A reading of the holy gospel according to John. When Jesus manifested himself to his disciples and they had eaten their meal, Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? Yes, Lord, Peter said, You know that I love you. At which Jesus said, feed my lambs. A second time, Jesus put his question.
Simon, son of John, do you love me? Yes, lord, Peter said. You know that I love you. Jesus replied, tend my sheep. Third time, Jesus said to him, Simon, son of John, do you love me?
Peter was hurt because Jesus had asked a third time, do you love me? So Peter said to him, Lord, you know everything. You know well that I love you. Jesus then said to him, feed my sheep. I tell you solemnly, as a young man, you fastened your belt and went about as you pleased.
But when you are older, you will stretch out your hands, and another will tie you fast and carry you off against your will. What Jesus said indicated the sort of death by which Peter was to glorify God. When Jesus had finished speaking, he said to him, follow me. This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
This narrative of Paul's appearance before Festus and the difficulty he had with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, and this account that we had this morning was brings out most clearly the sense of justice that the Romans had. Now if you took in what was read in this account of how Festus handled this problem, here you have a vision, an ideal of justice, of law, which is above the hatreds and the loves, the prejudices, the biases. It's above all of these things in the ideal order, of course. But here we see it being exemplified. Now the point that I would like to make is this: Festus and all the rest of these gentlemen concerned were pagans.
And today you will often hear the the word pagan thrown around in very pejorative terms. And I resent that terribly. Remember, pagans weren't believed in god. They many of them believed in immortality. Most of them believed in the spirituality of the soul.
So that when you say that the world in which we live is a pagan world, that is terrifically untrue. Because this so called world in which we are living is none of those things. It rejects all three of them, lock, stock, and barrel. Now here you have an illustration of what I would call natural justice. And under the Romans, it had achieved a great pinnacle of success.
And notice, notice how this justice all the way from Rome is reaching all the way out to Caesarea Philippi. Now the way we hop around today in our seven four sevens and seven twenty sevens, going from Rome to Jerusalem is nothing at all. But in those days, was a terrific thing to do. And to have that hand of rogue reaching out all the way across the Mediterranean to a little old guy down there named Festus, who's appealing to a local king, who then is appealing to the emperor. You see, here is something that is enormous.
It's magnificent, and it was based upon the natural law. Now that's another little item that is rejected today even by those in the fold. But so let us let us not underrate what we call the pagans. Let us not underrate what man naturally is. Now here is where we get into a delicate situation, that is the natural and the supernatural.
And I was just reading yesterday a very learned document about Saint Bonaventure, the seraphic doctor. Notice, the seraphic doctor. He was a contemporary of Thomas Aquinas. He's called the seraphic doctor because his doctrine was so so centered upon God, spiritual. But one thing about him is that in his writings, because he was so God centered, sometimes it's hard to know where the natural ends and the supernatural begins.
In other words, in many instances you can say he seems to fuse the two, especially in his theories of knowledge. Now it's important, I think, for us not to fuse to keep the to keep these two orders separate and distinct. Because by putting them together, one or the other is going to suffer. And generally, if you're dealing with a man like Saint Bonaventure, you're going to have the natural order suffer because it will become too supernaturalized. And that is going and inevitably, it's going to lead into some serious problems.
So that the we shouldn't underrate the preparation that the world had for the coming of Christ. And I say this again, when the disciples of his apostles, those who were sent, when they were sent into the world, they did not go into a secularistic world. Here's the world they went into. They went into a world that was dominated, at least by the ritual forms, of religion. There was too much of it.
In my last trip to Rome, I went on one of those tours, and it was a very good tour. And almost every five minutes, the guide was pointing out some temple or some altar. So finally he turned to the people and said, those old Romans seemed to have God on their mind all the time. In a way they did. Now that was the world in which in which the apostles, those who were sent, operated.
It wasn't a world as secularistic, as materialistic as ours. And this is a tremendous difference. They didn't have to meet Marxism, an explicit denial of God, and an elevation of man. They had they didn't have to face anything like that. And when Paul went into Athens and faced the Greeks, he says, I am here to talk to you about your that temple that you have dedicated to the unknown god.
They already knew about god and a lot about god. Now this don't miss this is frightfully important stuff. I mean, just for your own information. This glimpse that you get here in this extract from Saint Paul into that Roman world, a world of justice and of law and of power and of might, the two have to go together. You're not going to have justice in this world without a strong-arm to support it.
And don't underrate that picture. That doesn't mean in the least that we're underrating what Christ brought or the supernatural order. Not at all. Because what this what is so important here is what happens when we apply these concepts to little old me, the natural and the supernatural as it applies to me individually? Is nature something that I'm supposed to crush and look upon it as something degrading, as dirt?
Or as I've mentioned here, that you can have in the sixteenth century, a martyr and a saint named Fisher who said that the body was a satchel of gum. See, this is where the trouble begins. And so in this reading today, I feel like saying, let us pay tribute to good old Festus. He was a man cool, aloof on the law, on justice as he saw it, and he was going by the book. And if he had had his and everything he did was to preserve Paul, remember?
Not because he liked Paul, he was indifferent to Paul. That's perfectly clear. He could have cared less about Paul, he cared about justice. And Festus was a pagan, but an honorable man. In the name of the father, of the son, and the holy spirit.
Amen.