Reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. Now this is a continuation of the same passage as we've been reading for the last few days. I wanna go back over it because this is terribly important, and it's all together. And I would urge you as much as I possibly could to go back and read these few chapters of Saint John's chapter six because first of all, you have a series of miracles, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the walking of the water, then you have Christ meeting Nicodemus, and you have a statement about the Eucharist. See, people talk about the Last Supper.
You very seldom hear this brought in. And this this is all a continuous peace, and it just destroys it, you know, giving a jib and a jab at it every morning like this. And there's nothing so absolutely essential to the Catholic religion as the Eucharist, and what is it? Remember, rehab now, right in the Catholic church, people saying that it's just a memorial service, and you know all this emphasis upon the banquet business, this last supper, as if Christ was not the priest, the victim in the altar, and that is repeated in his priests. They are not presidents.
They're priests. And so this is frightfully important to our faith and our religion. Anyway, this is a continuation, and our lord now is speaking to the crowds of people. I myself am the bread of life. No one who comes to me shall ever be hungry.
No one who believes in me shall ever thirst again. But as I told you, though you have seen me, you still do not believe. All that the father gives me shall come to me. No one who comes to me will I ever reject because it is not to do my own will that I have come down from heaven, but to do the will of him who sent me. It is the will of him who sent me that I should lose nothing of what he has given me rather that I should raise it up on the last day.
Indeed, this is the will of my father, that everyone who looks upon the son and believes in him shall have eternal life, and him I will raise up on the last day. And this is the gospel of the lord. Praise be the lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Again, please be patient with me, but it just simply drives me up the wall that we break up these texts, and we read them a little bit every day. And what is this? You wouldn't dare do that with another piece of reading or literature. You wouldn't even do that with a letter that you got from a friend. Now we're the book of the acts.
How many people read that as of as the first most primitive story history of the church of Jesus Christ? How many people read that today? They may read the new they may but if if you talk about the New Testament, they'll think, oh, yes. That means the the the gospels, the good news of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and then, of course, there's John, and then we have some epistles, letters of Saint Paul. But how many people read the book of the acts?
And yet there you have firsthand account of the earliest days of the church of Jesus Christ. Now the thing I wanna stress this morning is this idea of church. You hear so much today about scripture. I'm all for scripture. I'm not against the bible.
But remember, Christ didn't write it. Suppose would we have a church today if if we had no bible? My answer to that is absolutely yes. Yes. Our blessed lord never referred to any written word that he was going to leave them in any way.
What did he do? He said, thou art Peter, and upon this rock, I will build my church. And the word there is ekklesia, and that's the Greek word, which means a community, a body, a a group of people, and organized, not a mob, not just a a great crowd of people, not just a multitude. It's an ecclesiast. That's what Christ said.
He also said to his apostles, going therefore, teach ye all nations. He didn't give them a book. He didn't give them a a bunch of Xerox copies of his choices thoughts. He sent them out with the word that he had given. Then we're told then in another text, we're told how I I have much to tell you, our lord said to his disciples just before his his ascension.
But he said, you can't bear it now, but you will get it. I will tell you later on. He also said the gates that that I will build my church on you and the gates of hell will not prevail against notice prevail. That means to to to conquer, to be victorious, to just to be the top man. This is what our blessed lord said, and this is what we must keep in mind.
I've just finished reading that famous book of Saint Augustine the bishop, and it's an extremely important book in my estimation for bringing home to us poor ignorant people a view of the church of Jesus Christ in Northern Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries. Is that the church in which we belong today? Well, Augustine, you know, is not exactly a man who had little regard for the scriptures. He practically based his entire spiritual life, his entire teaching upon the scriptures. And yet he said that you would still have the church of Jesus Christ and be and have salvation without them.
He said that according to the this author, and he has everything annotated. He must have he must have worked on this book for years and years. So let us bring home to our that we are living with a living thing. And it's the church of Jesus Christ. And today, here we have that very picture.
Here we have Stephen the first martyr, and here we have Saul going from house to house. That's that's how eager he was, how jealous he was of God's law and God's rights. These upstarts, these people of the new way, they were absolute threats. They were threats to the religion of God. And Paul stood tall and would have none of it.
And he's going as the text says today, he went from door to door, pulling out these people who had the effrontery to turn their backs on what was God's law and God's religion, going with this upstart from way God knows where up in Galilee. And then we have Stephen, the first martyr, and he's being buried today with lamentations by the first Christians. And then we're told today, in this reading today, that you had the first major persecution of the Christian of the follower. They weren't called Christians at this time. They were they were called followers of the new way.
And we're told this morning how they dispersed all but the disciples. The disciples stayed put with Peter in Jerusalem. They were willing to face the music. And how in Samariah, that's north, of course, how they went there, and they be they had an enthusiastic welcome. Stephen had died.
He was the martyr. Paul was going around and getting more martyrs, and it was Saul, Paul, who became the great voice of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, to the whole of the Western Mediterranean world. And so this this is where we belong. We are not isolated here in the twentieth century. The church has been around a long time.
I said church. It started with Jesus Christ, and that's where we belong, in that church of Jesus Christ. Why today, some in some instances, and I'm not exaggerating a bit, the worst they can say about you is that you are a traditionalist. Well, if what can you what can you want more than to be a traditionalist if you belong to the church of Jesus Christ? Do you wanna go back to the sixteenth century and be follow a great revolutionary and a great anarchist, a man who broke his vows, or are you going to side with a man like Augustine and Hippo, where in his time, you had over nearly 300 dioceses in Northern Africa?
That's our church, the living voice of Jesus Christ, and that is the company we keep. In the name of the father and the son and holy spirit. Amen.