A reading of the holy gospel according to John. Jesus looked up to heaven and said, father, the hour has come. Give glory to your son, and your son may give glory to you. In as much as you have given him authority over all mankind, that he may bestow eternal life on those you gave him. Eternal life is this, to know you, the only true god, and him whom you have sent, Jesus Christ.
I have given you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. Do you now, father, give me glory at your side, a glory I had with you before the world began. I have made your name known to those you gave me out of the world. These men you gave me were yours. They have kept your word.
Now they realize that all that you gave me comes from you. I entrusted to them the message that you entrusted to me, and they received it. They have known that in truth, I came from you. They had believed it was you who sent me. For these I pray, not for the world, but for those who have given me, for they are really yours.
Just as all that belongs to me is yours, so all that belongs to you is mine. It is in them that I have been glorified. I am in the world no more, but these whom you have given me are in the world as I come to you. 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 a sentence in this farewell message of Paul. Notice, we have two farewells today. Saint Paul saying farewell to his followers at Miletus and our Lord taking me of his apostles. And there's a sentence there where Paul says, I do not value my life or I set little value on my life or something like that. Except insofar as I do your work.
That is such a profound statement. And anyone who thinks about it and accepts such a view of their whole being is going to have a transformed life because they will have the truest sense of values when it comes down to nitty gritty decisions that we value our life only insofar as we haven't to use for the purpose of God, for his cause. Do you think that over a bit? And you will come to see how that if if we accept it or try to and try to bring to bring our lives into line with that projection, how it will color everything we do, everything we value, everything we hate. You know, today you're not allowed supposed to talk about love.
Well, just remember this. If things have contraries, and they do, then you can't love the one without hating the other. You can't have it both ways. And so this thought that we value our lives only insofar as we have them from god to use for his purpose, That's a transforming thought if we live it or try to live it. This is far from pietistic practices.
This is bringing the life of God into your daily lives, and above all, into your value judgments, into decisions you make of choosing this rather than that. I'm just not too sure that this is too opposite, but it certainly seems so to me. Some few weeks ago, I happened to see on the news, I guess it was, Luciana Pavarotti, this marvelous singer who's captivated the audiences of the world over. And they were interviewing him, and he was talking to them how he his attitude towards his voice. And he treats his voice almost as something impersonal, as a gift which it is his to use.
Someone objected, Well, look, you're burning yourself out the way you're handling it. And I just some references were made to Caruso and how by overdoing it, destroyed his voice. Now I have no idea whether how much truth there is in that. I have no idea. I know who Caruso was, barely.
But Luciano, he just didn't dismiss that frivolously, not at all. He explained that he was not going to do that because this was something it was his to treasure for others. Now if any of you some of you may have seen this. This thing struck me right down here because what he was talking about is while he was talking about this God given faculty of marvelous organ, his voice, as he said, It was given to him. You don't you can't you can improve it, you can reserve it, but you certainly cannot get it.
He looks upon it that way as something for him to use, not to abuse. Now, this is what it seems to me Saint Paul is talking about life in its entirety. Did we give ourselves life? Of course we didn't. Where did we come from?
Well, we said we all had mothers. Well, I'll accept that as a hypothesis it seems to be a working hypothesis that we all had mothers. But the point is, my conception certainly was some kind of a coincidence. Just possible the train went by and woke my parents up, and lo and behold, I'm conceived. This is how coincidental it is, how our lives hang from a tiny little thread.
They are life is a gift. What do we do with it? How do we conceive it? What's it for? Or do we say, Oh, this kind of thinking, forget it.
I'm too busy putting bread on my table to think about this. Well, before you start putting the bread on the table, ask yourself why I ought to put bread on the table. And if you can't answer it, why put yourself out in putting it on the table? You say, Look, I have all these responsibilities to my all to thousands of people. Every it seems that I have responsibilities to everybody.
Sometimes it almost destroys me to even think about my responsibilities. It does destroy some people they run away from them. Before we get engaged in all this kind of confusion, we should ask ourselves, What's it all about? What's it for? And if we can't answer that question, why bother?
You'll say, Well then nothing would be done. Possibly. Possibly. I'm quite sure it would not work out that way. But hear this message of Paul, how he values his life.
How do you value his life? Do you value it at all? Do you ever think about it? And if you do, what value do you put on it? Of all the things that you have and that are yours, and life is yours, it's not a possession, it is identical with you.
Of everything you have, this certainly takes the is supreme. What's your conception? What value do you put on it? That's a question to ask and above all to be answered. Ask God to give you the light to get an answer to that great question.
What is my life for? In the name of the Father, Son, and the Spirit. Amen.