign that Jesus performed on returning from Judea up into the northern country of Galilee. And this is the gospel of the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit.
Amen. What would have happened to this official and his family if the son had died? What would have happened if they had never had any contact with Jesus at all? Would that have changed the objective aspect of the truth of Jesus Christ? Well, the answer is, of course not.
I can blot out the sun with a little finger, I've said many times, if the sun's still out there, but I don't see it. We too often enough expect signs and wonders, unfortunately. Unfortunately. And that I think the main the main tragedy of that is that we are missing the signs and the wonders all about us, all about us. Because we're looking for something that isn't there, we are missing entirely the things that are here, here and now.
It is so easy to be blind. It is so easy, that is, to have our minds closed. We are all aware of this, even in the ordinary phenomena of vision. How, if we are concentrating on trying to see just one thing, how we miss a heck of a lot of other things, miss them entirely. I'm sure you've experienced this, I mean, this can be downright embarrassing.
You're driving your car along the road and you're looking for one certain sign, and just because the sign doesn't come up at the on the side of the road or where you expected it and where we're looking with great attention, you miss it, where it was. I did it yesterday. This is commonplace. Now let's let's be awfully realistic. If if Christ came into this world and is the son of God, if this is if this is true, if it's not true, then let's forget all about it and go out and play marbles or skip rope or do something worthwhile.
But if the son of God became man in the person of Jesus Christ and the son of Mary, if that happened, if he brought the truth of God with him, then he must have had something in mind of letting us know the truth. Can you escape the logic of that? And I mean truth, and truth cannot be self contradictory. There's a lot of criticism today in certain parts of our holy father because he stands firm on certain unpopular views. How can he not stand firm if he if he thinks, rightly or wrongly, that he is has the deposit of truth?
How can he do otherwise? Oh, of course, these great liberals in and outside of the church would like him to be wobbling. But how can you take such a view if you believe there is such a thing in the universe as truth and that the son of god came to impart it to us? It's impossible. You can't accept this without rejecting your common sense.
And so that truth must be available to us. If it's not available, it's as if it didn't exist. If you have a reservoir of water three miles away and you're dying of thirst here in the desert, that water is not doing you one bit of good. You die. And if the truth of Jesus Christ, which the son of god came to give us, he said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
He said that. Well, where in it? Where is this truth? Am I going to sit down and wait for signs and wonders? What do signs and wonders prove?
What do they prove? There's something that I'm not going to explain this, I almost hesitate to bring it up. But if you read some of those readings in the early part of Lent, when Moses appears before the pharaoh and does all kinds of wonders, what happens? The pharaoh brings his medicine men in, and they do the same thing. Do you remember that some of those readings?
So if you're looking for signs and wonders, even if you see signs and wonders, what do you have in the way of truth? These signs and wonders do not speak for themselves. Facts don't speak for themselves. It takes a mind to interpret a fact. All you can say about a fact is that it is.
But what is, is. It's a little early in the morning to be talking like this, isn't it? But the the this is the reality of the situation. We are dealing with truth. We are dealing with either God became man in the person of Christ and brought truth to the world for me in the in the year of our lord 1984.
Or the whole business is a lot it's it's worse than a dream. It's worse, much worse because millions of people have been deluded and are being deluded, if it be not true. But if it is true, then what do I how do I expect to come into contact with it? Just remember this, that the people, the handful of of the chosen ones that Christ chose by himself, when he talked to them about what he was going to do in giving them him them his flesh to eat and his blood to drink, do you know what they did? They left him.
They left him. And then Christ turned to the 12, and he said, are you going to leave me too? See, they were Christ was prepared to let the whole thing go rather than retract one tiny bit of what he had said in the way of truth. Our blessed lord did not follow the poplar mind, and neither did Paul the sixth in Humanae Vitae, and neither is our present holy father. How can they not stand up for god's truth?
And if it be unpopular, that's a very good sign that it's true, as my dear friend Malcolm Mugridge has more than once pointed out. And so let us not let us be realistic. Don't talk about signs and wonders. Look at your daily life. Look at the humdrum.
Look at the monotonous as we think it is. And yet that's the stuff that eternity is made up of. Your eternity is made up of the commonplace, daily, unheroic, undramatic things that you do in the name of Jesus Christ, the opus dei, the work of the lord. It won't be written down in books. No one will write your biography.
There'll be just a little inscription on your tombstone, the date you were born and the day you died, and a generation or two will remember you, and then you will be forgotten here, here. But you will not be forgotten with God. You will see him face to face, the way, the truth, and the life. In the name of the father, and of the son, and of the spirit, amen.