In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. The reading this morning continues the readings we've been having from Saint John. They are all motives of credibility to bolster, to confirm, to reinvigorate our faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ, not in the fact that he was a good man. Because if he was not divine, he was no good man.
He was one of the worst that ever lived. There's no imitation of Socrates. Now, today's reading is especially significant, especially significant, because our Lord is saying, if you don't believe what I'm telling you, look at my deeds. Look what I've done. And notice the conclusion there where John that was across the Jordan where John had baptized, which is quite a little away from Jerusalem.
Our blessed lord has gone over there, and they said even though John did no signs. See, they had a perception of signs. We call them miracles. Miracleum simply means something that it creates amazement, astonishment, startling. That's all it means.
I mean, as a word. The substance of it's quite different. Now, Newman deals with this problem many times. That is people want a sign. They wanna see.
They want tangible experiential evidence for Jesus Christ. And as Newman time and again has said, when they get it, they wiggle out of it. He doesn't use the word wiggle. He uses fancier words. For example, as regard to this very matter of Christ's divinity, the very matter of his miracles, because Christ himself appeals to miracles.
We shouldn't hesitate to appeal to miracles for motives of credibility. Christ did it, and what's good enough for him ought to be good enough for us. As Newman points out, these people who are want signs, here's what will happen. He he uses he he takes up the problem as regards, the very text that we're dealing with this morning and also the crucifixion of Jesus. Why didn't Christ come down from the cross and the whole world believe?
Newman faces up to that problem, and he answers it in the same way, in the same way. First of all, if these doubters or disclaimers or negators, the agnostics, if they don't believe the signs that they see, then what can you do with them? You say, well, look at what you've seen. They'll say, yes, we saw it. But then they'll say, well, it was done by magic, or the the word Newman uses is juggler.
In other words, even when they see concrete tangible evidence, they minimize it, they rationalize it, they get rid of it. On the other hand, if they don't actually see it, if it comes by word-of-mouth, in other words, on faith, then they'll say it never happened. Here we have the great geniuses like Feuerbach and David Strauss, who maintain that the whole panoply of the Christian religion was based on human need. We needed a savior so we projected a savior. We needed to create his his power and his his glory, so we projected his miracles.
All of this the product of imagination, and therefore all of it to be destroyed, said Feuerbach and his great and good friend, the founder of communism, Karl Marx of Happy Memory. They looked upon religion as the worst possible fiction because they looked upon it as merely a projection of man's wishful thinking or of his needs. That's what drives me up the wall when people today say they get nothing out of religion. It's what they put into it that matters. And so our blessed Lord knew the human heart.
If he had come down from the cross, they'd have said, oh, he never was up there. He never died. You know, they would find all kinds of arguments. I have seen this in my life. When people I'll give you a very concrete example.
The tomb of Peter under the altar in Saint in Saint Peter's Rome. I can remember very well when this was a great argument against the Catholic church and Rome, that Peter and Paul never came to Rome. There was no evidence of their being in Rome, that this started two or three hundred years after Christ. Now, at great expense, tremendous expense, expense, in our own days, the Vatican went down under there. They unearthed, they explored, and it's there for you to see.
And they have found plenty of evidence, not apodictic, but plenty of evidence to justify justify the claim that Peter came to Rome and was buried under that altar. And a very important consideration, nothing was found to negate it, not a single item. Now, has that changed anybody's thinking about the Sea Of Rome? Not a bit. Oh, they'll say it doesn't matter.
After all, that doesn't it doesn't make any difference whether he came or he didn't came. After all, religion is something better than that, bigger than Peter. See, you you can't win this argument. And Newman knew it. Christ knew it.
He knew the human heart. And remember, giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt, we have human hearts. So let's not put ourselves too far away from the crowd who rejected Jesus. We are very much enmeshed with the world, and we're being pulled by the world, and there's a thing called the devil and Satan. It's not a popular conception today, but the liturgy of the church certainly makes a great deal of it, and our blessed Lord certainly did.
And so we today are faced with that. We are being called by this Lenten service. And now as we're going into Holy Week, we are being pulled away from the world. At least the church is trying to do that for us. It's so easy to lose ourselves in the world.
That's easy. You don't have to work at that at all. Because as I say, by your very duties, by your very responsibilities as parents and Christians, you have to be in the world. The problem is not to be of it. And that's what Lent's all about.
That's what the holy week's all about, and that's what Good Friday is about. Christ our lord, son of god, rescued us from the world. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit, amen.